![]() |
The young Julia Roberts as a Portuguese-American "local" pool shark with her rich, preppy potential beau in 1988's "Mystic Pizza." |
What's a sorrow that's been a teacher to you in your life?
The poet and theologian Padraig O Tuama offered this question up for our Sunday morning reflection in his Poetry Unbound email this morning.
What's yours?
You may be surprised to know that mine tied into thoughts I was already mulling about the 1988 romantic comedy, Mystic Pizza.
Yes, that Mystic Pizza. The one with the young Julia Roberts, an even younger (18-year-old) Matt Damon making his film debut, Annabeth Gish, Lili Taylor, and Vincent D'Onofrio.
Mystic Pizza is set in the town in which I grew up: Mystic, CT, a village that is part of the town of Stonington, where much of the movie was filmed.
The sorrow that has been a teacher to me in my life is the sorrow of feeling I had to leave home and family behind to become myself.
I graduated from Stonington High School in 1979. In those days, Stonington, although midway between New York City and Boston on Long Island Sound, was still a lobster fishing village characterized by a large fishing population of Portuguese immigrants.
Thus the characters, and divides, depicted in Mystic Pizza.
Mystic is a lovely, gentle, salt-marshy, watery world. Now like so many beautiful waterfront places over-populated by people with too much wealth.
In Mystic/Stonington in the 1970's as throughout the U.S., the world was changing. Nixon had resigned; we waited in line on alternate days to buy gas for our giant cars; the last helicopter had left too many stranded on the roof of the embassy in Saigon. In the wake of Martin Luther King's racial justice movement and the anti-war movement, feminism and gay rights were ascendant but far from triumphant.
I was 15, and gay, the year of America's Bicentennial (1976). The world depicted in Mystic Pizza was pretty much my world growing up.
A marina rat, I loved being on or in the salt water. While the film would have you believe lobster fishing boats were leaving from the Mystic River, the reality is that the Portuguese fishing population lived primarily in Pawcatuck, the last town on the CT coast before Rhode Island, and Stonington, and fished out of the Borough, home also to the Holy Ghost Society of 1914. The Feast of the Holy Ghost continues in Stonington every August and in Portuguese communities around the world to this day, following the Blessing of the Fleet in July.
The Portuguese community in Stonington dates back to around 1840. Southeastern CT -- New London, Noank, Mystic, Stonington -- was a whaling coast, a history faithfully preserved by and at the Mystic Seaport, site of my first volunteer work. Whalers from the Azores who had been contracted onto Stonington-based vessels returned with the ships to their home port and began new lives. As is the nature of immigration routes, over the next 100 years thousands of other Azoreans followed. St. Mary's Catholic Church was built in 1851; St. Patrick's in Mystic, our parish, in 1870.
Like the feisty female characters in Mystic Pizza who sling a mean pie and shit-talk the too-many-already tourists, I grew up in an old-world, Catholic, very heterosexual culture where the class divides between the Portuguese fishing community and wealthy summer residents, between the college educated and working class folks like my parents, were glaring and deeply experienced.There was no question in my queer girl, 1970's disco'ing aspiring feminist mind: I had to get out.
And truthfully my parents supported that as well. They were intent on my going to college: a privilege they had not had. And we had already busted up the family compound in Old Saybrook, where I grew up adjacent to aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandmother, when my mother's sister and family relocated to the suburbs of northern New Jersey.
In Mystic Pizza, the Daisy, Julia Roberts character is on the hunt for a man and/or marriage that will get her out of Mystic. Her younger sister, Kat, has punched her departure ticket and is headed to Yale. The third, Jo Jo, faints at the marriage altar listening to the priest extoll the virtues of a lifetime commitment to her fisherman husband.
Best line of the movie, delivered by Jo from the Mystic drawbridge to boyfriend Bill (D'Onofrio) on his boat which he has re-christened NYMPHO to mock her sexual desire for him: "I don't have to marry an asshole. It's the '80s."
Wild applause from tourists gathered at drawbridge. A win for girls!
Somehow, with little help from my high school graduate parents, I get myself into Bowdoin College in Maine -- until very shortly before my arrival an all-male school. Heaven help the working class lesbian.
What neither my parents nor I (nor the girls in Mystic Pizza, I suspect) knew is that upward mobility, and the education that facilitates it, can be a trap -- creating chasms of experience between parents and children that are very difficult to cross.
I never again really went home. I figured that was true of my high school classmates who went to college, too, until I finally attended a high school reunion (my 25th) and found they had pretty much all moved back.
I never again felt close to my beloved family -- who had adopted me and given me an unbelievably stable childhood -- until it was too late to share the appropriate love and gratitude with my parents.
Mae and Evert, happy together, circa 1986 in Mystic, CT. Family portrait with me and David in the background by Kathryn Kirk. |
This sorrow of estrangement and loss and homesickness has been a lesson for me regarding difference and love.
Who gives a damn if you speak the same language? read the same books? believe the same things? look the same? vote the same?
Well, too many of us.
What if we could stop trying to hurt and control each other with our different beliefs and actions?
What if our culture weren't so self-righteous, so much about being "right"?
As my grandmother Mary used to say when I had done something particularly heinous to my brother: "The girl is good."
We are all good, even when we hurt each other.
The trick is how to look past the righteousness and the hurt and specific actions to see and to forgive the persons -- oneself and each other.
This is the complex and challenging lesson this particular sorrow, and Mystic Pizza, have taught me.