# Bad Manners: Infidelity inter alia



## RonPrice (Apr 17, 2010)

BAD MANNERS
…..good sex and loyalty……

The movie *Bad Manners *was released(1) about six months before I retired from my 30 year career as a classroom teacher and lecturer. I was also bringing my extensive work over several decades in Baha’i administration slowly to a close as 1998 turned to 1999 and as the opening years of my sea-change at the age of 55 advanced incrementally, annalistically as the Romans used to say. 

I watched the film last night,(2) a dozen years into my life of retirement during which I have reinvented myself as a: writer and author, poet and publisher, researcher and on-line blogger. This short film of 88 minutes sufficiently stirred my mind and emotions for me to write this prose-poem. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 *IMDb*, 9 October 1998, and 2*SCTV*, 12:05-2:00 p.m., 31 March 2012.

I’ve always liked Bonnie Bedelia who
worked on Broadway making a debut 
supporting Patty Duke in 1962 in _Isle 
of Children_: the year my travelling and
pioneering life began in that little town 
in the Golden Horseshoe, in Dundas, for 
the Canadian Baha’i community. Bonnie 
and I are still going…….In addition to her 
real beauty, she provoked my thoughts 
about a husband’s faithfulness, mine & 
the faithfulness of other husbands—and 
their wives in these decades of change!!

During my 45 years of marriage: 1967-2012
relationships between men and women—as
well as marriage have changed more than in
the previous 3000.(1) Good sex is something
this film does not do…….as Martin Amis says:
“good sex is impossible to write about.”(2)But
good relationships, this film implies…..require
faithfulness and loyalty: the bond that unites
hearts most perfectly, as writes ‘Abdul-Baha.

(1) Stephanie Coontz, *The Australian,* 1 June 2005. Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She also serves as Co-Chair and Director of Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families, a non-profit, nonpartisan association of family researchers and practitioners based at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
(2) Natasha Walter, _All Passion Spent_, *The Guardian*, 20 November 2004. Martin Amis(1949- ) is a British novelist, essayist and short-story writer.

Ron Price
31 March 2012


----------

