The Journalist and Mark Mimmel’s Niece
When love burns it's still love.
The film is about a renowned music conservatory, about the miracle of its conception. Critics lambasted it for certain casting decisions but praised its telling of the story of late founder Mark Mimmel. One journalist gets in contact with Mark Mimmel's niece for comment. The niece tells the journalist she never liked Mark, and that the film did a good job validating that. "You know I attended the conservatory for a while," the niece says to the journalist at a cafe downtown. The niece is having a martini and the journalist a Diet Coke. This cafe is too noisy for the journalist but he doesn't say so because this is Mark Mimmel's niece. "I couldn't stand it," she continues. "All those kids stumbling down the hall with instruments strapped to their backs. The singers wouldn't talk to you, they were saving their voice. I was kicked out for breaking the fire hydrant. I must've broken it, oh, ten times or so — I'd hoped the place would catch fire, and there'd be no water to put it out."
The journalist isn't sure what to say to this, but it's Mark Mimmel's niece and he can't just be silent. "I've just gotten a divorce."
"That's terrible," says the niece. "Really. I'm sorry to hear that. A well-respected journalist like you? Are you well-respected? It's a bit overrated. Mark was well-respected. That's where his anger came from."
Under the pretense of further discussing Mark Mimmel, the journalist and Mark Mimmel's niece spend many more evenings together. "You should know I'm not a stereotype," says the niece. She tells him stories about her time at the conservatory. She admits to a lifelong fixation with burning. (Not arson; arson is about property. Being the niece of Mark Mimmel means she has had property all her life and so knows little about it, and therefore cares not at all.) Her fixation, as a teenager, led to an argument with an English teacher at the conservatory with whom she was having an inappropriate relationship. She'd been trying to explain to him the resilience of beauty. She said that when something pretty burns it's no longer pretty and when something funny burns it's no longer funny, but when something beautiful burns, it's still beautiful.
She'd said: Take books, for example. Books are beautiful. Even when you burn them they're beautiful.
Don't say that, the English teacher had said. You'll ruin my life if I allow it, won't you?
"It was a malignant beauty," says the niece to the journalist, "The beauty of deep, scarring grief that I was referring to. But this is beside the point. You do that to me, you know. I start to say something to you and then I want to say ten other things. Is that because you're a journalist?"
"Good looks," he suggests.
"The point is, it's the same with love. When love burns it's still love. Which answers the question, doesn't it? About love?"
The journalist thinks he knows the question but doesn't want to make assumptions. Mark Mimmel was famously philosophical and whether by blood or osmosis his niece seems to share this trait. What the journalist doesn't want is for her to think that he understands her so well that she must be unoriginal.
"About love?" he repeats.
"I know you've just gotten a divorce, but there are some things you need to better understand."
The journalist convinces Mark Mimmel's niece to take him on a tour of the conservatory.
She wears a wide-brimmed hat and dark sunglasses. The journalist is bald with an excellent shine. Because it's the weekend, the conservatory is quiet. Right away, the journalist gets the sense that all the music and all the noises are not absent but merely suspended. "Uncle Mark never let me take a dance class," says the niece. "He said it was like going to medical school to become a lawyer." She takes him to the dance room. They hold hands and spin. The journalist hasn't spun around in a long time. It reminds him of something he'd like to forget.
Mark Mimmel's niece takes him to the performing arts theater, which is nearly the size of the Gershwin. "Come, let's get into character," she says.
They act out dramatic, bitter scenes from imagined but suspiciously familiar stories, not always responding to each other but to ghosts gifted to them by the theater. Onstage, they perform two lives that intertwine by accident of proximity. It's not altogether unlike the film, though carried out by actors who don't know how to safeguard themselves, bodies that don't know they may as well be in a dream. There is a collision, and the journalist and Mark Mimmel's niece fall to the ground. They laugh and then kiss and then the niece begins to cry. She reminds him that she's not a stereotype.
"I know," says the journalist.
Outside, they find the fire hydrant. It's a sunny day. Mark Mimmel's niece puts a hand on the hydrant. "Hot," she declares.
"After all the times you broke it," says the journalist, "It'd be a miracle if it still works."
"That's the thing about miracles," says the niece. "Didn't you watch the film?"
Dakota Lee Smith is a writer in Brooklyn writing, mostly, in Brooklyn.
