[A man in his late thirties. The liberal type, dressed casually and with messy hair. Something about him screams intellectual.]

“My grandfather was an old Hollywood screenwriter back in the forties. He only has two or three credits to his name on obscure films… To be honest, I used to think he had had a mediocre career and that he had retired early.

Later on, I learned he was also a member of the communist party, and that his political views had landed him on Hollywood’s blacklist…

Unable to get work as a screenwriter, he took any film-related job to make ends meet; production assistant, gaffer, grip… even as an extra.

According to my father, he once got a background gig in a big Hollywood production, a romantic drama, set in the Russian Revolution.  Anti-communist propaganda of that time…

My grandfather had no idea what the scene was about but, still, he put on his proletarian costume and showed up on a set that looked like a muscovite street, along another hundred extras.

There, this assistant to the director instructs them to parade down the fake street singing The International, you know, the United Worker’s hymn.

The song was banned in the US back then, so instead of teaching them the lyrics, the assistant just hummed the melody a couple of times for the extras to memorize it.

And so, when the director called “action”, all the extras began to hum the song, more or less successfully… All of them except my grandfather. He shouted it from the top of his lungs, enunciating every single word.

I like to picture him with a Cheshire grin, tickled by the irony of getting paid for something he had been banned from doing and being in real life.

It probably was the biggest victory of his life…

I’m sure he’d tell the story better himself.

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 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016