On being an Austrian or Romanian, etc., here are some thoughts to consider. Actors are required to "become" many different types of people and if you spend a few years acting, it affects your personality. You take on certain chameleon qualities so that unconsciously even when offstage you blend in with your environment and whatever group in which you find yourself.
On stage once I had to play a blustering Englishman and then in another act in the same play I had the dual role of an old Cockney stage door man. I hadn’t yet turned 20 and had never met a Cockney but recalled a speech by an English actress in another play and tried to copy that from memory, whatever it really was. After the show, an elderly Englishman came backstage to congratulate us all and asked me, “Are you from Lancashire?”
On a couple of occasions while visiting friends in hospitals, I’ve had nurses come up to me and address me as “doctor.” A little girl in a park in Toronto came up to me once asking, “Stiu Romaneste?” At an audition, another actor asked, “Are you Irish?” On a tour of Israel, a tourist from America, originally from Russia, asked me “Are you Jewish?” Maybe during all those moments I was an Irish-Jewish-Romanian doctor. I don’t know.
Obama had a white mother and an African father but the African DNA in his mix must have been stronger than the white because his features can be more identified with African features and I suspect that he identifies more with Africans than with Caucasians.
My first son at age five came up with a line that simplifies religious identity problems and I used that line many years later in a screenplay. My wife had been a Canadian Protestant and like the majority of Protestants she did not attend church or read the bible but felt that it’s “a good thing for children.”
I had never been a believer and had assumed that she was the same and I was surprised when she said that our son should go to Sunday school. That struck me as senseless as if she had said “Now that he is five, he should take up skydiving or visit a bordello. But she seemed insistent and so I shrugged and let it go.
He came home from Sunday school in tears. He had never before heard group singing, didn’t know the lyrics, of course, and participated by bleating loudly, “Dah, dah, dah, dah.” The Sunday school teacher told him to shut up and that hurt his feelings because nobody had ever said that to him before. I used that as a perfect example of the idiocy of sending him to Sunday school at so early an age. That ended his religious training.
A week or two later, on a weekend, walking to the neighborhood playground,(in Kew Gardens, Queens, NY) we ran into two young Irish girls who would have been about ten or twelve. My wife knew them and asked them how they were doing in their school. Wanting to be in on the conversation, my little son piped up, “I went to school!” One of the girls talked down to him, “You’re too young to go to school.”
My wife explained, “He means Sunday school.” The girls now became very interested.
“Where did you go?” asked one of them. He pointed and said, “Up there on the hill.”
“Then you must be a Protestant,” said the girl accusingly.
“No,” he retorted angrily, “I’m a BOY!”
That did it for me. I demanded that my wife decide on what she believed and then we could tell the children what we each believed and at the same time tell them that different people believe different things. I’m afraid she never did find her identity but I always knew what I was. I was a boy. (An acquaintance once came up with another relevant line: "Belief is the lowest form of thinking.)
My younger son once asked me, “How can you be a Jew if you don’t even believe in a God?” And I explained, “Because my birth certificate brands me as ‘Evreu’ and the man who wrote that onto the certificate might have been tempted to instead write ‘Jidan’ and that binds me to victims of oppression over five thousand years.” All the rest is play acting.
Andy Halmay,
> -----Original Message-----
> From: czernowitz-l_at_list.cornell.edu
> Sent: Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:52:38 -0500
> To: czernowitz-l_at_list.cornell.edu
> Subject: czernowitz-l digest: March 05, 2010
>
> CZERNOWITZ-L Digest for Friday, March 05, 2010.
>
> 1. [Cz-L] RE: czernowitz-l digest: March 03, 2010
> 2. Re: [Cz-L] Splenigasse, Strada Traian and now Popovich
> 3. Re: [Cz-L] Eminescu bookshop
> 4. [Cz-L] Our National Poet
> 5. [Cz-L] Who am I ?
> 6. [Cz-L] Who am I ??
[Moderator's note: Rest of digest deleted. Moderator Bruce]
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Received on 2010-03-06 21:14:15
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