Nowhere Else on this Planet
Cheryl Harris Sharman
January 1, 2000
I look at the ten people gathered in my living room and start doing the math—dividing us along every conceivable dotted line. Five Puerto Ricans, four African-Americans, two whites. Three families. Three married couples. Five kids, between nine and seventeen—two in private schools, three in public. The only common denominators are Christ, our residence in East (a.k.a. Spanish) Harlem, and the film Music of the Heart, which we've just seen together. The movie follows the real-life story of Roberta Guaspari, a white single mother played by Meryl Streep, from her first moments as a divorcée to her first concert at Carnegie Hall. After a bitter separation, Roberta takes her two young sons from bucolic New England to bustling New York, where she convinces an East Harlem school principal to hire her to teach the violin. Her success results in the formation of the competitive East Harlem Violin Program (still in existence today). Predictably, the dynamic program encounters funding problems, and violin virtuosos join the urban youths at Carnegie Hall in an effort to raise funds. My friends and I have just taken two taxis back to East Harlem from the theater on the Upper East Side (we don't have a theater in the neighborhood). On Third Avenue we crossed 96th Street, moving instantly from pale faces and polished exteriors to darker skin and decaying structures. The yellow cabs rolled past the all-night bodegas that were featured as drug hot-spots in the film and the mammoth federal housing projects that are the largest in the city. I had asked everyone not to discuss the film on the ride home—I wanted to save the conversation for when we were all together. After the cab rides, sitting in a circle while we wait for my ...
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