Vox Populi
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Joan E. Bauer: Lovers and Other Strangers
(1 h 44 min USA 1970)
My mother loved this movie & she’d laugh,
repeating her favorite line:
So, what’s the story, Richie?
Dinnertime in a working-class Italian home.
As one son hesitates to marry, the other tells
his parents he wants to get divorced.
The Old World parents (Richard Castellano
& Bea Arthur) are shocked & adamant.
Why would anyone ever divorce?
Not sure why my mother laughed so hard.
Did she think about her own Italian family?
Had they tried to pry ‘the story’ out of her?
Just saw Lovers again & I remember
how that movie in the Seventies worried me.
Why should anyone marry?
I was hesitant, even set conditions:
Last-minute wine for courage.
Flowered blue peasant dress, few attendees.
Such unearned luck that I married at all.
I remember the undertow when Castellano,
the father, talks about marriage—
We’re all strangers. But after a while,
you get used to it. You become deeper
strangers. That’s a sort of love.
.
~~~
Copyright 2025 Joan E. Bauer
Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). She divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.
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I never saw the movie, perhaps because I was in the middle of a dysfunctional marriage. No movies, some TV. Somehow I never got back to watching TV. It sits there til grandchildren visit. Maybe I can figure it out and watch the 9 years worth of movies that remain in shadow.
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As a cinephile, I’ve learned there are only about 5 great movies produced each year, and the rest are forgettable. I love Joan’s poems about popular culture, but her poems are better than the movies she writes about.
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Some marriages are love with a proper stranger, a lifetime of revealing and exploring mysteries and secrets. Love’s job often well done.
Other marriages are like an improper fraction,
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I got lucky with Eva. She’s smart, talented, good-natured, hardworking, and a great mother to our children. She is also very supportive to me and my crazy projects — Vox Populi, for example.
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Pam and I were lucky in the same sort of way. It was the luck of a strong loving bond, that even her death has not broken.
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Same here. I’m deeply grateful.
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Deeper strangers will stay with me. The world is strange, as I experience it, and beautiful, and everything else. Are we ever fully known to each other? Deeper strangers, I might start calling my lover and friends that.
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Beautiful comment, Moudi. Thank you.
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A wonderful musing of life and the movies. It is pure Americana, our immigrant fabric so bound in our cultural identity, and this fine poet’s poetic fluency in portrayal of our rich and shared heritage. We must never let America stop being America!
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Well-said, Sean. Movies are our national myths, and Hollywood is our Olympus.
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