Recently, with my daughter and two grand-daughters, I watched Mary Poppins make her gracious, technicolor return to the disheveled, precarious lives of the Banks family. Michael Banks is now grown-up and recently widowed, with three little kids of his own. Sister Jane is a labor organizer. Short on ready cash, the siblings are about to lose their childhood home to a money-hungry banker. Enter Mary Poppins, bringing stability and compassion to a world that seems to have lost both. A perfect heroine for our uncivil times, she tells the children “Anything is possible,” as she leads them into alternative realities - a circus painted on broken crockery, vast oceans accessible from bathtubs, and, holding balloons, up, up and away from the damaged earth below. And as I was transported like a kid from one fantasy world to another, I suddenly found myself thinking about - of all people - newly re-elected Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
Okay, work with me here. Both women are seemingly ageless, and come across as wise, stylish, pragmatic, and maternal as they take on entrenched, mostly male adversaries. Sadly, Pelosi is no magician, but she, too, has male friends and allies – even if New York Sen. Chuck Schumer can’t leap as nimbly to the top of his desk as the 91-year old Dick Van Dyke does in the movie. But Schumer may have to do a bit of tap dancing this Congressional session.
Back to the movie: in order to save the Banks house, slated for foreclosure, a team of gas lamplighters, led by Lin-Manuel Miranda, of Hamilton fame, builds a tower of ladders so Miranda can push the clock hand back by five minutes - giving Michael Banks precious time to resolve his fiscal crisis. But – spoiler here - the men can’t quite reach the clock face, so Mary Poppins opens her umbrella and floats skyward to calmly move the big hand backwards.
Now maybe this encouraged some wishful thinking on my part, but I found myself imagining how we – ok, especially we women - might, with Poppins-like grit and grace, buy some time to secure a better future.
And on a raw wintery day, that thought warmed me right up.
