You can’t begin to fathom the guts she has to be shot at ten times by her fiancé, survive and then thrive by becoming an inspiration to young women who are facing similar violence.
You cannot even comprehend what to feel when an entire stadium is booing you, telling you to leave because your joke hit their raw indoctrinated nerve. She did and she has come out on top.
You cannot believe how much courage this young woman had to tell her mother that she was going to not call her for a while because she was trying to unlearn the racist philosophy that had been drilled into her for years…
I needed to keep my personal politics and mixed feelings aside before watching Hillary and Chelsea Clinton help us meet women who are changing our world, one community at a time. There are eight episodes of season one of Gutsy on AppleTV+ and I am so glad I watched the series (inspired by The Book of Gutsy Women by Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton). It has stunned, surprised, startled this viewer into believing that the milk of human kindness is still around, being passed on from one good woman to another.
‘If I fall down, you pick me up, and if you fall down, I pick you up, okay?’
This might sound like a simple instruction before a self-defence workshop, but if you look at the situation in your own life, you realise that women instinctively create a support system around them that helps them through difficult times. This show celebrates how some women friends survive everything that they face with food, laughter and sharing stories.
Loved the way the eight episodes of Gutsy are split: Gutsy Women Have The Last Laugh, Gutsy Women Refuse Hate, Gutsy Women Seek Justice, Gutsy Women Are Rebel Hearts, Gutsy Women Are Forces Of Nature, Gutsy Women Step Up, Gutsy Women Take Leaps, Gutsy Women Are A Bunch Of Mothers. As you can imagine, each episode features a different facet of a woman and introduces us to some amazing women who have achieved so much.
Imagine seeing Kim Kardashian as an Instagram star and as owner of her own cosmetics and clothing brand plus the star of a reality show that millions of viewers around the world watch avidly, as a legal rights advocate. I was genuinely taken aback to hear this diva (who fought with her sibling for using her bag without permission) actually spent her childhood in her dad’s office reading up witness books and using her social media clout to reach out and save people from death row.
I love what Lee Delong said about clowning. You succeed when you show naivete, vulnerability and authenticity of your character, which is better than laughing at someone else. It is a hard lesson to learn that if your joke flops on stage, you don’t just run away from it and from the audience, but dig your heels in and push your performance a little more until your audience comes back to you and laughs with you. So amazing that the vulnerable clown who invites and provokes us into laughter could want to run away from the audience. In life, this is our instinct too, isn’t it? Hillary Clinton is reminded of the Presidential debate in which a candidate kept looming over her and wandered about on stage as if he were stalking her. Wanda Sykes asks her: would things be different had Hillary then simply joked about the looming rather than carry on seriously answering the question.
I loved the episode where women come together to share their life stories with one another. It’s stories that help inspire women who may be going through the same thing in their lives. I liked the idea of a judge using tribal ways to help bring justice to her people. The Yurok tribe in North California know that we have to live with one another, and so instead of handing out punishment as a way of separating people into victim and perpetrator, it is better to use a different method of offering justice.
I have met the incredible Madeleine Albright (may her soul rest in peace!) and even if your politics are different, you too will agree that she was a powerhouse and a wonderful woman. She was famous for having a treasure trove of dress pins that made a statement. The little anecdote in the episode shows how advanced her sense of semiotics was.
The show, helmed by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, shows us a softer side of Hillary (is she going to run for President again? Is this show recreating her image as a softer person who laughs at knock-knock jokes?). It was fun to see her pore over old photographs, eat scrambled eggs (with cheese) and tell us why she started wearing pant suits.
Even if you don’t really care about Hillary or her daughter, it is amazing to get to meet Dolores Huerta, the one-woman crusading army still fighting for the rights of labourers. I loved the episode where surviving members of the Little Rock Nine share their life’s story.
All the women featured in the series of brave women, whether it is a fire fighter who broke the glass ceiling to become one, or the mother and daughter duo of Kate Hudson and Goldie Hawn, who have one thing in common. They are all warriors. And as the saying goes, ‘When you decide to become a warrior for justice, you can expect a lot of arrows to be slung at you.’
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