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Sitting Ducks … Are Good Targets Only if They Stay in Place and Behave as Expected

by Julia Sneden

I had a small accident a couple of weeks ago, the third in almost 50 years of driving. It happened in my own driveway. I scraped the side of my car as I backed away from a tow truck that had been called to give me a jump-start. I was hurried and flustered and looking to the right to avoid my son’s car, parked beside me, and simply didn’t pay attention to what I was doing on the left. Damage to the truck was negligible; damage to my car was less than my deductible; damage to my self-esteem was massive. Although it was my third accident, it was the only one in which I was at fault.

The first accident happened about 20 years ago, when a large Mercedes slid sidewise on an icy road, brushed against my little Mazda and whipped me through a fence. The Mercedes drove on. I didn’t.

That was probably my first experience in being a true victim. Until then I had accepted (sometimes grudgingly) a share of the blame for most of the unpleasant moments of my life. Blame is an unpleasant burden, but shouldering it acknowledges that one is, at least, an active participant in the situation, and not a passive victim. I find it much easier to deal with being held accountable than with feeling helpless in the hands of capricious Fate.

I have always thought of myself as a fairly savvy person, able to cope with almost anything. I have traveled across a couple of continents, have no fear of being alone in strange places, and am not easily intimidated by adverse circumstances. I don’t find victim-hood to my liking. Scraping my car through my own carelessness wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t nearly as depressing as being the victim of a hit-and-run Mercedes.

Which brings us to my second accident. A few weeks ago, I was rear-ended while sitting at a red light. There was a car stopped on my right and a car stopped on my left in the left turn lane. When the woman hit me, hard, I was knocked about 20 feet into the intersection, and narrowly missed the cars from the feeder road, two lanes of traffic streaming onto the parkway with a green light. I sat for a moment, stunned, and then I got out of my car and walked back to look at the damage. Man, I thought, I was a sitting duck at that stoplight. The poor person who hit me is going have insurance rate hikes that go through the roof.

The other woman was standing in front of her car.

“Are you all right?” I asked

“Oh, my poor car!” she moaned. The front left fender was badly smashed in.

“Are you all right?” I repeated.

“Yeah,” she said. “You?”

I realized that my left shoulder was very sore, from the plunge into the seatbelt shoulder restraint. I moved it gently. Just sore, I thought, and said so. I didn’t want to claim instant injury and add to her distress.

The police came after a short while, and when the officer had checked our positions, he asked us to move to a nearby gas station. When I started to drive, I found that I was dragging the tailpipe and muffler, and the car was steering strangely. At the gas station, I went quickly to call my husband, who would be worrying about me because by then I was very late getting home. The officer began taking the other driver’s information while I called. When I came back and gave him my documents and report, he informed me that the other woman’s version of the story was different from mine. She claimed that the light had been green. Any sympathy I felt for her dissolved instantly.

“Then why were there cars stopped on both sides of us?” I asked her. She grinned at me.

“So sue me,” she laughed.

The officer intervened quickly. “I explained to her that since she ran into you from behind, it’s essentially her fault because one is supposed to maintain sufficient stopping distance, no matter what the circumstances,” he said. He turned to her. “Even if the light had been green, that wouldn’t give you the right to hit this woman.”

I was mildly grateful for his defense, but it didn’t take the sting out of her painting me as a foolish old lady who sits at green lights and causes accidents. I found myself wondering whether she would have told so bold a lie if I had not had a few gray hairs. I felt that I had become a sitting duck in more ways than one. I am now of a certain age, and look it. And much as I hate it, people feel they can treat me differently because of it. Some of my friends believe they receive such treatment just because they are female, but frankly, until I hit my late 50’s, I had very few problems commanding respect.

There were several witnesses to the accident who were not needed because it was clearly the other woman’s fault, but I found myself longing to find every one of them and have them attest to the color of that light. It’s a good thing I don’t have high blood pressure, because my sense of outrage was at stroke level.

The woman’s insurance company, however, couldn’t have been nicer. They agreed to rent me a car for however long it took to fix mine, and when I explained that it would have to be an automobile with a trunk large enough to carry my mother’s wheelchair, they assured me that there would be no problem. I wrote down all the appropriate numbers and called a rental agency that would pick me up. I explained my special needs to the clerk at the rental desk, and he promised to send a car right over.

Two hours later, a driver in a bright red Neon showed up in my driveway. I took the Neon to be the driver’s transportation, but when we got to the agency, I was surprised to discover that it was my rental car. When I objected, and reminded the young clerk that I needed a car with a trunk large enough for my mother’s wheelchair, he cheerfully informed me that he had called the insurance company, and they would cover a compact car only. He added that I could certainly pay the difference if I wanted to. I insisted on calling the insurance company, and asked to use his phone.

“Oh,” he said, “I’ll call them for you.” He dialed some numbers, and after a short conversation, said cheerfully: “Well, you’re in luck; they’ve decided to pay for the larger car.”

“They decided that about six hours ago, when I called them,” I said quietly. He looked at me, smiled, and shrugged.

Her Royal Highness The Princess Elizabeth II at work. (Image via War Archives)

April 23, 2019
MFA Boston Exhibition Explores Relationship Between Fashion and Gender Tracing a Century of Style That Dares to Break the Rules

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Gender Bending Fashion Traces a Century of Style That Dares to Break the Rules

This spring, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), opened the first major museum exhibition to examine the long-intertwined relationship between fashion and gender. Gender Bending Fashion (until August 25, 2019) features more than 60 boundary-pushing contemporary designs alongside dozens of 20th-century garments and photographs, illustrating a rich history of individuals disrupting, blurring and seeking to transcend a traditional division between men’s and women’s clothing over the last 100 years.

Among the approximately 50 designers featured in the exhibition are Jean Paul Gaultier, Rudi Gernreich, Rad Hourani, Rei Kawakubo (for Comme des Garçons), Yves Saint Laurent, Alessandro Michele (for Gucci), Rick Owens, Walé Oyéjidé (for Ikiré Jones), Christian Siriano, Alejandro Gómez Palomo and Alessandro Trincone.

Above, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Yohji Yamamoto, woman’s ensemble, Spring 2007. Gift of Yohji Yamamoto, Inc. Photograph © Monica Feundi

More than simply documenting styles and trends, Gender Bending Fashion also explores how the garments on view can speak broadly to societal shifts across the past century, including changing gender roles; ongoing efforts toward LGBTQIA+ rights and racial equality; and the rise of social media as a powerful tool for self-expression. Throughout the galleries, individual stories of designers and wearers — many of them celebrities, performers and fashion influencers — emerge, touching on issues of gender identity and expression, sexuality, race, class, pop culture, activism, social justice and more. These topics are further explored through the perspectives of local Bostonians, primarily sourced through Instagram, whose experiences are documented in a digital album within the exhibition.

April 20, 2019
A High Risk Device: FDA Orders Manufacturers of Surgical Mesh Intended for Transvaginal Repair to Stop Selling All Devices

The US Food and Drug Administration ordered the manufacturers of all remaining surgical mesh products indicated for the transvaginal repair of pelvic organ prolapse (POP) to stop selling and distributing their products in the US immediately. The order is the latest in a series of escalating safety actions related to protecting the health of the thousands of women each year who undergo surgery transvaginally to repair POP.

The FDA has determined that the manufacturers, Boston Scientific and Coloplast, have not demonstrated a reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness for these devices, which is the premarket review standard that now applies to them since the agency reclassified them in class III (high risk) in 2016. As part of the 2016 reclassification, manufacturers were required to submit and obtain approval of premarket approval (PMA) applications, the agency’s most stringent device review pathway, in order to continue marketing their devices in the US. The companies will have 10 days to submit their plan to withdraw these products from the market.

“In order for these mesh devices to stay on the market, we determined that we needed evidence that they worked better than surgery without the use of mesh to repair POP. That evidence was lacking in these premarket applications, and we couldn’t assure women that these devices were safe and effective long term,” said Jeffrey Shuren, M.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “Patient safety is our highest priority, and women must have access to safe medical devices that provide relief from symptoms and better management of their medical conditions. The FDA has committed to taking forceful new actions to enhance device safety and encourage innovations that lead to safer medical devices, so that patients have access to safe and effective medical devices and the information they need to make informed decisions about their care.”

Surgical mesh has been used by surgeons since the 1950s to repair abdominal hernias. In the 1970s, gynecologists began implanting surgical mesh for abdominal repair of POP and, in the 1990s, for the transvaginal repair of POP. In 2002, the first mesh device for transvaginal repair of POP was cleared for use as a class II moderate-risk device. About 1 in 8 women has surgery to repair POP over her lifetime, and a subset of these surgeries are completed transvaginally with the use of surgical mesh. However, the percentage of women undergoing transvaginal POP mesh procedures has decreased in recent years after the FDA began issuing warnings about the risks associated with using transvaginal mesh used for POP repair.

Two manufacturers have been marketing three surgical mesh products for transvaginal repair of POP. In reviewing the PMAs submitted by the two manufacturers, the agency determined they failed to provide an adequate assessment of the long-term safety of these devices and failed to demonstrate an acceptable long-term benefit of these devices compared to transvaginal surgical tissue repair without the use of mesh (native tissue repair). Since the FDA has not received sufficient evidence to assure that the probable benefits of these devices outweigh their probable risks, the agency has concluded that these products do not have a reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness.

April 19, 2019
If You’re Looking For A Link To the Mueller Report, Look No Further

Editor’s Note:

We’re not downloading the entire Mueller report, but here is the Justice Department URL to read the report at:

Report On the Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Election, Vol I and II; Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III

https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf?_ga=2.80421777.744576135.1555603755-461170982.1555603755

Mueller received the following military awards and decorations:

Courtesy of Wikipedia

April 18, 2019
During Poetry Month, A Joan Cannon Poem and Math and Metaphor: Flashes of Inspiration Require for Universes to be Disclosed

Humility by Joan L. Cannon

Archetypes, mysteries, simple clues

that only fingers and toes, sticks and stones
and flashes of inspiration require
for universes to be disclosed …
symbols for functions and formulae
for proof; logic so easy for some —
why am I innumerate?

East is east and west is logic,
and it’s said never will they meet.
Yet in hieroglyphs and runes
and Mayan masks, carven calendars,
in the graceful limbs of Arabic,
those signs beyond the Word
beckon curiosity to span the voids.

Plus and minus, powers, infinity …
zero, prime, sequences, fractals …
Euclid to Escher, Foucault and Fibonacci,
Seuss to Einstein, abacus to gigabytes …
the world and wars and philosophy
are in their hands, while I can only
grope for a touch of understanding.

©2010 Joan Cannon for SeniorWomen.com

Math and Metaphor: Using Poetry to Teach College Mathematics

Patrick Bahls
University of North Carolina, Asheville

Math is everywhere, and most people don’t even realize it. For the longest time I found math boring and confusing — just a bunch of numbers and symbols jumbled together, or word problems with juvenile purposes. (For example, would I really care about the rate water leaks from a bucket?) When I realized the concepts were actually relevant, and could be used to solve relevant problems, my feelings changed. Many of [my] poems definitely reflect my shift in attitude, and my realization that mathematics can be incredibly interesting.
— Katherine, Fall 2007 Calculus I student

Read the rest of the essay

April 17, 2019
So Many Who Need to Escape Danger: The Central American Minors Parole Program Will Resume Processing Children and Reuniting With Parents

On April 12, 2019 the government and plaintiffs in S.A. v. Trump, the lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s termination of the Central American Minors Parole program, agreed on a historic settlement that may allow approximately 2,700 children living in

dangerous conditions in Central America to safely reunite with their parents in the US. The settlement requires the government to finish processing all applicants who were in final stages of their applications when the government suddenly terminated the CAM Parole program. The government anticipates most applicants will be approved for parole and allowed to travel to the US.

The settlement followed a March 1 court order by US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ordering the government to resume processing for the children, who had already been conditionally approved by the government to reunite with their parents in the United States, only to see their status revoked when the Trump Administration shut down the program in August 2017. In an earlier order in December 2018, Judge Beeler found that the government’s mass revocation of conditional parole approvals from CAM applicants was unlawful.

Under the terms of the settlement, the government will provide individualized notice to the qualifying applicants.

S.A. v. Trump was brought by 12 children and parent applicants to the CAM parole program, as well as the community organization CASA. The plaintiffs are represented by the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and the law firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, LLP. In response to the ruling, plaintiff and counsel issued the following statements:

S.A., Individual Plaintiff: “I am so happy at the news that the government will allow eligible children to come to the US to fulfill their dreams of a better life without danger and fear, where they can study and try to have a better future. My heart jumps and cries for joy because there are so many who need to escape danger. I have faith that I will be together with my daughter and grandson soon.”

Linda Evarts, Litigation Staff Attorney, IRAP: “We are so pleased that after many years apart our clients will finally have the opportunity to reunite with each other in safety. These families belong together here in the United States, and we are hopeful this settlement will allow for their swift reunification.”

Daniel Asimow, Partner, Arnold & Porter: “We are delighted to be able to announce this settlement, which will make permanent the preliminary injunction entered by Judge Beeler requiring the Government to restore conditional grants of parole under the CAM program and expedite the reunification of our clients and approximately 2,700 other children and family members with their parents in the United States..”

The text of the settlement can be found here.

April 16, 2019
Ferida Wolff’s Backyard: Flowering Plum and Vincent Van Gogh

Flowering Plum In Ferida’s Backyard

The seasons have been varied this year. Fall had some frigid days. Winter had some warm days. And now, in the early days of Spring, we have summer-like temperatures. Today was 82 degrees! I wonder if it is confusing to the plants and trees that bloom at certain times.

This flowering plum tree in our front yard seems to be taking it all in stride. It flowers in early-middle Spring, in pretty much any kind of soil. For me, it is a sign of awakening regardless of what the weather does. I stop along my afternoon walk to calmly watch the delicate petals float down from the branches as the season progresses.

So much is happening in the world today that a simple gift of nature like this is much appreciated. The delicate pink flowers remind me of how life flutters on, how it shifts from beautiful to decimated and hopefully back again to a space that offers us a chance to take a deep breath, to experience joy and to share our awareness of life’s flowering with those around us.

Lots of flowering plum trees info:
https://gardenerdy.com/flowering-plum-tree

Editor’s Note: An artist who became fascinated by flowering trees was Vincent Van Gogh; Wikipedia devoted a page to this aspect of his art:

When Van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888, the area’s fruit trees in the orchards were about to bloom. The blossoms of the apricot, peach and plum trees motivated him,and within a month he had created fourteen paintings of blossoming fruit trees. Excited by the subject matter, he completed nearly one painting a day.Around April 21 Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, that he “will have to seek something new, now the orchards have almost finished blossoming.”

Flowering trees represented a source of spiritual renewal for Van Gogh; in 1883 he had written of the symbolism of the flowering tree, seeing the evidence of rebirth like the “man who finally produces something poignant as the blossom of a hard, difficult life, is a wonder, like the black hawthorn, or better still the gnarled old apple tree which at certain moments bears blossoms which are among the most delicate and virginal things under the sun.”

In 1888 Van Gogh became inspired in southern France and began the most productive period of his painting career. He sought the brilliance and light of the sun which would obscure the detail, simplifying the subjects. It also would make the lines of composition clearer; which would suit his ambition to create the simple patterns that he appreciated in Japanese woodblocks. Arles, he said, was “the Japan of the South.” Van Gogh found in the south that colors were more vivid. Pairs of complementary colors, such as “the red and green of the plants, the woven highlights of oranges and blue in the fence, even the pink clouds that enliven the turquoise sky” — create an intensity through their pairing.

Mancoff says of flowering trees and this work,

“In his flowering trees, Vincent attained a sense of spontaneity, freeing himself from the strict self-analytical approach he took in Paris. In Almond Tree in Blossom,Vincent used the light, broken strokes of impressionism and the dabs of colour of divisionism for a sparkling surface effect. The distinctive contours of the tree and its position in the foreground recall the formal qualities of Japanese prints.”

The southern region and the flowering trees seem to have awakened Van Gogh from his doldrums into a state of clear direction, hyper-activity and good cheer. He wrote, “I am up to my ears in work for the trees are in blossom and I want to paint a Provençal orchard of astonishing gaiety.”

While in the past a very active period would have drained him, this time he was invigorated.

©2019 Ferida Wolff for SeniorWomen.com

April 12, 2019
Individual Placement and Support (IPS) “holds promise … for people with opioid use disorders” & The Changing Perceptions Through Art and Storytelling ’Opioid Project

Detail of a painting in “The Opioid Project” exhibition. “Behind every person who has lived with the complicated and fraught life of drug addiction and its many cofactors, there is a human being with lots of hopes and dreams,” said Nancy Marks, the community-service learning coordinator at the School of Dental Medicine, and Annie Brewster, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and founder of the nonprofit Health Story Collaborative

By Chloe Reichel

Are workplace recovery programs successful in helping people to quit abusing drugs and avoid relapsing? A growing field of research suggests the answer is yes, though their success may have more to do with incentives than the nature of work itself.

There are a few ways that scholars have studied the relationship between employment and recovery, according to Matthew Walton, an instructor at the University of Louisville’s Kent School of Social Work. He is also the author of “The Effects of Employment Interventions on Addiction Treatment Outcomes: A Review of the Literature,” which looks at 12 studies on workplace recovery programs and concludes that they tend to be effective.

Walton described the two dominant approaches: one views employment as a benchmark of successful recovery. The other area of research focuses on whether being employed is a therapeutic intervention in and of itself.

Paid work as an incentive to abstinence

Kenneth Silverman, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, is a leading researcher in this latter field. Silverman has developed an experimental therapeutic workplace that offers paid employment to poor, unemployed people with opioid dependencies and other substance use disorders — with the understanding that the researchers will be studying them.

“We’re studying access to paid work as reinforcer or incentive to abstinence,” Silverman explained.

In this model, which has been the subject of study since 1996, participants have to provide drug-free urine samples to keep their jobs and/or avoid a dock in pay.

The model has proven effective in promoting and maintaining abstinence from heroin and cocaine among people who have been unable to stop on their own, he said.

Silverman was careful to say that his research shows that work alone does not keep employees from using drugs. Money and accountability matter, too.

“When we randomly assign people to just work and get paid, but they don’t have to provide drug-free samples to obtain maximum pay, they work a lot, but they continue to use heroin or cocaine,” he said. Only when paid work is contingent on abstaining does it serve as powerful incentive to maintain sobriety.

“I’m not sure that it’s right to say that work is a powerful incentive. Paid work is a powerful incentive,” Silverman said. “It’s probably the money that’s the most important thing.”

Doctors with opioid addiction

Anthony DeFulio, an assistant professor of psychology at Western Michigan University who studies workplace recovery programs, offered a similar perspective regarding treatment for physicians with opioid addictions.

DeFulio cited research on the national system of Physician Health Programs, which involves outpatient treatment and random drug testing over a period of five years. The results of these tests are reported to employers, insurers and state licensing boards, and if participants test positive, they can lose their license to practice medicine. These programs are quite successful, with only 22 percent of physicians testing positive at any point in the five-year follow-up screening period, according to a 2009 study involving 49 medical directors in charge of their state-run programs.

“When someone has a lot to lose, then that alone seems to be sufficient,” DeFulio said in a recent phone call.

According to DeFulio, research has shown that successful substance abuse treatment requires ample contact with patients on an ongoing basis, which are conditions the workplace offers.

He explained that incentive-based interventions tend to work better with high-value incentives. And, he added, “Recovery outcomes are better the longer you can keep an intervention in place…There’s a practical puzzle there — how do we deliver high-value incentives for a very long time? And employment is a great answer to that question.”

The value of work itself

There might be something about work itself, though, that helps people with substance use disorder in their recovery. DeFulio noted that there are some work therapy programs in which participants’ pay or employment status was not contingent on the results of drug screens. One example he offered was the Department of Veterans Affairs compensated work therapy (CWT) program, formulated with what DeFulio described as the “idea in part that being gainfully employed is going to help in the road to recovery.”

April 9, 2019
Jo Freeman’s Book Review of The Women’s Suffrage Movement by Sally Roesch Wagner

The apotheosis of suffrage. Drawing by George Yost Coffin, published in the Washington Post 1896 Jan. 26. View the original fresco on the Architect of the Capitol website; Library of Congress

By Jo Freeman

Review of

The Women’s Suffrage Movement

Edited by Sally Roesch Wagner

Foreword by Gloria Steinem

New York: Penguin Classics, 2019; 560 pages

By the time the 19th Amendment was added to the US Constitution on August 26, 1920, there were only eight states in which no woman could vote for anything. The struggle to remove “male” as a requirement to vote was long and incremental, though it is often celebrated as a single achievement.

Sally Roesch Wagner has devoted her life to understanding this “journey of courage and cowardice; of principles and capitulation; of allies and racists.” In this collection of dozens of reports and statements from primary sources, she allows the participants to speak for themselves.

Her first section shows how women lost the vote before they gained it. Her documents argue that “women had full suffrage in Massachusetts from 1691 to 1780.” In many places, ownership of property was a sufficient qualification to vote, regardless of sex or race. While few women or blacks owned enough property to use the franchise, some did. As colonies became states, they restricted the vote to white men. The last to do so was New Jersey, in 1807, in retaliation for women almost defeating a candidate by voting as a bloc.

The Woman Suffrage Movement is usually dated from the adoption of a Declaration of Sentiments at the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention when suffrage was just one of many issues. The earliest document in this collection comes from 1836. It equates marriage to slavery because entering that state brought woman under the absolute control and domination of another human being — her husband. The alternative was to starve since the opportunities for a single woman to earn her own living were few and far between.

Many of these primary sources show how the Woman Movement emerged out of the Anti-Slavery Movement. Working in that movement gave women a framework of analysis which allowed them to better understand what was wrong with their own situation and experience in organizing petitions and appeals. History repeated itself in the 1960s when women’s liberation emerged out of the civil rights movement, mostly by women who were active in that movement. Then as now, race and sex intertwined.

They also conflicted. Nowhere was this more apparent than in 1869 when the Fifteenth Amendment was being debated publicly as the states decided whether or not to ratify. The Fourteenth Amendment had inserted “male” into the US Constitution for the first time by penalizing states which denied the vote to otherwise qualified male citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment split those supporting suffrage into those who believed that “this is the Negro’s hour” and those who wanted nothing less than universal suffrage. Roesch Wagner reprints a fascinating debate over the Fifteenth Amendment that took place at a convention of the American Equal Rights Association in May of 1969 in addition to other statements on both sides.

There are other parallels between then and now. The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s was denounced for being nothing but a bunch of lesbians in a decade when that was seen as pathological. The 19th Century movement was dismissed as being for Free Love, which was seen as immoral. In both, what was seen as deviant sexuality was equated with the demand for equal rights with men.

The voices of men are in this book, both black and white, as supporters of women’s rights. Some, like Rev. Samuel J. May, preached for woman suffrage before women were allowed to speak for themselves. Others, like Frederick Douglass, were early and strong supporters until the Fifteenth Amendment split the movement.

It took another fifty years for “the woman’s hour” to come. Realistically, it came minute by minute, through many small battles rather than one large war. These documents celebrate the victories, lament the setbacks, and illuminate the debates over race, literacy and politics which marked slow and unsteady progress. Persistence over the generations finally brought success.

If you want to know what the suffrage debate was about, and how race and sex colluded and collided in the 19th Century, you should buy this book. It’s a great read.

2019© Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com

Note to publisher: This book would have benefitted from an index. And…. the title is ahistorical. In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, it was called the Woman Suffrage Movement, not Women’s Suffrage.

Above, Library of Congress: Magazine cover showing a Susan B. Anthony-like figure in classical dress thrusting an umbrella at a man in a toga. Another woman holds a sign reading “We want our rights”; Illus. in: Life. New York: Life magazine, inc., v. 61, no. 1582 (1913 February 20), cover

April 5, 2019
The PBS Mystery of Mrs. Wilson: It Begs the Question What Do We Actually Know About Our Partners

Editor’s Note: The very idea of someone being married to a partner who has had several relationships at the same time, unbeknownst … in this case … to the wives … each thinking they were the only wife is not unknown. Some of you may have seen a 1953 Alec Guinness movie, The Captain’s Paradise that depicts a similar, if not as complicated, situation:

Captain Henry St. James (Alec Guinness) heads a ferryboat that regularly moves between Gibraltar and North Africa, and he has a different life in each location. In Gibraltar, he is married to Maud (Celia Johnson), a subdued and dedicated housewife. In Morocco, he has another wife, the tempestuous Nita (Yvonne De Carlo), who enjoys the fast-paced nightlife. Henry enjoys this arrangement, with neither woman knowing of the other until both women become dissatisfied with their one-sided lives.

But Mrs. Wilson, as presented by PBS in three one-hour episodes over two weekends, is not, by any stretch as light-hearted as The Captain’s Paradise.

Here’s what PBS outlines but keep in mind that the actress who plays Mrs. Wilson is the actual granddaughter of the woman she portrays:

Who Was Mrs. Wilson?
“It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done — I think it’s the hardest role I’ve ever played,” says Ruth Wilson of casting herself in the role of Alison Wilson. The actress’ grandmother, Alison, fell in love with intelligence agent Alexander Wilson (Ruth Wilson’s grandfather) during the war. Thirty years her senior, he died suddenly, leaving her with two teenage sons and the shocking revelation of another Mrs. Wilson. Alison wrote a memoir describing her marriage and shared it with her granddaughter when Ruth was 15 years old. Wilson describes her grandmother as “… deeply complex and intelligent. I didn’t realize that she’d kept these secrets with her for so many years. I discovered this woman full of passion, full of love; looking for someone to believe in and wanting to dedicate herself entirely to an individual.”

Who Was Alexander Wilson?
That, dear reader, is the operative question! Wilson was brilliant and charismatic; an MI6 agent; the author of 27 popular spy thrillers; a devout Catholic; and an enigma. The rest is for Alison Wilson to discover on her journey towards the truth.

Go to PBS for the 3 episodes that will be streaming through April 14th:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/mrs-wilson/episodes/

April 5, 2019