Today In B'Days

Sidney Poitier is 81. Damn!

Me love Sidney. I talked about my huge crush on him and how I used to sneak down the hall at The Studio That Will Henceforth Remain Unnamed (TWHRU) to see him here. His daughter, also named Sidney, is an actor too, but after seeing her perfomance in "Grindhouse", I use that term very loosely.

Where do I start? He is a legend in every single sense of the word. From the early days of playing a Moor in 'The Long Ships" with Richard Widmark, to "To Sir With Love" to his being the first black man to win an Oscar for "Lilies Of The Field" with a bunch of nuns, to "Guess Who's' Coming to Dinner" and "A Patch Of Blue" showing some of the very first onscreen interracial relationships, to "In The Heat Of The Night", which I believe is the first film showing a black man laying the smack down on YT, to "Buck and The Preacher" which he starred in and directed, to the movies he starred in with Bill Cosby--"Uptown Saturday Night" being my favorite.

You get the idea.

Here is a clip from the classic "Porgy And Bess" that he starred in with the late Dorothy Dandridge, who oddly looks a bit like Kerry Washington in this film. This was what spawned the jazz classic "Summertime". I saw this when I was a very little girl with my father on TV, and was confused about so many things; why was Sidney with no legs on a push-cart? Why were they so poor? Why did everyone seem so fearful? How could Dorothy love a man that had no legs? But I remember feeling the raw power of their blackness after all these years, and that power came from Black Love. Check it: