The S.A.G. Awards have been delayed this year because of the pandemic. I've been a member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) since 1986, and joined the Screen Actors Guild a year later when I had one line on General Hospital, which made me eligible. Now the unions are merged. Every year, the studios send out DVDS or allow one to stream their movies and television shows, with the hope that they will get votes in the awards program. It's a lot less glitzy and less exclusive than the Academy Awards, but it is actors voting for other actors.
In Los Angeles, I often saw many of the nominated movies before the awards season. I haven't been in a movie theater since 2019. Joe and I don't watch television. I spend my time now with books, connecting with people online, and with my work on Morgantown's City Council.
I've watched a few television shows online, and one movie, Minari, about a Korean family living on a farm in Arkansas. I saw an episode of the show about John Brown and about the girl who plays chess. They were good. But the one that's caught me up is This Is Us, one of the few shows from a traditional network (NBC). The shows they sent to stream are from the fourth and fifth season. I've watched some of it in past years, and I've always liked it. The first year it was nominated it took me some time to figure out the premise. It's a family, and the children in one episode are the adults in another episode. The glue is the father, played by the gorgeous (IMHO) Milo Ventimiglia, who is dead. We see him as a young lover, a husband and a Dad to the three children, a son and daughter, and the Black child born the same day as the son, and raised along with him.
What's hooked me on this show is the way the past lives on for the adult children, and for the mother. They remember everything, and we see everything, and how it plays out for them. The acting is terrific, and I find the foibles and hang-ups of the three grown children moving.
I'm writing this at 5 A.M. Monday. I've been awake since three. No reason particularly, it's just that after the third time one gets up to go to the bathroom, it can be hard to get back to sleep. When I'm up late, I think about my seventy-one years of life, and the things that have happened. I go over events from ages ago, and sometimes wonder how I got to where I am now. Often I think about friends and family who have died. March is hard for me anyway. My father died March 17, 1991, and my mother died March 18, 2003. So of course, I think about them, just as the grown children on This Is Us remember their father.
In an episode in Season Four, the mother is diagnosed with a major health issue. She has remarried, and her husband is there for her. My Mom had a boyfriend when she became ill, who stayed with her through her illness, and helped me and my sister through our mourning period. He died a few years ago.
It's been hard this last year for everyone. Friends have been quarantined because someone in their kid's school tested positive for the coronavirus. Others have juggled full-time jobs and children home from school; an older friend lost his wife, who was in a nursing home. He wasn't allowed to see her for months before she died. Jobs disappeared and people couldn't pay rent or utilities or buy food. I've been home with Joe for a year. We have not lost income, been sick, or had people close to us die. Still, we're dealing with the sadness of not being able to travel, to eat inside a restaurant (we do carry-out) or see people in person. Our closest friends, still, are in California.
Like the characters in This Is Us, I still live in my childhood, my adolescence and my earlier adulthood, with the great things that happened, the mistakes and missteps, the grief over the loss of friends in the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 90s, the relationships I've screwed up and the people I've hurt and those who've hurt me. Facebook has brought back friends from years ago, and at my fiftieth high school reunion, now almost four years ago, everyone was so kind and loving. I'm still comforted by that.
I don't want to get all maudlin, like some of the stories on This Is Us, but like those characters, I, and maybe all of us, need to acknowledge and deal with our demons, be better to one another and appreciate the love we have in our life.
