An Inconvenient Truth

I took my son, his girlfriend and her mother (who is blind) to see "An Inconvenient Truth" this evening. I've never accompanied a blind person before, it was interesting to say the least.

First off, in the subway where normally everyone ignores everyone else (we are in Berlin, you know), I was suddenly aware of being the center of attention - everyone was staring at us. No wonder the teenage girl hates going places with her mom. I didn't tell the mother, at least she can't see this.

She is very handy with her white cane, and explained to me how she holds the cane just so, so that she knows when the stairs are finished. She really moves with grace, although she can't see where she is going!

In the theater we sat on the sidelines, because I was expecting to explain a lot of the pictures to her. The theater was maybe a quarter full, if that, and this is the first Friday the film is playing in German. An inconvenient truth indeed.

What a lovely film - Al Gore as narrator explains all the the things he is showing in excrutiating detail. I very seldom had to read any pictures aloud. The mother was very happy, even though she was quite aware of all of the details, it was great to go to a speech and have them presented to you. Gore even reads most of the charts he presents, so he gets an A+ for accessability.

Of course, Gore burned a lot of fossil fuels getting to the places he was giving talks, lots of pictures of him getting on and off airplanes, and the film crew flew around a lot making all those nice pictures of icebergs calving and such.

At the end the credits are interspersed with suggestions on what you can do to stop global warming. As the mom said: we pretty much do all that (although I do drive my car more than I should). But when they got to "if you don't like the politicians, run for office" she said: "you know, I might just do that when my girl is out of the house!" If she does, watch out world, she has quite a mind for figures!

They came over to our place, the mom wanted to feel our apartment. We usually joke about the "50 cent tour" we give to guests, this was quite a different tour. She squatted down to feel all of the floor coverings, touched all the furnishings to get an impression of the place, and sat right down when she found the piano, playing a concerto! Her daughter was, of course, embarrassed and left the room, but it was amazing, she does not have a piano at home, she was playing this from memory from many, many years ago.

She loved the bathroom with the big tub, the Ficus benjamina that is taller than we are, and the spiral staircase. She even ventured into the teenager's lair (he hurridly kicked all the stuff from the floor under his desk and his sofa) and climbed the ladder to his loft bed. She was surprised at how high our ceilings are (3,60 m). I was surprised at how fast she climbed the stairs and got back down again!

The film is great and should be force fed to teenagers around the world (mine turned the heat up in the bathroom the day before yesterday to take a bath, I didn't discover until today when I found it uncommonly hot in the morning that it was on full blast, for 2 days now....). And to politicians, they MUST wake up and take action on this, or their beach houses will soon be under 6 feet of water.