RonPrice

The month I separated from my first wife, the film The Way We Were was released. It was October 1973 and I was living in Australia. That marriage had begun six years before in Canada. I did not see the film until several years later. I don’t remember when but this afternoon, in another October nearly 40 years later, during my retirement from the job world, I chanced to see two or three short segments of that film.(1) I won’t give you the story of the plot or all the details leading to its release because you can easily google all the details about the film at several internet sites.

I was especially interested, though, in the beginning of the story which was told in flashback. It was the story of a Katie Morosky and Hubbell Gardiner, who met at college on 3 June 1937. It was about this time that my parents first met. They both worked at the Otis Elevator Company in Hamilton Ontario. In that year, 1937, the Baha’i teaching Plan, a Plan I have been associated with for nearly sixty years, was first implemented in North America. The western world was gearing up for the first global-war in history and the worst depression in modern history was coming to an end, arguably, because of that war.

Morosky and Gardiner, those two main characters in the film, met again after WW2, circa 1947. They fell in love and married. By then, my parents had also been married for four years, and I was three years old. Arthur Laurents(1917-2011), an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter, wrote the original screenplay for what became this film and which has been available now for some 40 years.

While an undergraduate at Cornell University, Laurents was introduced to political activism by a member of the Young Communist League. This student was the model for Laurents, of Katie Morosky, a fiery campus radical who organized rallies and a peace strike. The memory of her fervour remained with Laurents long after he lost touch with Morosky and Cornell University. Activism vis-a-vis established authority has become, for millions, the touchstone, of social involvement in our complex world and this film appealed to this social and political convention---among the film's other appeals---like having Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand as the leading personalities.

Laurents also wrote the 1958 musical West Side Story and the 1959 musical Gypsy, based on the memoirs of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. In 1962 Laurents directed the film I Can Get It For You Wholesale which helped to turn the then-unknown Streisand into a star. How Streisand and Redford become the two main characters in the film I watched this afternoon and which began with this experience of Laurents in 1937 is a complex story which can also be found at Wikipedia.2 --Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC1, 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. and 2Wikipedia, 8 October 2011.

You were beginning to find success(1)
in my first years of contact with this
new Faith, & it was coincidental that(2)
The Way We Were was released in the
same month my first wife and I came to
separate…...…A whole new success story
resulted for Streisand and Redford and a
whole new life trajectory opened for me
Downunder where I would lay my bones
long after that movie The Way We Were.(3)

1 Arthur Laurents wrote the screenplay West Side Story which opened in 1958
2 My first association with the Baha’i Faith was 1953 and I joined in 1959
3 October 1973

Ron Price
9 October 2011

bandit.45

I didn't like the movie. Two hours of listening to Bawbwa yap. Ughhh.....

RonPrice

Thanks, bandit.45, for your prompt response. Indeed, as with any movie, book or person, they only appeal to some. It is these differences in tastes and temperaments among other factors that make the world we live in.

"To each their own," seems to be a critical factor as we all travel the road, eh? Wishing you well, bandit.45, as spring(or autumn) turns its corner.-Ron in Tasmania