SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SERLING AT THE BUNDY

THIS MONTH AT THE BUNDY MUSEUM

The Bundy “Seeds Beneath The Snow” series continues. Each showing will start at 6:30pm and will take place in the Bundy Annex Theatre behind the museum. Free Admission and refreshments.

-IRWIN AND FRAN (April 14) The 2014 documentary is a portrait of “Professor” Irwin Corey, a stand-up comedian now in his 90s who was blacklisted for his political leanings and more or less faded into obscurity. Title withstanding, his wife Fran is a sideline character. Susan Sarandon, a longtime friend of Irwin’s, narrates the film. The documentary’s home-movie style of filming didn’t lend itself much to commercial success, but it provides insight into a lost link in the history of stand-up, as well as on the effects of being politically opinionated and in the public eye in one’s career.

-A DAY'S WORK (April 29) A smartly composed 2012 documentary, A Day’s Work examines the nature of the growing trend of temp work and the dangers that face some temporary workers. At the center of the documentary is the story of one individual temp worker, Lawrence Daquan Davis. Nicknamed Day, he was killed on his first day on the job at a Bacardi bottling plant in Jacksonville, Florida, where he was put to work with only a 15 minute training session, amidst a host of safety violations. Because he was hired by a staffing agency, the company took the stance that his death was not its responsibility, as he was not one of their employees. Much of what we learn about Day comes from his family members, counterbalancing a cold legal issue with the emotional reality of the loss of a man.

-IN THE ZONE: ROD SERLING'S TIME TRAVEL REVISITED (April 16) The Rod Serling Archive at the Bundy will deliver a night of Twilight Zone episodes about time travel. Rod Serling dove into time travel from the get-go. The first episode screened will be the one-hour pilot, “The Time Element,” about a man named Peter Jenson who goes to a psychoanalyst to explain a recurring dream in which he wakes up in Honolulu, Hawaii, just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, he believes that it is not a dream, but that he is actually time travelling. Following the one-hour pilot is the episode “Walking Distance,” thing Binghamton favorite in which a man, finding that his car has broken down just miles away from his childhood neighborhood, decides to take a walk down memory lane, only to find his old town exactly as he remembered it (Binghamton’s Rec Park carousel, where Serling played as a kid, has a major role, too!) Doors open at 6pm, with the show starting at 6:30pm.

The Bundy Museum is located at 127-129 Main St. in Binghamton. More info at bundymuseum.org.