Captain Update

I have movies and TV shows on my brain today…

Tonight I am going into Amman to see the world-wide premier of Indiana Jones and the Something Something 4th Installment! It is opening in Amman the same night it opens in the United States! There is a group of about 35 of us going tonight to see the film at a new theater in a new mall.

But there are other movies on my mind today too. As I read through today’s copy of The Jordan Times I spied an article about Captain Abu Raed, the first Jordanian feature film exported to the world’s cinemas. I saw this film about two months ago and wrote about it in the blog. The paper stated that the Jordanian embassy in Washington hosted a special screening for diplomatic bigwigs.

Captain Abu Raed presents a universal story of friendship, inspiration and heroism, and as the ambassador to the US commented in the article, “This is a story of intersecting across social boundaries in contemporary Jordan and shows the world the complex beauty of our region.” The embassy statement went on to say, “The film captures breathtaking footage of Amman and especially east Amman where the first settlers gave life to the city.”

I read the headlines and scan the newspaper every morning during my coffee break, which I take in friend Lubna’s office. In every school in which I have taught I have gravitated to the great secretaries I have known. Lubna, a secretary for the faculty, is one of those essential stops of the day. In fact there is a group of regulars who now congregate in Lubna’s office (we have affectionately dubbed her “Lubs” actually) about 9:00 after the first class of the day. Lubs prepares coffee for us, and we have christened the sofa area near her desk “Lubs’ Lizard Lounge,” since we tend to have a little dance party action to start the day. I don’t even remember how it all got started, but one of the young teachers, Chris, she and I started dancing a little and getting everybody all warmed up for the day. As I said, it has become an essential part of our day—laughter, pep talks, and the omnipresent Nescafe.

This morning we were talking about Captain Abu Raed, and how the film crosses over “Jordanian” borders and captured all our hearts, no matter where we are from. Lubna reminisced about a TV show she watched as a child with her family in Kuwait. (For the record I am two weeks to the day older than Lubs.) As she described the show, forgetting the title, I said, “Lubs, that sounds like a show I loved as a child—The Waltons.” She squealed with delight—“That’s it. We loved The Waltons!”

If you have never seen The Waltons it would come across as corny and hokey, I guess. It is the story of a Depression-era family in rural Virginia and how they coped with the trials and tribulations of daily life. This show would certainly resonate in phrases like, ‘it celebrates the human condition.’ It was one of the seminal TV shows of my childhood. It started on television when I was about 9, and we all four watched it together, and in many episodes my mother would start crying about something in the storyline, so my sister and I usually succumbed to the tears as well. My stoic father held us together so we didn’t all dissolve into tears. The oldest son was a guy named John-Boy, and soon thereafter my grandmother started calling me John-Boy. The youngest child in the family was darling Elizabeth, the same name as my darling little sister. The show lasted for 9 years, but as I got into teen-age years such a show did not capture my attention in the same way any longer.

As Lubna and I realized that for many of the same years in the 1970s we both watched this show, we joked about how our childhoods could hardly have been more different: her childhood in Kuwait and mine 10,000 miles away in the American Midwest. I asked her, “what did you like about the show?” Lubna smiled and said, “It really reminds me of Arab values and lifestyles.” What??? How is that possible?

But that Walton family was more like my family! It seemed incredulous to me that a family in the Gulf region would have anything in common with this Baptist family suffering hardships in 1930s America. I said, “Lubs, what in the world in that show is like Arab values?” “It’s simple,” she replied. “That show is about people that believe in their land, and treasure their name, love their God, and build their lives on the strongest bedrock—family.” Hmmmm…

We laughed as we remembered episodes we had enjoyed as children, and we decided that maybe more families around the world should watch The Waltons and possibly it could serve as a some kind of bridge to peace. (!) I told her that I had a DVD set of the first season, and I promised that I would loan her the discs to rekindle her love for this beloved show.

Of course none of the young ones who hang out with us in the Lizard Lounge have seen (or heard of) The Waltons, so we had to turn our attention back to catching them up to speed on the history of Indiana Jones. None of our young peers was born in 1980 when the first movie opened, and they just don’t know the history of Indy, and the greatness of the third installment. So as our Nescafe cooled we had to act out some of the set pieces from The Last Crusade—whew, Nazis do make great villains don’t they??

As most of the day passed by, the John Williams theme song played in my head. Who knows if the newest installment lives up to the third one, but a night at the movies is always a delight.