The Invisible Counterpoint

Sometimes, when I stand in a room of white men, I feel unfeminine and unsexual, no matter the strappy heels, the makeup, the dress. I know there are white men out there who find black women attractive, but you, John Mayer -- the guy down enough to be on"Chappelle's Show," the guy so sensitive he writes love songs -- now represent the ones who don't. Maybe you should think a little bit about that. I doubt you have any idea what it feels like to be invisible, to come to a party looking for a little sexual validation and have white men look through you like you're wearing sweats. I doubt you know what it's like to feel the weight of cultural expectations every time you stand on a dance floor, knowing that your dance card will be empty since you won't play the freak. I doubt you know what it's like to question everything about yourself -- how you stood, how you dressed, how you smiled, trying to figure out what you did so wrong that men simply stayed away...

To me it was always about my bag lady fears. It's a fear that men don't have, by the way. It comes from distant parenting or childhood abandonment. I had that. It's what happens if you don’t have a nurturing environment as a child, and you think this could happen, that you're going to end up on the street. (“The Bag Lady Papers”: How to lose money and alienate people,” Alexandra Penny in discussion with Thomas Rogers, Salon, 10 Feb. 2010) Re: “It's what happens if you don’t have a nurturing environment as a child, and you think this could happen, that you're going to end up on the street.” She's offering us a ton here. She's says guys don't know this fear, but it certainly is something I'm familiar with. I doubt, though, that it's just the distance that does it. The connection between finding yourself alone, on your own, and very vulnerable to absolute dissolution, requires something more than just having well known indifference and h...

After you've played God — twice, as Freeman has done in Tom Shadyac's "Bruce Almighty" and "Evan Almighty" — and been God, there's not really much left to do, except play Nelson Mandela. [. . .] The movie's first third is stiff and dull. And through that section, so is Freeman. [. . .] And eventually, Freeman reaches that something deeper, not by clamping down on the performance, but by loosening his grip on it. [. . .] Suddenly, instead of just seeing Nelson Mandela as a great man, we get an idea of how a guy could survive 27 years of unjust imprisonment and, instead of becoming embittered and broken, emerge with a better sense of what makes human beings tick. He has a sense of humor as well as sense of responsibility. [. . .] It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment in "Invictus" when Freeman lets go of playing qualities — dignity, affability, fortitude — and starts playing a person. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Morgan Freeman: Making Mande...