When Priscilla Wagner first steps onto the plush carpeting of Graceland, wearing mod kitten heels and her silky hair in a delicate ponytail, Elvis Presley easily hoists her into a twirling hug, before directing her upstairs to his bedroom—away from a grown-ups’ party in the living room. It’s an unnamed woman in said group who voices what we’re all thinking upon seeing shy, five-foot Priscilla in Elvis’ Memphis mansion: “Well … She’s like a little girl.”
She was. The real-life Priscilla—embodied by actress Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla, the new film written and directed by Sofia Coppola—visited Memphis for the first time at 17 years old. Coppola’s story starts three years before then, when Priscilla and Elvis meet at a party in West Germany where both were stationed with the military (Priscilla with her Texan family, Elvis serving with an armored tank unit). She was 14. He was 24. The famed couple’s ten-year age gap has gone mostly unacknowledged in the general Elvis narrative, including director Baz Luhrmman’s hit film Elvis, which premiered last year. That film, which earned its star Austin Butler an Academy Award nomination, largely glossed over Elvis’ marriage. Coppola, in contrast, has placed Priscilla’s girlhood at the center of her movie. Her plot begins with ninth-grade Priscilla and follows her through first love, obsession, disappointment, pain and release. While Elvis ruminated on “the King’s” talent and vulnerability in the face of insidious management and fame, Priscilla brings the spotlight to, arguably, his own victim: the young woman who occupied his shadow. Coppola’s Priscilla comes 17 years after Marie Antoinette, the director’s sweet and sharp characterization of another young woman married off to a king. The director has established herself as a filmmaker attentive to female stories—often beautiful women and girls who are understood perfectly by themselves and their ‘sisters’ but mysterious to or unacknowledged by men in their periphery (as the virgins of The Virgin Suicides or the matriarch of The Beguiled). Priscilla Presley, a girl brought into the public fold only to privately suffer, was a perfect outline for Coppola to fill. Spaeny’s Priscilla is gorgeous and convincingly teenaged. Her dead-eyed, nervous demeanor at the film’s opening is almost too potent to bear, and while Elvis praises her old soul, we giggle as she whines to strict parents at home, “Please don’t ruin my life.” Jacob Elordi, of Euphoria fame, is a functional Elvis. He plays Priscilla’s love interest with run-of-the-mill dumbness. He’s big. His Tennessee accent is correct. He exhibits no musical talent because the script does not call for it. (The movie’s soundtrack contains no Elvis.) Overall, Coppola’s film does little to remind you who Elvis actually is—a world-famous musician—and everything to establish him as, simply, a man. Scenes featuring Priscilla and Elvis are often darkly lit and quiet: He’s boring her by reading hippie philosophy aloud; she’s asking him on the phone when he might come home and being told he needs a woman who won’t complain about that sort of thing; he’s telling her, heavily pregnant, that he thinks they should take a break. But these bad-romance scenes are broken up by several sun-soaked, slow-motion vignettes of Elvis and his guy friends roughhousing—at the roller rink, in the yard—exhibiting a carefree boyness that draws attention to just how little fun is to be had by Priscilla, the actual kid in the picture. While Elvis stays the same, Priscilla’s maturation is measured in hair dye, makeup and the developing resolve of a wife who no longer believes in her husband. In an hour and 50 minutes, Priscilla tells the story of a girl who fell in love and got trapped in the hole. While its plot is engaging, the ending is abrupt, and I don’t remember any special visual or sonic entrancement, which should be required for a film whose plot is pre-written by history and therefore unoriginal. But where Coppola failed to make stylistically unique cinema, she succeeded in developing a convincing heroine. And particularly during the film’s last twenty minutes, one feels some secondhand pride in imagining that the real Priscilla, dead not a year, has finally said her peace. Her release is the reason Priscilla sticks around in the mind, like a layer of hairspray on the wedding bouffant.
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When he began a career in commercial real estate almost two decades ago, Elli Klapper and his father had a talk. They come from a family of modern Orthodox Jews, but Klapper’s dad urged his son not to wear a yarmulke to the office. The elder Klapper, who worked for the city of New York, worried that wearing a yarmulke could hurt his son's career, causing him to become a target of discrimination.
Klapper decided to wear it anyway. “I said, ‘Abba, that was your generation,’” recalls Klapper, who was raised in Queens and now works with investment properties in Teaneck, New Jersey. “We don't have these problems that you did.’ And I was wrong. I was wrong.” Now, 18 years later, he understands where his father was coming from. Klapper says he constantly experiences antisemitism in his business. He can’t quantify the number of times he’s been told to stop “jewing” people down when negotiating. Recently, he brought a real estate client to view a large property owned by an Orthodox Jew. At the end of the meeting, in the company of Klapper and four other people, the client asked a question. “He said, ‘So, if I want to buy a piece of real estate here, I'm going to have to deal with Jews, right?’ I didn't understand what he meant,” Klapper says. “I’m like, ‘Uh, I don't—these are really good guys—we could try to cut a deal.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, but, you know, is there any way I don't have to deal with any Jews?’” I used to pay four hundred and ninety dollars per month in rent.
I used to pay four hundred and ninety dollars per month in rent, for an apartment with crown molding, hardwood floors, a kitchen, dining room, living room, three bedrooms, and two porches, in a lush neighborhood thirty minutes from downtown Chicago. This is bragging. It’s also a reminder of how one can live if one does not live in New York City. But chiefly, I say all that so you can form an image in your mind of apartment 3E’s charms—like its ample sunlight, tall ceilings, and built-in, stained glass hutch from the 1920s—so you will understand why we stayed there, in spite of everything else. Sonya Evariste can relate to the student-parents she meets at LaGuardia Community College: When she was an undergraduate at York College, she had a 3-year-old daughter.
“It really was a challenge, and back then I had to do what I had to do with very little resources and no childcare available on campus,” Evariste said. “I vowed that if I ever had the opportunity to make that change for students, that would definitely be a goal for me.” This month, LaGuardia’s Early Childhood Learning Center expanded its programming to provide education and childcare for children as young as 6 months. Previously, the minimum age was 1 year old. Citizens rail against unmasked subway riders and likely fare increase at MTA board meeting11/30/2022 Public speakers at the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Wednesday morning board meeting advocated for a reinstated mask mandate on public transit, complained of disorder on trains and opposed fare increases.
Speaker Joe Rappaport approached the podium holding a photo of a coronavirus cell attached to a popsicle stick in front of his face. “I’m the coronavirus,” Rappaport said. “ It was just Thanksgiving, and here's what I'm thankful for: people not wearing masks in crowded rooms, on subway cars, commuter trains, buses, Access-A-Ride. That's fantastic for me." The town of Atlanta lies in the center of Illinois, halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. So, when the city council was faced with the task of repainting the local water tower, there was a choice to make: Cubs or Cardinals.
Fans of each team campaigned for their emblem to grace the tower. Bill Thomas, chairman of the board of the National Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership, recalls the remedy to the dispute. “There wasn’t going to be an easy resolution,” Thomas said. “So at one of the council meetings, a councilwoman named Billie Cheek, offhandedly, to throw out something completely different, said, ‘Well I think it should just be a smiley face. That would make everybody happy.’” At Valentine Station in Valentine, Arizona, owner Ruben Rodarte is used to the noise of passing vehicles driving down Route 66. He can usually tell what’s coming his way by the sound: cars, trucks, semis. Every so often, though, the noise isn’t placeable.
“So you know when something different is coming,” Rodarte said. “Maybe. Like, ‘look up.’ And it’s amazing to see, whether it’s a group of lamborghinis, or a circus train, or just a weird vehicle, or something. I mean, stuff you can’t even describe. Like, ‘What the hell did I just see?’ And I have to run it back on the security camera. ‘Yeah that was something that looked like a rocket going down the road, I’m not crazy.’” From his post at the station, where he lives, Rodarte has seen travelers walking, running, pushing a stroller, in horse-drawn buggies, pushing a shopping cart and carrying full-sized crosses. |