Talk To Me

I made it quite clear to Sneedlet One yesterday that he wouldn't be coming back to my house until Friday, his usual day. He comes on Friday night and leaves Sunday noon. This arrangement gives his mom a break, him a change of scenery and a day and a half is about all my nerves can take. But I do love the little guy. Son Sneed and I went to the movies this afternoon to see Talk to Me, the Petey Greene story. Don Cheadle does a fine job playing a fast and loose with the facts version of the real Petey Greene. The movie credits Petey Greene with calming the rioters in Washington, D.C. following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. I'm fairly sure that they film producers made up that story. Mr. Greene's contribution to civil rights for African-Americans, and for ex-convict is far greater than what is portrayed in the film. He was a far more complex character than was presented in the movie. The movie is a loose adaptation of Petey Green's story, very loose. I'm not sure that the producers were clear on what story they were trying to tell. It began as the Petey Greene, feel-good story, morphed into a story about a brilliant but self-destructive man and wound up as a story of the relationship between Petey Green and his friend and business manger, Dewey Hughes. In all, Son Sneed and I agreed that it is worth seeing, if for nothing more than Mr. Cheadle's entertaining performance. Look up Petey Greene if you really want to know about his life. The movie got me to thinking about Martin Luther King's murder. I was a senior at a predominantly minority high school in the San Joaquin Valley in California when Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968. Beyond Dr. King's name I knew next to nothing about him. I knew he was a civil rights leader, but I wasn't really paying much attention to civil rights. Basketball and my futile pursuit of girls were the focus of my life. What I do remember was that the white students at my school were very afraid in the days following the assassination. There were demonstrations and boycotts at our school. Many of the black students refused to attend class, milling around in the open areas of the school, protesting, demonstrating, singing and listening to the news coverage. Some parents, black and white kept their children at home. I don't think we had any real violence, but tensions ran high. The African-American guys I knew from school athletics, even my varsity tennis doubles partner, a black kid named Tony Henderson, suddenly found that there was a great divide between us, one that I at least, hadn't been aware of. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky