![]() ![]() The only real value she’s absorbed from the outside world is that home is hopeless. She dresses like her alcoholic mom and shoots like her depressed and shut-down dad. ![]() She didn’t blossom into a sophisticate or become a success, nor does she really seem to have rejected her background. Yes, Sam has been away for 10–15 years, but she was living barely two hours away in Lawrence (a college town but hardly a cosmopolitan hub), where she worked as a bartender. But Notaro’s character is alienated from her family and the South-and confident in her new place in the world-in ways Everett’s isn’t. ![]() That’s roughly the frame of Tig Notaro’s terrific One Mississippi, for example, in which a comedian also returns to her hometown to mourn a relative’s death and come to grips with where they came from. She tells Joel, who she thinks is a stranger, that she lost her sister six months ago and is still recovering. Sam corrects him: The essay was pretty mediocre. Sam explains: The essay was about a girl “teaching her little sister how to take the training wheels off her bike.” A puzzled but game Joel observes that some of the essays are indeed very good. Moved by the essay portion of a standardized test? If you’re like me, you might find yourself thinking wait, what’s happening as you grope for the expected irony. She exits to compose herself and when a gentle co-worker named Joel (played by the magnificent Jeff Hiller) goes out to check on her, Sam says-to his surprise, ours, and hers also-that she was deeply moved by an essay she’d been grading. Her fellow graders try to ignore it, then start to stare. Shortly after we’ve met Sam and her workplace in the pilot, she starts weeping, openly, at her seat. Home, even if it’s in a tiny town in the Midwest, can be a place where you find hope, and community, and genuine, meaningful connection. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |