“You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.” ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
In my family tree I have (in no particular order) a partisan, a French gambling whiz who reportedly broke the bank at Monte Carlo and various circus folk - all of which appear very glamorous/fascinating in hindsight, but were probably serious trouble in their day! It is most definitely true that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, and generations of feuds (Cain and Abel, anyone?), embarrassments and hell raisers just go to show that’s not going to change in a hurry.
“You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.” ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
In my family tree I have (in no particular order) a partisan, a French gambling whiz who reportedly broke the bank at Monte Carlo and various circus folk - all of which appear very glamorous/fascinating in hindsight, but were probably serious trouble in their day! It is most definitely true that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, and generations of feuds (Cain and Abel, anyone?), embarrassments and hell raisers just go to show that’s not going to change in a hurry.
The advent of anonymous sperm donation has taken things even further, with stories swirling round for years about children seeking to meet their dads and vice versa where the reality has most certainly not lived up to the dream. I recently read about the work of Dr Mary Barton towards the end of World War Two - a woman who had been pioneering the artificial insemination using donor sperm of women whose husbands were impotent or infertile. Hers was one of only a handful of clinics in Britain offering the then highly controversial treatment, and she was eager to share the story of her successes with the wider world. She said at the time that 'in theory', just 0.01 cubic centimetres of sperm would be enough to get a woman pregnant. “It follows that a fecund donor submitting two specimens weekly could, with ideal conditions, produce 400 children weekly (that is 20,000 annually)”, she wrote in an article in the British Medical Journal, and her own clinic was proud of its own success stories. Years later it has come out that the so-called ‘Barton Brood’ all share the same donor father - his name was Bertold Wiesner, who just happened to have been Barton's husband to boot. Incredible though it sounds, it now seems highly likely that Wiesner fathered up to 1,000 children at his wife's clinic - with more emerging every year!
Which brings me to the topic of ‘Natural Selection’, an absolute treat of a wee indie film showing this month on Rialto Channel. It’s the tale of Linda (the fantastic Rachael Harris) and her husband, Abe (John Diehl), who have every reason to believe she cannot conceive a child. They share a fundamentalist Christian faith, but only Abe believes that sex with his wife would be a sin, because procreation is not a possibility - brilliant! This is definitely a lose-lose situation for poor Linda, but as a loyal wife, she goes along with his belief. Thus it comes as somewhat of a blow when Abe suffers a stroke at a sperm bank, where he has been gleefully spilling his seed for years.
When Abe then expresses a desire to meet one of the children from his years of sperm donation, she faithfully sets out cross-country to track down that child - with interesting results. Son Raymond (Matt O’Leary) is living a feral existence in a festering hovel that seems to have done time as a crack house, and he has no particular desire to meet his father. But Linda does have a car and wants to drive them both back to Houston, which is a potential godsend for a man who has just escaped from prison… enough said really, just get ready for a fun watch!
The film won the Grand Jury Prize, the Audience Award and five other prizes at the 2011 South by Southwest Film Festival and is definitely recommended, even if it’s just for Harris subtly nuanced performance alone.