RFK Remembered

Thursday, June 5 at 8 p.m. MPT will be the first television station since 1968 to broadcast Robert Kennedy Remembered, a tribute honoring the late politician’s life and work on the 40th anniversary of his assassination.

The Academy Awardwinning film by Charles Guggenheim was broadcast just once on all television networks when it was shown during the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. This moving film tribute to a man who had hoped to win the presidency created an historic moment when it brought the proceedings to a standstill and the crowd, in tears, to its feet. It hasn’t been seen on television since.

Commissioned by the Kennedy family, the film begins with the funeral train to Washington, D.C., and follows the triumphs and tragedies in the late senator’s life through extraordinary newsreel footage, archival stills and home movies.

The film was produced in only four weeks—two months after the senator’s assassination—in order to meet the convention deadline. Charles Guggenheim, with the country’s resources at his fingertips, worked around the clock to complete this poignant eulogy and compelling reflection on the spirit, quality and commitment RFK brought to his life and work. Richard Burton narrates. The film went on to win an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Subject.

These are 30 goosebump-inducing minutes you won't want to miss.

The Big Read!

(Above: Rudolfo Anaya, author of classic coming-of-age novel, Bless Me Ultima.)

This month, people all across Baltimore have joined MPT and the Enoch Pratt Free Library to celebrate the power of words by reading Rudolfo Anaya’s classic coming-of-age novel Bless Me Ultima, part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read.

Reading Bless Me Ultima is more than just a "good thing to do," like eating your vegetables. This is a fascinating, exciting, sometimes funny, sometimes sad story of a young boy growing up in a small New Mexico village, and an extraordinary window into another world. Young Antonio Marez's quiet life is changed when his Aunt Ultima comes to live with his family. Ultima, with an owl in tow, is a curandera (a healer—what we might call a practitioner of herbal medicine), and helps to teach Antonio about life and many of her secrets on his path to adulthood.

For all the differences between our world and Antonio’s, as I read, I found myself identifying with him and the conflict between his father's wild vaquero (cowboy) brothers and his mother's more sedate farming relatives. I’m sure others will also see themselves in him as he wrestles with his parents' conflicting expectations, as well as the tensions between Hispanic and mainstream American culture in his village.

For younger readers, MPT and the Pratt are also sponsoring a “Little Read,” with Anaya’s picture book The First Tortilla—the story of Jade, a young village girl who is told by a blue hummingbird to take a gift to the Mountain Spirit to bring much-needed rain to her small Mexican village. This heartwarming story is prefect for parents to read along with their children, and help bring them into the excitement of the Big Read.

Book discussions and programs focusing on Bless Me Ultima and The First Tortilla are being held throughout the month of May at libraries and recreation centers around the city. Come check us out!


Poet and librarian Reginald Harris (reggieh.blogspot.com) has received Individual Artist Awards for both poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council. He is Help Desk and Training Manager for the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.

The cooler gig

My former roommate and I are both screenwriting majors at Drexel University, released from academic purgatory for six months to get an internship in our field so we can appreciate just how good we’ve got it (I’m reasonably certain that’s not how Drexel advertises its co-op program, but after a four straight terms of classes, that’s definitely how I feel). My roommate is spending her six months in Ireland, working her butt off amid rolling fields of green, quaint little pubs and surrounded by that wonderful Irish accent that she imitates so beautifully. I’m back home, working at MPT and remembering why my brother and I get along best when I’m two hours away. There are fields of green, yes, and there’s probably a cute little pub or two somewhere, but pretty much everyone here has the same accent I do—no imitation required.

Still, all of our friends agree: I got the cooler internship.

I’m working on MPT’s documentary: Maryland Generations: Jewish Americans. Being raised Catholic, there’s a certain irony to this, but I’ve loved history all my life, and this has been a chance to not only learn history that’s new to me, but to really connect it with the places I know. I grew up in Roland Park, known back in the day for the “no Jew” clauses in the deeds to its houses. I even talked to my dad about it, and he said yup, that clause was in the deed for our old house, along with a little note saying that the clause was unconstitutional. When I asked why the offending clause wasn’t just removed, he said: “Another clause said it couldn’t be removed.” The law is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

But the history bit is just a perk, like those “buy $50 or more worth of merchandise and get a cute little stuffed dog FREE!” promotions stores do. Even on a completely different project, one that had absolutely nothing to do with my interests (although that’d be pretty hard, considering I’m interested in pretty much everything MPT does), I’d have the best internship ever.

MPT uses its interns. Seriously uses its interns. You don’t just answer phones, take messages or take dictation of a script. In my first two weeks working here, I’ve researched Maryland’s history, met state politicians and leaders of international Jewish organizations, gone out on shoots and learned a little bit about camerawork. I’ve looked for visuals to put into the show, read through interview transcriptions and picked out sound bites to use. I’ve written outlines for the first two segments, highlighting the information we should cover and the sound bites I like best. My boss/producer actively seeks out and trusts my input. In those two weeks alone, I’ve utilized almost all the skills I’ve learned in school, and picked up some new ones. And everyone here, whether you work closely with them or just occasionally walk by their office, cares about you and what you’re doing. They must drug the water or something; you don’t get people this nice in Philadelphia.

So if you’re an undergrad (or grad student) interested in television, in Maryland, just want something more to do with your time—consider an internship at MPT. It’s a lot of fun.

Also?

We have a koi pond. Last I checked, my roommate’s place of employment doesn’t have one of those. They just make her sit in on boring seminars.

I definitely got the cooler gig.


Katie Nolan
Content Enterprises Intern

Sea of Fog

As much as I’ve been waiting and working towards it for four years now, I really can’t believe I’m graduating college in three weeks. I’ve got some ideas about where I’m headed, but mostly I feel like I’m groping along in the dark.

There’s this picture (above) I really like to look at now and then, Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.” Even though Friedrich painted it in 1818, I feel drawn to it some near 200 years later. Don’t get me wrong—for me, time is melting away faster than desert clocks in a Dali painting, but this whole sense of temporarily rising above the fold, taking a minute to reflect and then heading back down into a sea of chaos pretty much sums up my whole experience right now.

I’m going to get all dressed up, put on a gown (I’d really prefer it if they called it a robe, because that would make me feel like a king or a wizard or Hugh Hefner), have my named called and hear (hopefully) a bunch of people applaud. And then I go back into the Sea of Fog, obscurity—as Hunter S. Thompson put it, “straight into frantic oblivion . . . just another freak in the freak kingdom.”

It’s now time to make something of myself, though I’m not sure what that is going to be. I’ve always been successful, from the time the guidance counselor pulled me out of the third grade to do all these IQ tests and told me I was “gifted” to just last Friday when I was given a “certificate of excellence” by my college, but I’ve never felt quite content. And that’s probably because I’ve never quite found an enterprise that I could feel comfortable entirely devoting myself towards.

My time spent here at MPT has helped me meditate on just where to funnel my abilities. As someone who enjoys the arts, I am glad to see there are organizations out there who are trying to still support them in an age where dollar signs and immediate gratification are requisite for successful business. I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid in the foothills of Appalachia up in Pennsylvania, so I’m especially glad to see there are organizations like MPT that are working to preserve the Chesapeake Bay.

And perhaps it’s because I have always been more than a little suspicious of change that preserving such institutions appeal to me. But, as much as I want to fight it, change is inevitable as the sun rise. So with the knowledge that there just might be some organization, some cause out there, that I can really buy into and believe in, I’ve got a little hope about things.

And now I’ve got to get on out there.

Thank you, MPT. You’ve been great.


Kevin Sunday
Communications Intern