Word: missed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...conversations going. Suwelo, a black professor of American history, travels from his California home to attend an uncle's funeral in Baltimore and to dispose of the house that comes as his inheritance. Suwelo is grateful for the respite provided by this visit; his wife Fanny (the granddaughter of Miss Celie, the heroine of The Color Purple) has discovered feminism and wants a divorce. It is not that she has stopped loving him, as she tells him, but rather that "I don't want to be married." Gloomily, Suwelo decides that "his generation of men had failed women...
...spirits lift when he meets Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie, two old and aged friends of his uncle's. These two drop by regularly to talk and reminisce; they prove themselves remarkable founts of memory, particularly Miss Lissie, who confides that she has lived in countless incarnations dating back to the dawn of time. Relating her experiences as a slave girl being transported to America, she interrupts herself to warn Suwelo, "You do not believe I was there? I pity...
Suwelo believes. Short of hustling Miss Lissie out the door, that is probably his only option. For her voluminous story, to which a growing chorus of other voices gradually contributes, is an extended myth that must be taken on faith or not at all. Parts of it are enchantingly beautiful. She remembers primeval Africa as the Edenic cradle of life, when women and men lived separately and thus at peace and when lions killed only to put ailing fellow creatures out of their misery. But then the men decided to force their way into residence at the women's encampments...
More evil followed. Ancient Africa was home to white people as well, but they were driven out because their pitifully pale skins could not protect them from the blazing heat and light ("The white man," Miss Lissie notes, "worships gold because it is the sun he has lost"). Thus was conceived whites' envy of blacks and a determination to crush them, a process that began, at least symbolically, in Greek mythology when Perseus beheaded Medusa, who was really the Great Mother, the Black African Goddess...
...Tonight, the the Performing Artists' AIDS Coalition (PAAC) presents Now, Later, Soon: Sondheim this weekend in the Dunster House Dining Hall. This year the profits from the show will benefit the Deaconess Hospital AIDS patient care. The performances in this weekend's show should be fantastic, so don't miss this great chance to hear good music and to provide necessary care for AIDS victims...