Cinematic Debut: The Drama

The Puzzle

I love movies. Many kinds of movies. 

I have no idea how many I have seen or how many theaters I have been to, but I remember very well my first visit to a theater. I think of it fairly often, most recently when the film was featured in the NYT online game Strands. 

Don't worry: I waited a couple of days before posting this screenshot from the game. As always, the puzzle has a theme, several scrambled words in blue and one Spanagram -- a scrambled word that stretches from side to side or top to bottom and summarizes the rest. 

Back to that early cinematic experience. It was 1967, Falls Church Virginia. Young Jim and Jackie Bohanan -- barely 24 themselves -- trundled their young Baby Jimmy and younger Bobby (as James and Bob were known back then) off to the local Plex (the Multiplex had not yet been invented).

There was probably popcorn -- we did not have a lavish lifestyle, but if there was a celebratory occasion, Jim and Jackie were all in. The theater darkened. The audience hushed. A tale began on the big screen -- music, wiggling pig butts, and mild peril -- all in a classic parable extolling the Protestant Work Ethic. 

And there I was: Baby Jimmy, not knowing how this would end and increasingly worried about the pigs and indignant about the behavior of Big Bad. Eventually, I could not contain myself any more. In the dark quiet of the theater -- in my best social-justice warrior voice, I blurted out:

"YOU LEAVE THOSE PIGS ALONE!"

Our parents, mortified, quickly quieted me down. Decades later, my dad did say that this is where my concern for social justice started. But in that moment, I imagine that their main thought was how quickly they could get me to quiet down -- we are not a people given to public drama. 

The Work

When I contemplated this post, I was working with two misconceptions. One is that I thought we were seeing this film in its original run. It was, in fact, made a decade before my parents were born and more than three decades before our family outing. 

The other is that I would want to include a movie trailer. Since the entire movie is less than nine minutes long, it is easy to find the entire piece on YouTube:

I am sure we did not venture out for this alone. I cannot remember what else we saw at that time, but Disney's Jungle Book might have been the feature. It was released in 1967 and has a run time of 1h18m, so I think Los Tres Cerditos might have been the opening short.

Sustainability @ Cloverfield

 We were grateful that our colleague John Winters asked to include us in our university's efforts to share good news stories as we came gradually out of the Covid-19 isolation. His profile about our home and our sustainability efforts was generously entitled Leading by Example. The title as John originally submitted it was even better: 

Natural Devotion

Leading by example to teach young people about the environment and their part in it

I am taking the liberty of including the full text below, in case the article ever disappears from the university web site. 

Photo: Ashley McCabe

Leading By Example

Through their professional and personal choices, professor and
librarian seek to raise students’ awareness of
the environment around them

By John Winters, G’11 | April 5, 2021

For James and Pamela Hayes-Bohanan, sustainability is something they live every day. In fact, their Maple Avenue home, which abuts the west side of campus behind the Harrington Hall parking lot, is itself a model of sustainability.

Not only does its proximity to campus mean the couple never needs to drive to work, the 0.31-acre yard is listed as a World Wildlife Fund-designated backyard habitat. Solar panels, a bat box and many other elements promote sustainability and reduce the family’s carbon footprint.

While visiting Gray’s Daily Grind in Westport with Dr. Hayes-Bohanan’s Coffee Week class, BSU students (from left) Susie Beckwith; Olga Lindsey, ’17; and Karen Ormaza, ’16, get hands-on experience milling corn meal from locally sourced corn at the adjacent Gray’s Grist Mill with guidance from mill operator George Whitley.

“I can stand in the yard and talk about this for an hour,” said Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan, a professor in the Department of Geography who’s been full time at Bridgewater State University since 1997. “The fact that it’s so close to campus gives me a chance to share it and show it to students.”

Pamela Hayes-Bohanan is a librarian and adjunct Spanish professor, who began her career at Bridgewater State on a part-time basis the same year her husband arrived, and became a full-time employee in 2002. Both have been committed to environmental causes for much of their 34 years of marriage. It manifests not only in their home, but also in the activities they pursue, in both their professional and personal lives.

BSU students Ariana Barbosa, ’17, (left) and
Eve Vernet, ’19, hold baskets from a
coffee harvest while in Nicaragua.

“We are both passionate about it,” Ms. Hayes-Bohanan said. “It informs a lot of things we do.” Their home, she added, is “where our work and personal lives converge.”

The couple has been involved with BSU’s Sustainability Program since its founding, and regularly include in their lesson plans sustainability, environmentalism and social justice. Ms. Hayes-Bohanan taught the course “Sustainability 101” on two occasions. Even when teaching a Spanish class, she manages to work in these subjects that are near to her heart

Pamela Hayes-Bohanan joins librarian and teacher Jacoba Cantarero
and a young girl named Paola in the library at the high school
in La Corona, Nicaragua, during a BSU study tour.

A longtime area of interest and scholarship for Dr. Hayes- Bohanan is coffee. His doctoral program focused in large part on Latin American studies. Two years after he arrived at BSU, someone introduced him to a coffee buyer from Equal Exchange, a global cooperative in West Bridgewater, and his interest on the topic of coffee grew.

“That changed everything, and I began to see coffee as something that was at the intersection of environmental and Latin American studies,” he said.

Of surprise to him was that coffee growers in Latin America get only one percent of what Americans pay for coffee. He’s working to bring awareness to this inequity and hopes to one day help change it. “Treating farmers and the land better means you get better coffee,” he said, not to mention it speaks to the idea of social sustainability.

For years, Dr. Hayes-Bohanan has taken study tours to Nicaragua to visit and work on coffee farms. For many of his students, it’s a highlight of their time at BSU.

As part of one of Dr. Hayes-Bohanan’s study tours in Nicaragua, BSU students and alumni learn about the process of sorting and drying coffee at the La Corona home of the Rayo-Granado family. Also looking on is local guide Freddy Membreño (second from right), who has assisted Dr. Hayes-Bohanan on several of his tours.

Ms. Hayes-Bohanan has joined her husband on several of these trips.

Emblematic of her commitment to the environment is an apple tree outside the entrance of the library. Not wanting to see it neglected, as the apples were high in the branches, she decided she would make it easier for the campus community to enjoy its fruit. A professor friend had the idea to get an apple picker. Ms. Hayes-Bohanan made it happen. “Now there are two apple pickers in the library, and they’re in the catalog,” she said.

While in Costa Rica on a study tour, Nahthan Paul, ’20; Christen Couture, ’20; and Ally Osborne, ’20, (from front) are headed to an overnight stay in an indigenous Bribri community in the Costa Rica/Panama border area. The pilot of the boat is a member of the Bribri community.

Her professional philosophy on sustainability as a veteran librarian is a holistic one. “All the work I do I see as a piece of the puzzle,” she said. “Libraries are the original resource-sharing place. You don’t have to buy more books and use more paper. We have it all here.”

The couple’s commitment has influenced many of the students they’ve taught over the years to be more conscious of the environment and sustainability. A good number have followed in their footsteps (two are featured in these pages). It’s proof that one of the most effective ways to teach is by good example.

“Something we say all the time,” Ms. Hayes-Bohanan said, “is everything is connected to everything else.”

Lagniappe

We are up to 45 minutes of proverbial fame because of profiles in two other outlets. First was the 2013 Early Lean Years story in the New York Times (yes, the paper of record). Next was the Bridgewater Couple Visits story by Brockton Enterprise journalist Sara Cline. The photo below is by local photojournalist MarcVasconcellos. I have lifted his marvelous fish-eye view of our Bridgewater-history hallway. Most of those items are now in the Special Collections archives at the BSU Maxwell Library. 

And finally, even as we leave our Bridgewater home, we continue our interest in knowing all the Bridgewaters.