Sober Gay Poz Ex-Con

So, last night my friend Michael and I went to see Mamma Mia! What glorious and total fun.  The Greek Islands were to DIE for, the story is inspired silliness, the songs are defiantly hummable, and the actors commit to their parts like their lives depended on it. Pierce Brosnan, for example, is no singer, but he acts like he is, so what comes out of his mouth is totally listenable.  And Meryl Streep--good for you girl. She has so much fun up there it's infectious, and she can sing.

So then I get home, and after walking the dog, decided to check out the first two episodes of "Cranford," which I'd missed on its first run on Masterpiece Theater because it competed with Desperate Housewives and Brothers and Sisters. What an idiot I was for that.  The most extraordinary ensemble of Brit talent I can think of, bar none, and a story that's engrossing while deceptively simple. One half an hour was more memorable than a whole season of either of the other shows. 

When I went to bed, humming the tunes to one movie while thinking about the artistry of the other, I wondered how such disparate entertainments could feel like bookends to me. Except for the fact that both were put together and acted by consummate professionals, you couldn't find two more dissimilar plots or styles.  It finally occured to me that while both sets of characters, like any human beings, chased contentment, in Mamma Mia the pursuit exists in the veritable absense of any social conventions--everything goes, basically. In Cranford, the search is conducted within the confines of the most rigid social conventions imaginable.  Propriety, correctness, what is done and not done, these form the rules and regulations that few of the characters even question, much less test. They were two sides of the very same coin.

But within the atmospheres of complete, uninhibited freedom, and of practically none at all, the questions posed are exactly the same. How do I choose to live? What is fun? What is service?  How far do I go to get what I want while remaining a person who respects who he or she sees in the mirror? Who do I love? How do I love them? 

Caughtup in these stories, I had the wonderful sense that when life is viewed through the prism of these questions, whether you live here or there, now or then, under this system or that, our interior experience remains much the same as human beings.  Ask almost anyone on his deathbed what his  life was most about, and if he's honest the answers will almost always revolve around how much love he was able to give or to receive.

MCO 2008