What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [50]
Alidra was captivated by Doris’s passionate articulation of her beliefs and her determination to make a difference in the lives of others. “Doris had such tenaciousness. Her philosophy was something like, If you don’t like something, then do something about it. She doesn’t complain. That’s very Yankee. She just says, Do something about it!” In a telling moment, Doris explained, “As a child I was always small for my age and so I learned to fight for what I wanted.”
It was during that first interview that Alidra decided to focus a documentary on Doris alone. “Are you open to that?” she asked.
Doris welcomed the idea, but warned Alidra that she would need to clear it with her literary agent. After all, she had a book coming out, she explained. The agent, it turned out, was not encouraging. “But my mind was made up. I knew she couldn’t stop me. I called Doris and said, ‘I’m coming up to interview you.’ ”
In early February, Alidra drove to New Hampshire. With the help of a woman she had met in one of the film workshops, she began filming Doris in her daily rounds, playing Scrabble with friends, talking politics, and in one of her film’s most spontaneous moments, dancing around a living room with a group of older women, known as the Tuesday Morning Academy and who met weekly to keep their minds and bodies fit. “Once I started filming, I was in a state of utter joy,” Alidra said.
Doris explained that she became interested in campaign finance reform around 1996. She had seen a small article in the Boston Globe about a bill being sent to President Clinton for his signature. It reported that, in the middle of the night, two senators had slipped an amendment requesting a $50 billion subsidy for the tobacco industry into the bill. Doris smelled corruption and brought the issue to the Tuesday Morning Academy for collaborative study. Pretty soon the women began asking people to sign petitions and they wrote to their senators, urging them to enact campaign finance reform. “We got reassuring letters, each of us, from our senators, saying, ‘Dear little old ladies, don’t worry about this, we’re taking care of it,’ ” Doris said.
Taking on government felt hopeless. But on a fishing trip with her son, Jim, to the Florida Everglades, Doris saw a man walking on the road between two towns and a light went off. She instantly announced that she would walk across the country to spur reform. She explained her motivation to Alidra: “If you look at your life, you will see your life is made up of acts. And this is my last act. I would like to make some news of my life.”
Alidra began to collect archival footage from the dozens of news programs that had covered Doris’s ten-mile-a-day, six-days-a-week march across America. From these news clips, Alidra would eventually cull and stitch together a swift and seamless narrative of the diminutive pilgrim’s long odyssey and its undulating moods of seriousness, zaniness, courage, and occasional drama. In town after town, parades, politicians, and reform-minded people of all ages greeted Doris. In snippets, she is seen speaking from bandstands and from the steps of town halls, over front-yard fences and along roadways. Captured, too, are the children, college students, and ordinary citizens who cheer her on as she tries to rouse Americans to take back their government from special interest groups and private industry by restricting political donations.
Along the way, Granny D is also seen collapsing into unfamiliar beds in houses where she was taken in for the night. And in a climactic and mesmerizing act of determination, as snow threatens to