First Date
My first date was at the movies. It was not “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a 1964 French musical, the young star Catherine Deneuve innocent and luscious in a star-crossed romance. I saw it at 16 with my High School boyfriend, Peter. It was perfect, colorful umbrellas swirling on rain-slick sidewalks. We were in love. I probably chose it.
But in 1961, when I was thirteen, I didn’t choose the film. Sandy Wilson did.
I don’t recall much about Sandy, except his hair was sandy-colored and he wore horned-rimmed glasses. He must have attended my Junior High School. He must have asked me in the hall, or on the phone. I don’t know how I got to the theater, but I’m guessing we were each dropped off by a parent. A first date should be memorable, a right of passage, filled with trepidation, wondering what he thought of me, what I thought of him, whether he would hold my hand or put his arm around the back of my seat. A first date should have romance, a bit of drama and an aftermath worth pondering.
Mine did, but not because of Sandy Wilson. The movie was Ben Hur. Set in the time of Christ, it featured Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur, boyhood friend of Messala, played by Steven Boyd. Messala becomes governor, tries to enlist Judah in identifying Jews. Judah refuses. They become enemies, Messala ultimately sending Judah to a slave galley, and his mother and sister to prison, where they contract leprosy. Judah eventually returns to mount a chariot race against Messala, which Judah wins. Christ’s crucifixion ends the film, at which amidst thunder and uproar, Judah’s mother and sister are miraculously cured of their leprosy.
I felt lurched from one bloody scene to another, hardly aware of my date. I’ve looked at photos from the film. There are photos of the chariot race, photos of the slave galley, photos of Christ giving a sip of water to Judah, photos of Judah’s beautiful sister before the leprosy, but not a single photo of the lepers. So I can’t confirm what I saw. In my memory, the women are wrapped in head scarves, their faces disfigured by red boils, as they cowered behind stone pillars. They are outcasts, marked an incurable, relegated to life in a leper colony.
The scene lasted maybe ten seconds. I closed my eyes after I realized what I was looking at. The action moved on. I didn’t. I’ll bet I stayed in shock until the chariot race usurped the scene in blood and gore.
Today, leprosy is not the untreatable disease that resulted in leper “colonies,” segregated as contagious from society, feared as pariahs, assumed to have been cursed by God. But I can imagine that finding a red sore that feels numb strikes the same fear today as the appearance of Kaposi’s sarcoma did in the 1980s — harbinger of a death sentence that everyone can see. Actually, people don’t die of leprosy. But untreated it can cause nerve damage that causes limbs to atrophy, giving the appearance that hands or feet “fall off.” They don’t. Even today, there are 700,000 new cases a year, primarily in India and Africa. Leprosy is now recognized as a chronic bacterial infection to which 95% of humans are immune. A twelve-month drug regimen of treatment will cure it; once treatment has begun, the afflicted is not contagious. The major problem today, as in Jesus’ time, is stigma. People won’t come forward to seek treatment because their fear judgment and ostracism.
In his 1966 book, “My Other Life,” Paul Theroux, the hero of his own “imaginary memoir,” tells of volunteering to teach English at a leper colony in Moyo, Africa. Moyo contains a medical clinic and an outpost of Catholic priests, but mostly he is entranced by the colony itself, where nightly drumbeats and frenzied dancing around firelight attracts him like a moth to flame. He glories in the details of having sex with Amina, a young woman whom he thinks is a caretaker for her blind leper grandmother. But by the time he enters her hut, he knows Amina is infected — he fingers a quarter-sized patch of dry flesh on her inner arm. For him it is an erotic zone. For her, not so much. The skin is numb.
Although Theroux shows Amina as willing, almost aggressive, the scene is revolting, not because she is a leper, but because he seems sexually aroused by her disease. Not surprisingly, he sneaks out of the hut, decides he must leave the colony the next morning, without acknowledgement to anyone of his transgression. The book goes on to the next chapter of his life in Singapore. That’s it for lepers.
Jesus is said to have cured ten lepers. In Biblical times, leprosy was viewed as a curse from God, a sign of spiritual uncleanness. It shows up as the word “sar’at” in Leviticus. By AD 383, Jerome translated sar’at into the Greek word “lepra,” which became the Latin leprosy when the Bible was translated into Latin. Jesus was known to consort with sinners and prostitutes, the outcasts and ostracized. So perhaps it’s not surprising that he healed lepers. At the end of Ben Hur, he cures Judah’s mother and sister.
I didn’t know Jesus was going to show up in Ben Hur. By 13, I had been a Jehovah’s Witness for three years. Sandy Wilson was a “worldly association.” I don’t recall my mother telling me I couldn’t meet him for the movie, but as the carnage drew on, I began to wish she had. If I saw any parallels between Judah’s family cursed with leprosy and any penalty I might suffer from going out with a non-Witness, it didn’t occur to me.
I’d imagined my first date, fueled by Sandra Dee movies, as a breathless combination of hope and fear — would Sandy hold my hand, would he try to kiss me, would our hands meet in the popcorn bag? But I hadn’t counted on the chariot race. In 1959, the year prior to the release of Ben Hur, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in creating a replica of a Roman coliseum. Both Heston and Boyd learned how to drive a horse-drawn chariot. Seventy-eight horses were imported from around the world and trained to pull a chariot. No wonder the race was terrifying. It was real.
Spoiler alert: Messala tries to knock another chariot out of the race, is thrown behind his chariot and dragged in the dirt. The spiked wheels of nearby chariots tears his flesh to shreds. Amidst cheering crowds, dust and sweat, and thunderous music, this becomes literally a race to the death. For someone who recoiled in repulsion at a dead raccoon on the highway, this was both unexpected and traumatic. I didn’t get a chance to close my eyes because I didn’t anticipate Messala would die.
The film won 11 Academy awards, including best actor for Charlton Heston. Some criticized him as a bit too stoic, like the Moses he would later play in the Ten Commandments. True, he was in love with a slave girl, Esther, but the film was dominated by the feud with Messala. Stephen Boyd, who like Heston was blue-eyed, so he wore brown contact lenses to mark him as the bad buy. Heston’s chariot was pulled by white horses. Boyd’s of course, were black.
There were off screen feuds as well. The script writer was fired because the dialogue sounded too stilted. No one knew how people spoke in AD 26, but the second scriptwriter achieved a more modern tone and the first writer sued him for credit.
I knew nothing of these controversies sitting in the theater with Sandy, nor that the film would last 3 and ½ hours, or whether the lepers would be healed or show up again. I didn’t know the carnage of the chariot race would far outshadow leprosy. Sandy Wilson became a bit player in my romantic fantasies. After the film, we got into separate cars. He never called again.
I was also unaware that weeks later I would be invited by another boy to see the same film.
“Hey, it’s Pete.”
“Oh, hi. Uh. What’s happening?
“Not much. I’ve been walking three black labs for the neighbors. They love to jump in the pool. It’s wet work!
“I love labs. You know we have one too?
“Right. What’s it’s name?
“Shamrock. Shamrock Lochar Lily Sweetheart. Guess who named her?
“Not you I’m guessing.
“And not my brother either. He wanted to name her Shoepolish — for how she smelled, not because she was black. It was my dad. We just call her Shammie.
“Well, huh. Listen, I was wondering . . .
“Yes?
“Would you want to go to the movies next weekend? We could go after I walk the dogs — and dry off, of course.
“I’d… I’d . . What movie?
“Ben Hur. I heard its great.”
By this time, I could easily say “Oh, sorry. I’ve already seen it.” However this boy, unlike Sandy Wilson, is my Ben Hur. He has the same blue eyes, the same boyish blonde hair, the square jaw, the smooth muscled chest as Charlton Heston. I had eyed him from afar but despaired that he was as beyond my reach as a movie star. He played drums at the back of the band. I played flute. I loved how purposeful he looked hitting the timpani. I was lost in a row of flute players — all girls. The flute was light, reasonably easy to play and best of all, because there were so many flute players, if I couldn’t hit a note, I’d just pretend. Pretending was required to keep up appearances of a normal school girl, when underneath my façade was a Witness — forbidden to salute the flag, no birthdays, Christmas, admonished to be a minister and convert the worldly.
Was I willing to sacrifice myself before a bloody spectacle of leprosy and shredded limbs, 3 1/2 hours of my imagining his arm around the back of my seat, wishing I could hide my head beneath his arm as a dove will shield her face?
I realized he was waiting for my answer.
“Sure. Great. Sounds good.”
“Ok, I’ll pick you up around 2 on Saturday?”
Like Sandy Wilson, I didn’t hear from Peter again after Ben Hur, at least not for three years. I didn’t know our second date would not occur until I was 15 and we were in high school. Peter would become my boyfriend. We would walk those three black labs together on Saturday afternoons, thinking there would be endless afternoons.
“So, who was your first date?” he’ll ask one day.
“Sandy Wilson. I was 12.”
“Never heard of him. What did he look like?”
“Oh, kind of nondescript. Sandy hair. Glasses. Remember?”
“Nope. Where did you go?”
“Ben Hur.”
“What? I seem to remember you went to see Ben Hur with me.”
“I did. I did.”
“Oh, man. That must have been love.” He’ll grin and give me a squeeze.
Eventually, Peter will ask me to marry him. One day when he is a freshman in college, he will bring me a beautiful yet tiny diamond ring. My mother, still a Jehovah’s Witness when I tell her I have become engaged, will laugh, forgetting perhaps that she herself was married at age 19, maybe unaware that a nice, normal guy may not be dramatic like my father, but that I needed to feel normal. At least she didn’t tell me I’d be damned for marrying a “worldly” guy.
This after my High School years, the many dinners spent at his family home with his adoring mother and stuffy father where I wash the dishes after dinner, treated as the daughter they did not have, pretending I am not a misfit, as marked by being a Jehovah’s Witness as if I were a leper. They were the normal family I longed for, the opposite of my chaotic homelife with a Jehovah’s Witness mother and an alcoholic father. If movies were families, Peter’s would be The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and mine would be Ben Hur.
I didn’t marry Peter. We’ve kept in touch over the years. When he did get married, he hired a horse and carriage — fitting for a romantic. I got married in San Francisco City Hall. When his mother died, he sent me a note, “she always had a warm spot in her heart for you.” The violence and bloody spectacle of Ben Hur had been superseded by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the countless romantic comedies we’d seen over the years. I’m sure when he rode to his wedding in his horse and carriage, he had forgotten all about the chariot race in Ben Hur.