For anyone who hasn't seen The Shawshank Redemption, I can from my heart recommend this movie from WAY BACK---I can remember my own modest Mother, whose work ethic was strict and of high resolve, one day when she had gone to lunch and failed to return at her usual five-minutes-to-One to take over so I could go home. She called to say that she had settled in the den at noon with a sandwich and glass of tea, happened upon the first few moments of the movie, and just HAD to see "how it came out."
If you have not experienced this wonderful movie with its perfect cast and gifted actors, plus the absolutely sublime Stephen King writing---DO look it up.
In one of the brightest spots in a grim-spotted movie, of prison and of gray and of the beating-down of the humanity within, there are incandescent moments of LIGHT so bright they feed your soul. My favorite is when Andy Dufresne, convicted of murders he did not commit, had been given the task of administering the prison library.
He took on the small, dim space, with its creaky book-cart of handworn, many-times-read books and its dusty corners, and by writing to organizations and pestering the state legislature with something like a letter-a-week requesting funding, he was finally sent a few boxes of used books and records.
On one particular day, the guard stepped out for a moment, and Andy took out a big old slick black record from its worn sleeve, set it on the turntable, started it playing, and turned on the intercom/public address system for the whole prison---house and yard.
The men elbow-deep in hot laundry suds stopped their labor; the kitchen cooks and the machine shop grease-monkeys and the floor-moppers and the guards all looked up in wonderment as those silvery notes floated out over the gray walls and bare-trodden yard, as if they were seeing the very angels in the air who voiced the melody.
And Red, who was Andy's best friend---a pragmatic old lifer played by Morgan Freeman (imagine that rich, honey-syrup voice narrating the words), says:
"I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it.
I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was as if some beautiful bird had flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free."
