You Need No Painter, You Are The Artist of Your Life

Danny Kaye a well-known comedian and actor said “Life is a great big canvas and you should paint on it all you can.” He played in a controversial movie called Skokie. The plot was a true story of how a band of Neo-Nazis were going to march through a predominantly Jewish area of Chicago. It was said it was freedom of speech but it was an unwanted rally to Nazism. The movie did much to notify the public as to this unwanted event to even occur. At that time, he was thought of as very brave to undertake a movie like this. He himself was Jewish and so was his wife. It brought forth to the viewing public the irony of freedom of speech when doing this thing in Illinois or anywhere in this country after the horrendous times of the Holocaust. Jewish leaders Bert Silverman (Eli Wallach) and Abbot Rosen (Carl Reiner) advise the Jewish community to ignore the neo-Nazis; the strategy they put forward is “quarantine”, isolating the meeting by totally ignoring the neo-Nazi presence and refusing to be provoked. The logic is simple: if the Jewish community refuses to acknowledge the rally and thus refuses to feed the media any publicity, the meeting will be futile and eventually forgotten. However, one citizen challenges their argument. A Holocaust survivor, Max Feldman (Danny Kaye), says that he was told to ignore the Nazis nearly 40 years ago in Germany, and before he knew it he was in a concentration camp. He says this time he will take action, and he is ready to shed blood if necessary. Led by this de-facto spokesman, most members of the community agree to protest. The film spans a year and a half of legal battles and explores the meaning of freedom and First Amendment in the USA. The above two paragraphs are taken from the Internet writings on Skokie. It was a finely acted movie and Danny Kaye was saluted by all nationalities upon taking on this controversial, but true movie. He was doing what he preached in his saying. He was painting on a large canvas all he could to bring this event to the public’s eyes and minds. Sometimes in life, we have to protest verbally or in print when we see a wrong doing being committed. Most of the time, we feel, we should not get involved because it draws attention to us and our family and surroundings. We have to use our thoughts and ideas to counterattack some events in life. Years ago, probably in the early sixties, I did something like this, of course it was not as important as the Skokie happening. The city of Baltimore and I presume private benefactors built a new theater where live plays were presented. It was called the Mechanic theatre and was a brand new and modern theater where live plays and some concerts were performed. We had an old one which was outdated and this one came on the scene and was named after its benefactor Morris Mechanic and his wife. The inside chambers were nice, new and you could view the shows fairly easily from all seats, even the less expensive ones. However, the outside of the building was built in a very unusual mode and that precipitated many and I mean many negative remarks. It was as if the viewing public decided that the ‘ugliness’ as it was called would impede the viewing of a play. That was nonsense, it really did not matter what the outside looked like. It was contemporary, up to date, clean and a bit way out for those days of 1960 or so. Every newscast started out with the denigration of this theater’s outside view. It got really to be a big item to talk about as if there were no other newsworthy news to report. One day I sat down and wrote a letter to our main and local newspaper. It was brief and to sum it up I said “let us not worry about the exterior, let us enjoy the interior with its new furnishings and fine Broadway plays being presented there.” They published it and I got many calls (no internet or email then) complimenting my on my concise review of the building and what it was built for. Somehow, I do not really believe, I had that much influence with this simple explanation of the architecture, but the ranting’s and ravings seemed to stop. There was nothing more every night on TV about it, other than when a famous and popular play was performed there or an interview with the star was published in the paper. The hullabaloo stopped and everyone settled down to enjoy the shows and to be happy, that once again, we had a fine building to come and see excellent live acting in new shows. Another thing I got through a letter to the editor was there was no street sign on the new development we lived in when we were first married. It was on a side street and was deemed to be a private road and the management of the complex had to clean the snow when it snowed, because the city or county said it was private and not their domain. That was OK, but when a package had to be delivered or a piece of furniture had to be brought (No GPS’s in those days either) no one could find the street called Green Meadows Parkway. I had just had my first child, did not have a car, there was no email or internet to buy from and I use to order things from the department stores from pictures I had seen in the newspaper. When the delivery men came out, they could not find the street and called me and I tried to explain where they turned off and etc. After a while, delivery trucks from certain stores knew where it was and if it was a new driver, trouble started all over again until he knew where it was. One day, I sat down and handwrote a letter (no typewriter did I own) and presented this problem in the Sunpapers. Lo and Behold, about three days after the letter appeared, a sign was put up at the beginning and end of the street noting its name. I went down as it was being placed there and spoke to the installer and he said ‘’ some lady had written to the papers and it was noted by the proper authorities and was authorized immediately after the sign was made” to be installed. Even now, over forty-eight years later, when I drive by it on my way home, I feel ‘proud’ that this is ‘my’sign. We moved away four years later after the installation and I felt good that a regular person got something accomplished by a piece of paper, an envelope and a stamp probably costing in those days about fifteen cents. Now days, a simple phone call, a complaint via email or a statement posted on Facebook could probably accomplish a feat like this even earlier. That is, if some bureaucratic individual got to read it. When I first started to compete and dance in competitions; in some of them, all dancers regardless of their ages were placed together competing against younger dancers. This made a person of forty-five dancing against a person of twenty or twenty-five. It also made a person of sixty dancing against a person of thirty-five. It was not a fair way to evaluate dancers and it was brought to the higher ups in the dancing community and it was soon resolved. Now there are placements of juniors, youth, ages of about twenty one to thirty-five, thirty-five to fifty, fifty to sixty, sixty to seventy and etc. Some are called Senior One meaning about up to sixty and Senior Two about up to seventy something and Senior Three over eighty or so. This is a fair way to separate different age groups and older people should not be placed dancing against younger folks. It is OK at a social dance to dance with others but not against others in a dance competition. Everyone regardless of age should have the opportunity to excel and show what they have attained and be placed against others in the same age requirements. That way, everyone has their chance to win, place or whatever they attain. When we were in Kansas in 1984, my husband and I were, he was fifty-four and I was fifty. We were scheduled to dance in a couple’s section and we noticed we had been placed dancing against a young couple in their early twenties. We were doing very well in our dancing and when he saw that, he decided not to show up for the event. I urged him to, but he said no way. So we heard them call our names out for the heat (division) and we walked away without them seeing us. We found out afterwards, that the three younger couples, none of them showed up either. They had been partying all night and never made it in time to dance. We could have won easily, though we danced well and had practiced for months for this event. He was always sorry about his decision and we have had fun relating this story for the last twenty-eight years. When we left, the owners of the competition had been thrilled that we chose their event to come all the way across from Maryland to Kansas and they offered my husband one trophy just because he made the trip and everyone was kidding him about not showing up. I had won dancing with my teacher Laurence E. Miller nine trophies. I said no, he did not earn it and they all laughed and he got none. However, when we came home, he took one of my trophies and showed it to his employees at our pharmacy and said he won it. I was sorry, that I had said for them not to give him one; because he let me go there with all the expenses involved including the teacher’s expenses too. No one at the pharmacy knew the difference, so to them he was a winner too. After that experience, the competitions changed rules and made separate divisions for age and this was the proper way to allow older people not to dance with younger ones. It is still practiced that way today and if I dance next year at the Atlantic Ballroom dance competition next June with my teacher, John Dawson, I will be in the category for people over seventy and still in their seventies called Senior Two. Things can be accomplished by talking, writing, caring and noticing. When the rain arrives, put up your umbrella to cover you and then the sunshine will appear when the rain subsides; you put the umbrella away to dry and you view the sunshine with awe, happiness and know you weathered the rain and now the day or days will be bright, delightful and clear. Do not let the exterior of something visible deter you from investigating the interior to find exceptional things there inside and remember that the sign on your street can be one of happiness and joy that you live there, love there, and like it there. Reside, inspect interiors and try to change things for the better with an email, a call, a letter and you will see that you are important enough to get changes made in a decent and honorable manner, because you are decent and very honorable and that will be noticed. Paint on your canvas of life all you can. You are the artist of your own life. elita sohmer clayman Fairfax Station Patch