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Loraine Anderson

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July 4, 2011

Loraine Anderson: No eternal perfect age

By Loraine Anderson, Local columnist ----

Time travel.

I sit in the State Theatre with a friend eating popcorn under the starry sky of an August night replicated in thousands points of light embedded in the State’s ceiling in perpetual tribute to the Traverse City Film Festival — at least as long as the house lights are on. I will probably think of this some day as part of a Golden Age in Traverse City.

The curtain lifts. The movie begins. I hear the French anthem. A clarinet lures me into street cafes and tours past the Louvre, Arc d’Triomphe and Notre Dame and down the Avenue des Champs d’Elysees. A church bell strikes midnight.

Poof!

Woody Allen, filmmaker guru of my generation, transports me to the 1920s during a “Midnight in Paris.” Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are there, Ernest Hemingway, Picasso, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. Salvador Dali and other surrealists make cameo appearances.

T.S. Eliot gets out of a beautiful old car to greet an unfulfilled 21st century American screenwriter who wants to write a good novel. Eliot is smiling, not reciting post-World War I era poetry like “We are the hollow men, We are the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.”

Or “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

I wait, but never once does Gertrude tell Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation” as that cohort of writers, poets and artists tried to make sense of the devastation of the early 20th century Europe. How my generation seemed to love that phrase as it came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the Vietnam era.

Oddly enough, the movie returns me to the Golden Age of my early 20s working for a northern Michigan county weekly in the mid-1970s — a time when I consumed Ernest Hemingway books and “Autobiography of Gertrude Stein,” by Alice B. Toklas. One weekend during a February thaw a friend and I decided at 10 p.m. on a Friday night to drive down to Chicago to see the Art Institute’s Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings we’d read about in the autobiography.

It was a golden moment then, worth the white-knuckled drive back in a blizzard. It still is. Golden moments and ages last at least a lifetime, I guess.

After the movie, I slowly walked down Front Street, still only half in 2011, thinking about those writers, poets and painters in Paris and the influence of their works on succeeding generations.

The important thing for me to remember is that there is no eternal perfect age. There is just now and golden times occur in the present because that’s where I live, laugh, love, cry and create.

Loraine Anderson can be reached at landerson@record-eagle.com or 231-933-1468.

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