A Street Car named Desire

A few days ago I was at home alone (which is rare) and I turned on TCM. This is one of my favorite channels I love the old classic movies. I guess because back in the fourties and fifties actors were really actors not simply bobble heads saying lines that have no meaning. I saw A Street car named Desire was coming on so I popped some pop corn turned off the lights and settled in front of the TV. Now I'm not a big Brando fan but I love Vivien Leigh because of her hellava acting in Gone with the Wind another one of my favorite movies. Anyway I digress and that is one thing you will see often in this blog. At first I couldn't get into the movie but as I watched it I became morbidly facinated because some how I felt a compassion with Blanche the character Ms. Leigh played. I mean here she was an aging southern beauty living with her married pregnant sister. She was lost. The world as she'd known it as a beautiful, sought after southern belle had vanished along with her family and the family home. All she had left was her sister and her husband (Brando). She's tried to support herself as a teacher  but there was a restlessness about her after the death of her young husband. She was lost in a world that no longer bowed at her beauty and class, her grace and manners mattered not. This was a new world in which she couldn't quite find her way. Then to add humiliation and disgrace she finds her sister Stella has married a classless, unmannered, loud talking but good looking in an animailistic sort of way man named Stanley. When I saw Brando take off his shirt in the first fifteen minuetes of the movie I was determined to stay up and watch it to the end.
I became enraptured as Blanche when he slowly pulled his sweaty shirt over his head to change into a fresh one. I saw the lust in her eyes in one second and then the shame in them the next. She knew Stan was a monster by the way he treated Stella but she would soon find out monster was to good of a word for him after she was driven into the madness she was pushed into by Stanley.
I related to her character because the world as I knew it is slowly fading away. A world and time of children playing outside and people speaking to you when they see you. A world where neighbors chatted easily and people got together just to talk and dance and laughed. They really enjoyed being together. Children knew their places and didn't feel they had the right to intterupt an adult talking. You didn't have to watch your children like a hawk they were free to go play with the kids down the street and you knew they were coming back home. Going out to dinner was never interupted by a ring tone from a cell phone.
Change is good Blanche knew that because she tried to change her life by starting a new realtionship but she went about it the wrong way without disclosing some things she'd done in her past. When Stanley found out that she'd had alot of lovers he couldn't wait to spread the news. He wanted everyone to know she was actually lower than him. He couldn't stand her pretenses of bing a southern belle and of having wealth and class he couldn't never attain so therefore in order to make himself feel better about marrying a woman who's station in life was above his he demeaned her sister. 
This movie had me thinking about my life in so many ways...the past...starting anew...aging...class status and madness.