Yesterday, before the big game, I watched the DVD I bought of Tim Burton’s Golden Globe Award movie, Big Eyes. It is the true-story bio-pic of an artist I loved as a kid, Margaret Keane… though I knew her as Walter Keane.
This movie is the bizarre real-life tale of an artist whose art was stolen from her by a man she loved, and supposedly loved her back. I have to wonder how you deal with a thing like that as an artist? I live in obscurity as an artist. My art has been published in several venues, but I have never been paid a dime for it. All I have ever gotten is publication in return for “exposure”, and limited exposure at that. But my art always brought vigor, joy, and light to my career as a school teacher. My art was always my own, and had either my own name on it, or the name Mickey on it. I shared my drawing skill in ways that directly impacted the lives of other people. It enriched my “teacher life”.
Mrs. Keane’s hauntingly beautiful big-eyed children appealed to the cartoonist in me. They expressed such deeply-felt character and emotion, that I was obsessed with imitating them. In fact, the “big-eye-ness” of them can still be detected in some of my work. I remember wondering how these children, mostly girls, could be drawn by a grown man. What was his obsession with little girls? But the true story reveals that he was a man so desperate to have art talent and notoriety that he put his name on his wife’s work, made her paint in secret, and eventually convinced himself that it was actually his. He had a real genius for marketing art, and he invented many of the art-market ploys that would later inform the careers of homely artists like Paul Detlafsen and Thomas Kinkaid. One wonders if Mrs. Keane could’ve ever become famous and popular without him.
The movie itself is a Tim Burton masterpiece that reveals the artist that lives within the filmmaker himself. I love Burton’s movies for their visual mastery and artistic atmosphere. They are all very different in look and feel. Batman was very dark and Gothic, inventing an entirely new way of seeing Batman that differed remarkably from the 60’s TV series. Edward Scissorhands was full of muted, pastel colors and gentle humor. Alice in Wonderland was full of bright colors and oddly distorted fantasy characters. Dark Shadows was Gothic melodrama in 70’s pop-art style. This movie was true to the paintings that inspired it and visually saturate it. It is beautiful and colorful, while also serious and somber. It makes you contemplate the tears in the eyes of the big-eyed waifs in so many of the pictures. It is a movie “I love with a love that is more than a love in this kingdom by the sea”… if I may get all obsessive like Edgar Allen Poe.
So, there you have it. Not so much a movie review as an effusion of love and admiration for an artist’s entire life and work. I am captivated… fascinated… addicted… all the things I always feel about works of great art.
![Clofillia, Josphine [Madame Clofullia, P.T. Barnum's "Bearded Lady of Geneva"]. Daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly, 1853. Photographs and Prints Collections. Missouri History Museum. Easterly 321. NS 17387. Scan © 2008, Missouri History Museum.](https://catchafallingstarbook.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/beardedlady.jpg?w=273&h=154 "beardedlady")
Catch a Falling Star 
A Mr. Holland Moment
Life is making music. We hum, we sing to ourselves, movie music plays in our head as the soundtrack to our daily life. At least, it does if we stop for a moment and dare to listen.  We make music in many different ways. Some play guitar. Some are piano players. And some of us are only player pianos. Some of us make music by writing a themed paragraph like this one. Others make an engine sing in the automotive shop. Still others plant gardens and make flowers or tomatoes grow. I chose teaching kids to read and write. The music still swells in my ears four years after retiring.
The 1995 movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, is about a musician who thinks he is going to write a magnificent classical orchestra opus while teaching music at a public high school to bring in money and allow him time to compose and be with his young wife as they start a new family.
But teaching is not, of course, what he thought it was. He has to learn the hard way that it is not an easy thing to open up the closed little clam shells that are the minds of students and put music in. You have to learn who they are as people first. You have to learn to care about what goes on in their lives, and how the world around them makes them feel… and react to what you have to teach. Mr. Holland has to learn to pull them into music appreciation using rock and roll and music they like to listen to, teaching them to understand the sparkles and beats and elements that make it up and can be found in all music throughout their lives. They can even begin to find those things in classical music, and appreciate why it has taken hold of our attention for centuries.
And teaching is not easy. You have to make sacrifices. Big dreams, such as a magnum opus called “An American Symphony”, have to be put on the shelf until later. You have children, and you find that parenting isn’t easy either. Mr. Holland’s son is deaf and can never actually hear the music that his father writes from the center of his soul. And the issue of the importance of what you have to teach becomes something you have to fight for. Budget cuts and lack of funding cripples teachers in every field, especially if you teach the arts. Principals don’t often appreciate the value of the life lessons you have to give. Being in high school band doesn’t get you a high paying job later.
But in the end, at the climax of the movie, the students all come back to honor Mr. Holland. They provide a public performance of his magnum opus, his life’s work. And the movie ends with a feeling that it was all worth it, because what he built was eternal, and will be there long after the last note of his music is completely forgotten. It is in the lives and loves and memories of his students, and they will pass it on.
But this post isn’t a movie review. This post is about my movie, my music. I was a teacher in the same way Mr. Holland was. I learned the same lessons about being a teacher as he did. I had the same struggles to learn to reach kids. And my Mr. Holland moment wasn’t anywhere near as big and as loud as Mr. Holland’s. His was performed on a stage in front of the whole school and alumni. His won Richard Dreyfus an Academy Award for Best Actor. But his was only fictional.
Mine was real. It happened in a portable building on the Naaman Forest High School campus. The students and the teacher in the classroom next door threw a surprise party for me. They made a lot of food to share, almost all of which I couldn’t eat because of diabetes. And they told me how much they would miss me, and that they would never forget me. And I had promised myself I would never cry about having to retire. But I broke my promise. In fact, I am crying now four years later. But they are not tears of sadness. My masterwork has now reached its last, bitter-sweet notes. The crescendos have all faded. But the music of our lives will still keep playing. And not even death can silence it completely.
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