Lights, Camera, Amalee

by Dar Williams

  “Hi, Amalee,” Ms. Severence said. She was wearing a long purple dress with sandals and pretty silver earrings. Her long blond hair was swept up in a silver clip, and she looked like one of the women who shopped at Lydia’s natural food store. “Congratulations. I hear you wrote a great screenplay.” And then she gave me a hug and handed me a small wrapped present. (A hug! I saw Lenore’s eyes widen.) Everyone was quiet. “It’s not a big deal. I just saw it and thought you’d like it,” she stammered, looking around. I unwrapped it quickly to save her some embarrassment. It was a fancy metal pen covered with green frogs. It was perfect.

  “It’s beautiful. Thank you,” I said.

  Everyone was looking at the pen. Everyone, that is, except Dad. I looked and saw Dad looking at Ms. Severence, and Ms. Severence looking at him.

  “We’ve met a couple of times,” he said. “I’m David.”

  “I know. Hi, David,” she said.

  I watched their conversation like it was an Olympic Ping-Pong tournament.

  “Would you like some pizza?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Would you like a glass of wine?”

  “That would be great.”

  “Red or white?”

  “Red, thanks.”

  “It’s a merlot.”

  “That sounds great.”

  Luckily I realized that I was completely starving. The word pizza helped to break my trance. Hallie and Lenore, who had been in the same class with Ms. Severence, couldn’t take their eyes off of her, either. Even though she’d loosened up over the year when she was our teacher, we’d never seen her doing things like eating pizza and talking as a friend to other adults. And now she was drinking wine with them!

  Sarah and Marin admired my pen and asked if I would consider doing another movie with the frogs. Sarah said she would write a fiction movie where a two-headed leopard frog, a golden poison frog, and a red-eyed tree frog were called the Green Avengers who would attack polluters. I said that sounded like a fun idea.

  “So, your dad seems to like Ann,” Sarah said, nodding in their direction.

  “Oh, no … she was my English teacher,” I explained.

  “So?” Sarah asked.

  “Leave Amalee alone!” Marin interrupted, laughing and poking Sarah. “How would you like it if one of your teachers liked one of your parents?”

  Ms. Severence wasn’t just one of my teachers — she was Ms. Severence. I always thought of her going home and reading thick books about history and coming up with ideas of how to make things interesting for her students. That’s what I loved about her. She seemed so smart. And now I looked at her talking with Dad … another person, I now realized, who read thick books and thought about how to make subjects interesting for his students. They both seemed so smart, almost like a club that they couldn’t allow me into. Or maybe they could. She was in our house, eating our pizza, with her brother clapping me on the back, congratulating me on pulling off the day of filming.

  It was hard to feel left out.

  I woke up the next morning and thought about the parade of friends and former foes we’d had in our living room last night. Phyllis, Dad, and I had cleaned up. Ms. Severence had not been mentioned, to my relief. As I saw the pen that she had given me lying on my desk, I realized that neither my shyness nor the weirdness of the situation kept me from feeling really proud of her present. She had thought about me and understood me. The pen was proof of that.

  Later in the day, Lydia picked me up and brought Marin, Sarah, Julie, and me to the swimming hole again. We passed Kyle’s house, and Sarah didn’t even notice. “I feel sad,” she said. “Yesterday was so much fun! Are you going to finish the film soon so we can have a big screening party?”

  “First we have Julie’s big dance concert,” I pointed out. Julie slid down in her seat, but she was smiling. We swam and ate leftover pizza that Lydia had put on a baking pan and left in the sun to see if it would cook. It cooked, but not before it caught a few ants. We just picked them off and ate the pizza, rough wild-blooded girls that we were.

  I had an appointment the next day at the film department in New Paltz, thanks to my dad. The dance performance would be my reward for sitting in a dark cave of a room for the day.

  Dad introduced me to Sandy and Karim in the film room. He slipped them some money — I’d have to ask him later how much. I could see why they wouldn’t want to accept money from a twelve-year-old, even one with as many coins as I’d inherited. They seemed to be doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, anyway.

  They looked nervous, though, when they saw all the footage to edit. Then I took out a notepad and showed them I had a very good idea what I wanted where.

  “You will become less organized as you get older,” Karim said, and Sandy nodded. They were also impressed that I already knew something about film editing on a computer.

  Sandy wrote something on a Post-it and stuck it on the corner of the computer. “This is from your dad,” she said. The note said, Whatever you do is enough. “Has he ever done this to you before?” Yes, he had. Once he had received a brilliant paper from a student. He said it was imaginative and clear, and it seemed like the student had enjoyed writing it, which made it enjoyable to read. When he asked the student what made this paper stand out from other ones she’d written, she said she’d been so nervous that she finally wrote herself a note that said, Whatever you do is enough, telling herself that if she only wrote one of the ten pages she was supposed to write, she’d still get a D instead of an F. Three pages were a C–, she decided as she finished three pages. Eight pages must be at least a B. And then she was done, and she hadn’t pushed herself to do it. She’d actually had a good time.

  I thought of my mom, growing up in a Nothing is good enough house and meeting the Whatever you do is enough man. She was lucky, in that way.

  “I need that note,” I admitted.

  “Yeah, we got our work cut out for us,” Karim said. “Your dad is a smart guy. He pushes the kids who need to be pushed and lays off the kids who push themselves too hard. I’ve had him for a few classes and I noticed that.”

  “I don’t know if he’s always guessed right,” I said, thinking of my mom. I decided to let it go at that. We started at the beginning. They agreed with me that I could put opening credits over some footage I’d caught of the “frogs” doing stretching exercises. Then we cut to the camera focusing on John as the other frogs sat down. I loved seeing how some of my original ideas, like John just walking into the room, were less interesting than the ones with more action, and less funny. Whenever we came to the best editing moment, we were able to fine-tune it pretty fast.

  John said the opening lines, and then said that every ecosystem had its own web of life, after which we cut to Gail at the American Museum of Natural History giving her speech about the animals pooping and dying and putting nutrients back in the ground. I had been worried about putting real humans next to the big frogs, but the film seemed to be saying that the humans were in their own world, unbothered by the dramatic larger-than-life amphibians. Also the way Gail talked about “poop” made it clear she wasn’t trying to give some big adult science lecture!

  We edited back to John, who said he didn’t want to show off about his importance, but since frogs live in both the land and water, their health is the best way to know what’s going on in the environment, because their survival is the most threatened by pollution on the land or the water.

  “For instance,” John said, “you can tell by looking at me that my ecosystem is very healthy.” He patted his stomach. He’d added that line himself.

  “This is going to be good,” Sandy said, and I swelled like a bullfrog.

  We moved on to Curt, who said that even though we live in a world where we can make clothes, medicine, and even food away from nature and in laboratories with chemicals, we had to admit that since we are part of the complicated life of the planet, we always needed to go to the bigger laboratory of the planet Earth for ans
wers. “Does that sound too stuffy?” I asked.

  Karim shrugged. “It helps that we’re hearing it from a giant yellow frog.”

  “Golden,” I said, smiling.

  We went to Betsy in her tank top, brushing back her silver braid of hair with her bracelet-covered arm as she talked about rain forest plants. And then we had Curt again, talking about medicines we get from the natural world. Betsy’s purple tank top against the white orchids and Curt’s golden mask against the blurred green of the other frogs in their chairs were beautiful contrasts, while the soft light in the greenhouse and the sunlight in the frog room were very similar. These edits were working.

  And then Curt came back and talked more about the quinine we use to treat malaria, the annatto plant that was used in red makeup and face paint, and the curare bark that was used for many medical purposes. We edited to pictures of each plant, but it was too much, so I just used the annatto plant, which was the most interesting. Sandy and Karim nodded along with my choices.

  Then Curt said that animals weren’t helpful just for the medicines and makeup they gave us. They could also inspire us.

  We cut to the tai chi people looking like cranes. Karim and Sandy agreed that we could spend a full ten seconds on the distant shot, and then another seven seconds — a lot, in movie time — on a close-up of one of the women. The golden light was rich and inviting to look at. We edited to Kevin, the curly-haired tai chi guy, talking about the qualities of each of the animals. It was getting a little long, so we just had him talk about the tiger and the crane, editing each one down to a couple of sentences.

  “You don’t need a lot of what he’s saying to get the point across, do you?” I asked. “I mean, he cares about it so much, a little goes a long way.”

  “It’s very intense, yes,” Karim mumbled, leaning over to help me make the cleanest cuts so that Kevin’s words would still flow evenly. “Less is definitely more here.”

  Marin then came in, saying that, as the red-eyed tree frog with bright eyes, light blue legs, and light green skin, she was one of the best-loved frogs in the world. “I’m here to represent how important the natural world is to us, just because it’s fascinating and beautiful.” Here, I told Sandy and Karim, was where we’d edit in the footage from the dance concert once I had it. We then returned to Betsy admiring the delicate blossom of the orchid, and then introduced Henry at the aquarium. He was pointing toward the ocean tank, which was teeming with busy fish, plus a stingray going by like a slow-motion butterfly. Both Henry and Betsy seemed to be in awe of what they were observing for us, which, Sandy and I said, gave Marin’s point more “momentum.”

  We all laughed as Sarah then got up from her chair with her hands on her hips, as if to say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve got two heads. You think I hadn’t noticed? She talked about the discovery of the mutant frogs in Minnesota, and how scientists were still trying to figure out which chemicals had done this to them. Then we cut in the actual pictures of the leopard frogs. Here I didn’t need a smooth transition. As soon as Sarah had made her point, I made a quick cut to the mutated frogs. Karim looked at their withered extra legs and arms. “Poor little guys,” he muttered.

  Sarah came back and talked about how mussels can tell us how polluted water is because they filter so much of it, and then she came back to the mutated frogs and said that if the chemicals we were using could do this to frogs, what were they doing to all the other life in the lakes of northern Minnesota? And even if we didn’t care, what were these chemicals doing to humans, especially children?

  We had shown why plants and animals were important to us. Now we would get into the part about how they were endangered.

  We went back to John, who said that due to the way humans were spreading out and over-harvesting, we were losing big chunks of the food chains. I’d gotten some footage of the young tattooed guy at our local fish store who Phyllis said always talked her ear off about “the politics of fish.” The red and black tattoos on his arms as he pointed to the different silver fish in the case were striking. “Great color world,” Sandy observed. I liked that expression, color world.

  The guy at the fish store, Dave, was shaking his head at a pile of white fish. “See that? That’s cod from Cape Cod, which they catch responsibly, from what I’ve heard. You know, I’m really careful about what kind of cod we get, because they, like, totally exterminated the population of cod off of Canada and Maine, not because they killed all the cod itself, but — get this — they went out in these HUGE boats, and they were just scraping the bottom of the ocean to get what they could get. I mean, imagine if someone just came and scraped out all the towns between New York City and Albany. So they totally wipe out the whole sea bottom, the population of plankton and all the tiny stuff that all the sea animals eat, and it works its way up the food chain, so good-bye to little fish and then the cod, not to mention that they were also over-fishing the cod itself. Man! You just don’t —” He swore here. We replaced it with a bleep sound that we made with the alarm on Sandy’s cell phone. “You just don’t BLEEP with Mother Nature like that.”

  “Good example,” said Sandy, laughing. “I wouldn’t want to date him, but he makes his point well.”

  “That’s because you have dated him,” Karim pointed out.

  “That guy?” I pointed.

  “He means guys like him,” Sandy explained, rolling her eyes at Karim. “Yes, I’m done with angry tattooed guys for now, thank you.”

  Marin came next and said, “The word for all the complicated, beautiful things we see in nature is biodiversity. Gail works at the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History. Part of what we’re protecting is not just this or that species, we’re protecting the whole systems that are interconnected.”

  Gail talked about how every system became more complex the more you looked at it. Then we cut to Henry and the part of our interview where he talked about how he loved the almost infinite variety of plants and animals, all the colors and shapes that existed in the world. And then we flashed though a bunch of photos that Gail had sent. I’d asked her to send pictures of endangered species I’d learned about from books and museums in the last month. We went fast, fast, fast: Nilgiri tahr, Nilgiri langur, Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, desert tortoise, Hector’s dolphin, giant panda, snow leopard, humpback whale, seabeach amaranth, gorilla, marine otter, Mexican gray wolf, Oregon silverspot butterfly, Palila finch, cucumber tree, Corroboree frog, manatee, pink sand verbena.

  Marin came back at the end of the beautiful pictures. It took a second for the eye to see she wasn’t one of the photographs. She said, “All of these are endangered.” Sandy gasped.

  And then we went to Lenore.

  “Wow, who’s that?” Sandy asked. “So awkward!”

  Lenore held out her palms and shrugged as we heard Sarah’s voice introducing Frog X. “I am here to talk about the importance of keeping the environment safe for every species, even when they’re not particularly helpful or interesting to us. Perhaps I am not an important part of a food chain. Maybe I have no medicine to offer, I cannot help you detect an environmental disaster. I am not beautiful. But I have a right to stay a part of this planet.”

  I had written and crossed out every word of what Frog X said. I looked sideways at Karim and Sandy to see what they thought. I couldn’t tell! We stopped the film and went back to Gail, Betsy, and Henry.

  Henry, standing in front of the fish tank, said, “I just want to live in a world with an infinite variety of flora and fauna, and rocks for that matter. I want to be on a planet with countless life-forms.”

  Gail, beaming in her purple sweater at the museum, said, “We’ll never perfectly replicate the intricacy of interrelationships that actually exist in a natural system. And yet every level of understanding we reach is really wonderful in and of itself.”

  Betsy, standing in front of a field of orchids rescued from the brink of extinction, said, “It’s not just the beauty of each thing. It’s how it all fits toge
ther. Stunning. Ingenious. No artist could have thought of it. We have great ideas. We have beautiful ideas. Nature is the greatest idea.”

  Then Lenore’s frog said, “And also, just because I don’t seem valuable to you now, you never know. People haven’t solved the mysteries of the planet. People don’t know what the future will bring. People don’t know what they need to survive.”

  Then we edited to some of the footage from Mr. Chapelle’s movie. This was technically Curt’s turn to narrate, because it was about the usefulness of an animal, but I didn’t want him to feel weird talking about Mr. Chapelle, so I’d let John do it. We watched Mr. Chapelle’s son in the water with the therapist and the dolphin for about seven seconds, then cut to the therapist saying how this had helped other autistic kids communicate better, for some mysterious reason. John pointed out that we’re still in the process of figuring out whether working with dolphins is a key to helping children with autism. Then he said that while most dolphin species were not endangered, their habitat was always threatened.

  Lenore returned and said, “Maybe someone needs the secret language of one animal to speak. Maybe someone needs to channel the power of a tiger to survive. Maybe someone needs the bark of a tree to make the painkiller that works. Maybe someone needs the beauty of a tree frog to live. Or the medicine from the rosy periwinkle.”

  We edited to a picture of the rosy periwinkle as Sarah’s voice continued. Karim showed me how to make it look like a camera was traveling over the picture. He called it “pan and scan.” Movement added to the suspense here, as if we were exploring the flower as Frog X talked about it.

  “This is the rosy periwinkle. It is endangered. It is small and easy to miss. It only grows in Madagascar. The medicine made from the rosy periwinkle has increased the survival rate of infant leukemia by eighty percent. The rosy periwinkle is rare and endangered. We could have lost it, but because we found it, we have created the medicine that helped eighty percent more babies survive leukemia. We don’t know what we need to survive.”