Shouts from a Third Act

Long before the Capitol insurrection, long before the War in Ukraine, long before our nail-biting mid-term elections, Frida Kahlo and Vincent van Gogh were two long-dead artists who were beloved throughout much of the world. That has not changed. Much has changed in the world, but not that.

Frida Kahlo’s image is just about everywhere you go in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a 16^th century city with cobblestone streets and a cathedral that looks like a fairytale. When I visited in early November, the city’s Day of the Dead celebrations had just ended. The decorations were still up, but even when they’re not, Frida lives on. The artist and feminist icon is a year-round presence in shops and galleries and restaurants.

Day of the Dead is a joyous celebration, even if the skeleton figures you see around San Miguel—decorating buildings, for sale in various shops, roaming the streets on stilts—seem somewhat macabre despite their fancy clothes. There’s no escaping death but isn’t it ‘loverly’ to imagine the people we leave behind setting aside time to remember us. For the good things we did, for the pleasure of our company, for simple kindnesses.

And then there’s Frida, a woman more famous in death than in life. An artist who’s celebrated throughout the year in countless ways by millions of admirers. It’s not just her distinctive paintings they admire. It’s what she went through—what she lived through—before dying too young at forty-seven. Late last year, in 2021, Frida’s self-portrait “Diego and I” sold for $34.9 million in New York City, the highest price paid for a painting by a Latin American artist. She was married to the famous muralist Diego Rivera, but her fame has long since eclipsed his.

Frida could’ve been a doctor. At eighteen, she was riding the bus home from university in Mexico City when her bus collided with a trolly car. A metal handrail shot through her hip and came out the other side. After three weeks in the hospital and three months at home recuperating in a body cast, she gave up on the idea of being a doctor. Instead, she taught herself to paint.

Resilience. A year before her death, she arrived by ambulance for her first solo exhibit in Mexico City. Hobbled by her earlier accident and thirty subsequent operations, she held court from her four-poster bed. Frida embraced life despite all her pain—both physical and emotional. It was just three years after her bus accident that she asked Diego Rivera for artistic advice; he in turn courted her, visiting her weekly at her parents’ house. He was twenty years older, and his many affairs broke her heart, but she seems to have found some solace in her own affairs, with men and woman. Still, by all accounts, the couple had a deep bond and love for one another. They divorced in 1939 and remarried the following year.

One-of-a-kind Style. Frida had this, but she cultivated it. Her husband was tall and heavy. She was petite, with a stunted right foot and a limp as result of polio as a child. She chose to wear long, brightly colored Mexican folk dresses with elaborate hair accessories that were often adorned with flowers or fruit. She sported a unibrow on her pretty face and sometimes the hint of a mustache. Her sense of fashion concealed her disability, but it also empowered her. Of her 143 paintings, 55 were self-portraits that reflected her physical or emotional pain, but also her resilience and her appreciation of life. Today she inspires fashion designers as well as girls who like to dress up like Frida while viewing exhibits of her work.

“I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to better.” Frida Kahlo

Vincent van Gogh died before Frida was born. He lived in a different century on a different continent, but he, too, has an infatuated fan base, and it’s not just because of his distinctive paintings. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, established in 1973, reports two million visitors a year and even more to its website. His most famous painting “The Starry Night”—valued at about $100 million—hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It was purchased in 1941, but midwesterners ‘discovered’ him first. In 1922, the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum bought an 1887 “Self-Portrait.” The next four van Goghs were also bought by public museums in the midwest. In 1971, the singer/songwriter Don McLean wrote the song “Vincent” when he was a struggling musician, and it became one of his greatest hits. By 1990, Vincent’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” painted in 1890 shortly after he left the mental asylum, sold for $86 million. There have been at least four major feature films about Vincent’s life, beginning with Lust for Life in 1956. For the last two years, a travelling “Immersive Van Gogh” exhibit has wowed millions with its fantastical light show that explores his life and work.

It’s too bad Vincent didn’t live to see any of this. He took up painting at twenty-seven, having failed at several other professions. He lived an impoverished life. He had few friends, apart from his younger brother Theo. Plagued by mental demons, he cut off one ear, spent a chunk of time in a mental asylum, and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at thirty-seven, his work virtually unknown. But his legacy, thanks in large part to Theo’s widow Jo Bonger-van Gogh and an increasingly adoring public, lives on. Two thousand paintings, drawings, and sketches, plus hundreds of letters, mainly written to his brother Theo:  

I am often in the greatest misery, but still there is within me a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corners, I see drawings and pictures.”

Our collective admiration for Frida and Vincent shows that we have more in common than we are different, even in the U.S. where battles still rage over our divisive politics. We’re alike because we applaud one-of-a-kind talent and appreciate the hard work it takes to cultivate it. We champion individuals who work hard to overcome their disabilities; we better understand the complexity of mental illness, in part because one in five adults suffer from some form of it during their lifetime (according to the National Alliance of Mental Illness). For all these reasons, and because their paintings touch our souls in myriad ways, we give to Frida and Vincent the life we wish they could have had here on Earth.

Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane. So says the flyer pasted to the side of a mailbox in downtown Chicago. Joy sees it after she stumbles out of a creepy-looking back-alley abortion clinic, unable to go through with the procedure. The year is 1969.

This is a feature film, not a documentary, but “The Jane Collective” was a real underground organization that helped women get safe abortions—and the all-important aftercare. (A documentary The Janes was released by HBO in June.)

Joy (a terrific Elizabeth Banks) is happily married to Will, who’s just made partner at his law firm, and they have a fifteen-year-old daughter, Charlotte. Joy is a traditional stay-at-home mom but sometimes edits her husband’s law briefs because, as he tells her, “You make me sound like Clarence Darrow.” Joy is very happy to be expecting a second child, until she develops congestive heart failure and the only way to reverse it is through “therapeutic termination” of the pregnancy. Barring that, she has a 50/50 chance of survival. Her doctor says she’ll need hospital board approval to terminate. She goes to the meeting bearing a tray of homemade cookies. The all-male board treats her as if she isn’t there. When they are told she might have a 50/50 chance of survival, that’s good enough for them. “Is there any number that would sway you?” Joy asks, but her question falls on deaf ears.

At home, Joy tells her husband she’s not ready to die. She still has much she wants to accomplish, including being there for Charlotte. Her husband, although upset, doesn’t have any answers. He’s always been a rule-follower.

Joy’s doctor tells her there’s another option: convince two psychiatrists she’s suicidal. Yes, she can do that, she tells him, but one of the psychiatrists doesn’t believe her. Plan B is to fall down a staircase. “It worked for me,” the receptionist at a doctor’s office tells her. Joy can’t quite bring herself to do that, which is how she ends up at a back-alley abortion clinic, unbeknownst to Will, and ultimately—unbeknownst to Will—calls Jane.

The real Jane Collective started up in 1969, when abortion was generally illegal in all but four states. This volunteer network consisted of working women, stay-at-home moms, and students, some of whom had used the service themselves and joined the cause. In the movie, Joy joins the cause and trains herself to do the procedure. “You could have been a nurse,” the abortion doctor tells her after she performs her first procedure. “I could have been a doctor,” she replies.

In May 1972, the Janes were raided by a Chicago homicide detective who came looking for the abortion doctor but found only women. As in the movie, some of the real Janes had trained themselves to do the procedure after discovering that a doctor they’d hired was actually only a medic who’d served in the Korean War. This enabled them to provide more abortions at a much lower cost or even for free. In the beginning, most of the women who came to them were affluent. Later on, many poorer women sought them out. Seven Janes spent a night in jail and were still awaiting trial eight months later when their case was thrown out because the Supreme Court had decided Roe v. Wade, making abortion legal in all fifty states. In any case, the women had proven hard to prosecute. On the way to jail, they’d swallowed their ‘clients’ names/addresses ripped off index cards; additionally, the DA couldn’t find anybody who wanted to testify against the Janes—they’d performed about 11,000 abortions without a single fatality.

In the film, the leader of the pack is Virginia (Sigourney Weaver, also terrific), an older woman who’s fought for causes all her life. In real life, the founder was a student at the University of Chicago who helped an almost-suicidal friend obtain an abortion. Not long after, another woman called. Then another, and another and . . . Overwhelmed, she conceived the idea for the Jane Collective in her dorm room. At the time, Cook County Hospital in Chicago had a septic abortion ward that was always full of women who’d had botched abortions–as did many hospitals across the country.

Despite the subject matter, Call Jane is an entertaining film. It’s a drama filled with some funny moments (just like any real life) and it doesn’t feel preachy. Joy is a conservative and extremely likeable character, and she initially tells Virginia she disapproves of what the collective is doing after she meets a young woman who seems to be using the service as birth control—her married boss keeps footing the bill.

The movie finished filming last year, well before the Supreme Court decision in June that overturned Roe v. Wade. If I’d seen a movie like this a few years ago, I would have thought, wow, what an amazing thing these women did, and thank goodness the sneaking around is over and all women have access to a safe procedure if they need one. There are those who disagree, those who believe the life of a fetus is as important—or more important—than the life of the mother.

My hope is that many people from both sides will see this film and discuss it. Reasonable minds can disagree and still agree on ways to see another’s point of view and compromise. Sex isn’t going away; unplanned or unwanted pregnancies are inevitable, even with birth control; medical emergencies sometimes threaten the life of a pregnant mother; rape and incest are as old as mankind.

As a woman and citizen of the United States living in the 21^st century, what I find totally unacceptable is that a woman’s right to an abortion—or not—is now a decision left to each state. It means that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not equal for all women in these United States of America.