Plus works by Ilene Segalove and Cecilia Condit
In Ilene Segalove's My Puberty (1987, 10:45 mins), an eleven-year-old girl is befuddled by hormones which send her off on a new path towards dating, vanity, and the lingerie department. Segalove's trademark wit, peppered with a modicum of mockery, guides us through the first inklings of pubescence, its fear and clothing. The first signs of middle-age rear their ugly wrinkles in Vanalyne Green's elliptical narrative, What Happens To You? (1991, 37:42 mins). Martha, a forty-year-old fugitive from the love generation, spends a rueful day in front of her TV, doing aerobics to Jane Fonda. Radical only in her complete effacement of the late Hanoi Jane, Fonda becomes the emblem of Martha's disillusionment, while both women fight off the ravages of change-a true body politic. Green's sly story is an enthralling exercise in frustration. Cecilia Condit's macabre tale, Not a Jealous Bone (1987, 11 mins), is about an elderly woman who finds a bone that promises her eternal life. When a younger woman learns of this magical shard, she wants it for herself. Combining fairy tale and fact along with musical numbers, this unsettling tape dares to side with the aged. That the old are the emblems of our inevitable death is a wrongful perception the young live with.