What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [47]
About the only time Robby seems dumbfounded is when someone asks him why he continues to work so many hours at his age. It is the question, not the answer, that stumps him. He simply does not think of himself as old. He thinks about what he has to do and what he wants to do next. In answer to why he works so many hours, he reflects on all the young people who have come to him in trouble, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and sometimes suicidal. “I’ve lost track of how many came in here thinking they were failures, whose families told them they were useless. And I’ve seen them go on and sign up for college a year later and get jobs. That’s why this is the best job I’ve ever had. It’s impossible for me to talk about the work I do without enthusiasm. Yeah, sure, at the end of the day I’m tired. But it’s been a great day, I feel good about what I’m doing, and I like to think I’ve done some good. I go to bed and I feel terrific about it.”
ALIDRA SOLDAY
Going the Distance with Granny D
“Once I faced my mortality, I was
driven to do something.”
For her, it was a jackhammer decade of betrayals, disease, and death. Having her brother perish in a plane crash years earlier, she needed no more lessons in impermanence. But the veteran New York City psychotherapist got them anyway in the 1990s in something of this order: breast cancer, a lover’s infidelity and abandonment after she was diagnosed, her mother’s dementia, her father’s death, and a recurrence of cancer and surgery. It seems little wonder that she cast off her old name, Linda Brown, and took an invented one, Alidra Solday.
But what changed her life and set her on a formidable eight-year journey to become a filmmaker and make the award-winning documentary Granny D Goes to Washington was as simple as a vacation in California with a box of pastels and a camera.
She was exploring the rugged coastline and secluded beaches of the Mendocino headlands in 1998, during her first real vacation in years, when “it hit me. I so loved the landscapes I was seeing and so loved using my camera that I thought, You’ve got to do something with this. It made sense to put my love into shooting along with my interest in people and with my experience interviewing them in my practice as a psychotherapist. When I came back to New York, I said, I want to be a filmmaker. Then I thought, Oh, that’s impossible. I can’t do that.
A full-time program in film school was out of the question. For one thing, Alidra told herself, she was too old. She was nearly fifty-eight. For another, the cost of a graduate school degree was prohibitively expensive and, given the cost of living in New York, she needed to work. Still, she nudged herself and signed up for a six-week class at Film Video Arts, a nonprofit film school in Manhattan. It was a small but important first step. Despite her apprehension about dealing with technical gadgetry and video cameras, she managed to fulfill the course’s requirement, completing a video interview. Hers was a straightforward one with a Korean man who spoke little English. It was that basic, but Alidra was proud: “I actually figured out what buttons to push on the camera.”
Emboldened, when she heard about an undergraduate course at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts taught by legendary documentary filmmaker George Stoney, she phoned him and asked permission to audit his class. Stoney, the director of more than forty documentaries on social change and the Paulette Goddard Professor of Film at NYU, is considered the father of public access television. After they met and she explained herself to him, he said, “Sure, sure, come to the class.”
The following semester Stoney went to Ireland, and his class was