 | | Accepting her Emmy, Sheryl Lee Ralph said: "To anyone who has ever, ever had a dream, and thought your dream wouldn't — couldn't — come true. I'm here to tell you, this is what believing looks like."Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times |
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'I Was a Winner Going Into It. And I'm a Winner Coming Out of It.' |
LOS ANGELES — Sheryl Lee Ralph has a tendency to break into song. |
The "Abbott Elementary" star teems with energy, often vacillating between channeling her inner Broadway diva — occasionally belting a sentence to drive home a point — and her inner church girl, emphasizing her words with that sing-songy whooping tone that many Black preachers love to use. It's as if she's addressing an invisible 200-person congregation. |
And Reverend Ralph had some advice: |
"You have to go for it!" she said, punctuating each word. "Imagine if you have a map? Ask yourself: 'How do I get from Point A to Z?'" |
There was a dramatic pause — she seems to love those — before she drove home the point: "You have to know exactly where it is you're going so you can see your trajectory." |
It was a month before the Emmys, and Ms. Ralph had been nominated for her first major award in 40 years. |
Our first interview ended on a cliffhanger, of course, though she was already planning our second conversation, after the Emmys. |
"And you know what I'm going to tell you?" she teased. |
"I was a winner going into it. And I'm a winner coming out of it," Ms. Ralph, 65, said. "I got to this place at this time in my life and everything always works out for me. So whether that trophy is in my hand or somebody else's hand, I am still a winner no matter what. And if I lose, this time, maybe it wasn't for me, but it will be for me some other time." |
"And if I'm the winner, I'm going to say to you: I told you so. Everything always works out for me." |
Ms. Ralph has a party trick. She can guess your age based on what TV show or movie introduced you to her. |
I was introduced to her as Deidra Mitchell on the UPN sitcom "Moesha." |
"So, you're … 32 to 35," she said, confidently. (I'm 32.) |
Ms. Ralph has been consistently booked — rare for a Black woman in Hollywood — since her 1975 graduation from Rutgers University. |
"I've felt ever-present," she said. "It feels good." |
Right after college, at age 19, Ms. Ralph did a tour with the U.S.O., performing alongside Anneka di Lorenzo, that year's Penthouse Magazine pet of the year. At the end of the tour, Ms. Ralph was flown back to Los Angeles in a military aircraft before a scheduled transfer to a commercial flight for her return to New York City. |
"They told me not to get off the plane," Ms. Ralph said. "But, of course, I took my bag and got off that plane." |
She entered the terminal in Los Angeles, found a phone booth and called her father, who was expecting her across the country. |
"Get back on that plane!" he implored her. |
Undeterred, she said, "Daddy, do we have any family in L.A.?" |
She had no plan, but she had a feeling: She was supposed to be there. |
Her father was silent for a long, terrifying moment, she said. When he finally broke the silence, he told her that he'd recently spoken with a distant cousin with whom he hadn't been in contact for years. Her name was Mabel, and, hours later, Ms. Ralph was standing outside her apartment, waiting for Mabel to throw a key to her building down from a window. |
That evening, as she checked her phone message service, she noticed multiple missed messages from Chris Kaiser, her former acting teacher and an associate producer of the Sidney Poitier film "A Piece of the Action." He wanted her to audition. She was in front of Mr. Poitier at the Warner Brothers Studio lot the next day, and later was offered a part in the movie. |
After filming, as she was leaving the set for the last time, Mr. Poitier pulled Ms. Ralph aside to say, "'You're so wonderful, you're so talented. And I'm sorry this industry has no more to offer you.'" |
Over a decade later, in an oft-retold tale, she had a similar conversation with Robert De Niro on the set of the 1992 film "Mistress": "'You deserve to be seen,'" he says in her retelling. "'But Hollywood is not looking for you. They're not looking for the Black girl. So you better climb that mountain and wave that red flag and let them know that you are here.'" |
Ms. Ralph recalled these conversations as highlights of her career. "All I needed to hear was that I'm good," she said. "You think I'm going to be stopped because maybe these people can't see me? The industry just hadn't caught up with how good I am." |
Read the rest of the story here. |
 | | Deena So'Oteh |
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Celeste Ng's Dystopia Is Uncomfortably Close to Reality |
The definition of "dystopia" in the Oxford English Dictionary is bald and to the point: "An imaginary place in which everything is as bad as possible." |
Literature is full of examples. In "The Time Machine," the Morlocks feed and clothe the Eloi, then eat them. "The Handmaid's Tale" deals with state-sanctioned rape. The firefighters in "Fahrenheit 451" incinerate books instead of saving them. In "1984"'s infamous Room 101, Winston Smith is finally broken when a cage filled with rats is dumped over his head. In "Our Missing Hearts," Celeste Ng's dystopian America is milder, which makes it more believable — and hence, more upsetting. |
Noah Gardner, known as Bird, is a 12-year-old Chinese American living with his father in Cambridge, Mass. His mother is a fugitive, on the run because she wrote a supposedly subversive poem titled "All Our Missing Hearts." America is living under PACT — the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act — which became law during a confused and economically disastrous period known as the Crisis. (We're given more details about this Crisis than we actually need.) |
Before the Crisis, Bird's father was a linguist. Now he works in a library, shelving books. In Ng's version of the American Nightmare, there's no need to burn books. "We pulp them," a helpful librarian tells Bird. (Bird doesn't tell her he's picturing book bonfires, but she intuits it.) "Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone's rear end a long time ago." |
Less gaudy than firefighters burning books, but more believable. The empty shelves Bird sees in his father's library speak volumes. |
Under PACT, the children of parents considered culturally or politically subversive are "re-placed" in foster families. When Bird is given a clue to his mother's whereabouts he goes in search of her, and much of Ng's firmly written and well-executed novel deals with his adventures along the way. In that sense, the book is a classic tale of the hero's journey, said hero young enough to make the trip from innocence to experience with surprisingly little bitterness directed toward the parent who has abandoned him. That his mother, Margaret Miu, had no choice would make no difference to most children, it seems to me; abandoned is abandoned. |
We have heard this tale of government scapegoating before, which adds to its power rather than detracting from it. Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany's economic malaise. Trump told us to fear migrant caravans full of "bad hombres." Here it's Asian people in general and Chinese Americans in particular who are held responsible for everything that's gone wrong — blame those who don't look like White America. In New York's Chinatown, street names have been censored: "Someone — everyone — has tried to make the Chinese disappear." Flag pins decorate every lapel. |
Because Ng's storytelling is so calm — serene, almost — the occasional explosions of violence are authentically horrifying, as when Bird observes a man punch a Chinese woman, knock her to the ground, then kick her repeatedly. There is no reason except for her otherness … and perhaps the fact that she looks well off. He then kills her little dog, breaking its back "the way he might crush a soda can, or a cockroach." |
Read the rest of the story here. |
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