Blue Dress, Red Dress

2019-11-13T16:35:11-08:00Categories: arts, film, memoir, midlife, women's rights|Tags: , , , , , |

I’m thinking again about Anita Hill’s blue dress. I wrote about it, and her, and Freida Mock’s engrossing documentary film, titled simply Anita, last year when the film played at the Seattle International Film Festival. Now, Anita is in theaters, including Seattle’s Sundance Cinema. Go see it. Time-travel back to October 1991, when we weren’t yet accustomed to having a man accused of sexual harassment on the Supreme Court. But back to the dress. No matter how hard we all try to be less attached to the things of our lives, objects do have power. Anita Hill knew what her pale blue dress said, and so did we: Professional. Tasteful. Modest. When I remember my mother, I often picture her in a dress that couldn’t be more different than the one Hill wore to that infamous Senate hearing. My mom’s dress was Tabasco-red. It was fitted with a flared skirt. Spaghetti-strapped. A print of tiny white racehorses galloped across it. That dress was shorthand for who she was then: a youthful, single, 49-year-old woman with a great eye for the right outfit, one that pushed the edge of daring without going over it. A red dress says: Here I am. The star of Peter Brook’s stage adaptation of a South African story called The Suit, Nonhlanhla Kheswa, was resplendent in a red dress that was a ringer for my mother’s, only without the racehorses. When she stepped to the front of the stage and sang Miriam Makeba’s haunting “Malaika,” it was as if the red dress [...]

Anita

2013-05-21T09:20:55-07:00Categories: film, politics, women's rights|Tags: , , |

She had it dry-cleaned and put it away, layered in tissue, never to be worn again: an aqua-blue, demurely double-buttoned linen dress. To watch Anita Hill unwrap it and shake it out, smiling in a bittersweet, almost affectionate way—as if to say, Oh, if frocks could talk!—was unforgettable. Sure, it bordered on stagy, but there was something wonderful and graceful about Hill’s plucky, good-humored willingness to do this on camera, more than 20 years after the day she spent in that aqua dress, testifying in front of siblings, colleagues, friends, her aging parents and, on the other side of that big green table, a battalion of white guys in suits who called themselves the Senate Judiciary Committee. By this point in documentary filmmaker Freida Mock’s latest film, called simply Anita, I was so brimming with outrage that this quiet moment in Hill’s closet came as an urgent relief. Reliving Hill’s testimony about sexual harassment by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was like reliving a bad, bad dream. But the news has been like that lately. The way the senators turned Hill’s willingness to shine a light on a nominee to the nation’s highest court into an opportunity to question her morals, her credibility and her dignity was powerfully reminiscent of the stories many military women have told recently about how they were treated when they tried to report sexual harassment or rape. The senators’ behavior also reminded me of Chris Cuomo’s slimy CNN interview of Amanda Knox. The brutal truth is: two decades after Anita Hill’s [...]

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