What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [53]
Alidra returned to Green Gulch and submitted to the practice there. She rose, along with the other participants, at 4:30 A.M. every day and went to a small, dark, unadorned zendo, or meditation hall, and meditated for thirty minutes. Afterward, they did chores, such as cleaning bathrooms or gardening. Work was punctuated by simple meals and another meditation. “The training is in being nobody. The practice is that you’re ignored,” she said. The teachings focused on impermanence. And Alidra began to come to terms with the expectations of others that made her vulnerable to pain in an unpredictable world. “It was a lesson in life that I had somehow never learned. The question was, what was I going to make of it?” she said.
Alidra stayed at the center for seven months, paying $650 a month for the privilege. After a while, the routine began to feel oppressive and she transferred to Green Gulch’s sister center in San Francisco. But she found the atmosphere there just as stultifying, and signed up for a painting class at the Center for Creative Exploration. There, instead of trying to edit out their “mistakes” as they painted, students were urged to add more paint and color to their work and paint through them. As she painted, this metaphoric activity had a striking effect on Alidra. She began to feel as if she was painting herself out of the monochromatic world of depression. Painting “introduced me back into a world of color,” she said. It also spurred her to leave the Zen center, move to Marin, take a short course to activate her license to practice therapy in California, and to start a therapy practice in San Francisco. She also started looking at her footage of Granny D again.
As she did, she recovered her faith in her project. She stickered her room with Post-its that read: This is not about me! She told herself that the work deserved the respect of being completed. One day, on a hike in the Marin Headlands with her old friend and colleague Frances McGoohan, Alidra confessed her sadness at not finishing the film. But, she admitted, she was scared to contact Doris, fearful that her own words would sabotage her goal of returning to work on the film. She had aborted several letters. Her friend offered to help Alidra write one. It took several drafts, but finally she sent Doris a letter updating her on her life and telling her that she wanted to complete the documentary because it was important. Doris was receptive. Why not? She was by then ninety-four, the subject of a second film project—Run Granny Run, directed by Marla Poiras for HBO (a project to which Burke gave his blessings)—and preparing to run for the U.S. Senate.
Alidra went back to work on the film. She cut more than one hundred hours of footage down to an hour of film. Then she turned to George Stoney, her former NYU professor, for advice. He told her to cut deeper. With the help of Erica Trautman, a film student, she cut another twenty-five minutes. Documentarian Deborah Hoffman, at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism, took a look and encouraged Alidra to make Doris’s biography even tighter.
But editing cost money, and Alidra’s money was running out. She had used far too much of the $216,000 from the sale of her country house to support herself and to pay for the film. She hoped for a grant from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), which funds, presents, and promotes documentaries on public television, but she discovered it funds only experienced filmmakers. So Alidra sent veteran filmmaker and frequent PBS producer Janet Cole a rough cut of her