I was involved in a presentation to the Animation Guild Local 839 last Thursday night. Having been invited after its board steadfastly refused to endorse our efforts to stop the Long Term Care closure, I felt the warm breezes of acceptance and understanding from Guild president Kevin Koch. He graciously extended the invitation to both us and the MPTF scoundrels after many a shared e-mail and phone conversation.
We were to go on after Ken Scherer laid out the MPTF board's position. Ken is usually a great opening act for us. However, this time we were open to the Guild's idea of sharing the dais with the affable Mr. Scherer, but that was not to be.
The MPTF board once viewed us as merely a pimple on the backside of their plans to change the face of motion picture and television health care. The ground we have gained in inciting the industry against their nefarious plans to rid the MPTF of the most elderly and handicapped have now become a dermatologist's worst nightmare! The pimple has popped, and sanity now threatens to spread like Ebola-gone-wild, as we eat away at the board's resolute position to evict the elderly. They avoid us like the plague that
they are foisting on all of us.
So now we have become a force to be reckoned with, and I reckon that Ken Scherer's avoidance is the manifesto of the higher-ranking commandants of the fund. I've met Ken, and all things considered I might have liked him in another life had he taken a different route rather than the road he travels being the fund's hatchet man.
I arrived during Ken's presentation. Once in the Animation Guild's stark and sterile quarters, I crept upstairs to view the proceedings, and it looked more like a bar exam than a presentation that should pique the interest and chill the blood. Ken's droll delivery appeared to be bouncing off the animators like plastic rings at a carnival ring-toss booth that's fixed.
Our approach is a bit different and definitely more lively. We opted to be animated with these animators, and tell them the real story. Everyone enjoys a tale of good against evil, and we all but wear white hats when we lay out the facts and enlist souls to fight for the future of health care.
Our mission when we follow Ken is to mop up the conjecture, half-truths, and misleading statements that spell doom for the continuum of care at the Motion Picture Home. We were there in force that night, and even brought along John Sparey, a real animator residing at the Motion Picture Home. He was eloquent and convincing. Ken brought along Mark Fleischer, grandson to animation pioneer Max Fleischer.
I imagined John and the spirit of Max Fleischer up there alone on the dais -- maybe these two men could hammer out a solution via the creativity of a cartoonist vision that redefines reality, and embraces those who society would rather throw away.
