The Tornado

Here are some work in progress still shots from the movie I'm in charge of this month at job-job.

Lately I've been feeling like we're becoming the 'opposite of racist' in the movies we provide--whatever that is. It's just that tons of our films feature African Americans or Latin and Spanish people. We hardly ever make a movie about a white person. I've been exasperated by it, in that I think it's getting strange that we're not representing a true melting pot. So when my schedule docked on Wilma Rudolph I rolled my eyes. Then I had to start researching her. I'm awe inspired. She rocks so hard. I love when my job teaches me new things. Wilma Rudolph was one of those people who shouldn't have succeeded. She was born premature, weighing only four and a half pounds. She was the twentieth of twenty-two kids! In the first few years of her life, Wilma's mother nursed Wilma through scarlet fever, mumps, measles and double pneumonia.

Wilma contracted Polio. Hospitals were segregated and she almost died multiple times, submitted to the kind of medical help you can imagine a poor little black girl in the South in the 1950s would receive. She had a Forest Gump kind of brace on her leg until she was twelve!

I loved the stories I read about her mother who would not give up. Determined to beat the odds, her mom packed Wilma up. They traveled fifty miles twice a week to get Wilma to physical therapy in the only place that would treat her. Her entire family worked round the clock helping Wilma do strengthening exercises, nursing her to health.

Look her up. She died so young. but in her short lifetime she shattered boundaries. She wrote her own biography. She consulted on the movie made about her life. She won so many awards. If you Google her you'll find multiple accounts saying she changed the world. Talented enough to brake through the time's preconceived notions about race and gender she changed the way the world measures the value of a person.

In 1960 she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympic games.
Ooh and she was sooo so fast.

Watch her run. She'll blow your mind.