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Cat Cafe's avatar

I'm not making blanket statements. I'm referring to the very specific types of person who voted for Trump. I'm well aware that there are many righteous, decent people in those communities--I'm FB friends with many of them, and am encouraged as I see them stepping up to protest. But I'm talking about the people we saw at the Trump rallies, the people who call me a cunt on Twitter for supporting the idea of public education, the people who send vile, anti-semitic messages to women I admire. I'm talking about the exact, specific people, who constantly vilify those of us in the big cities, and literally, try to insist we're in a "bubble." I'm responding to THOSE people. I most certainly am not meaning to generalize that to everyone. Sorry if I gave that impression, it was not what i meant.

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Harlan is a character and a half. When we eventually have coffee after I finish my script, remind me to tell you the time I was on some panel with him, years ago, attended by a crowd of would-be writers. He happily went into a long spiel about how women "need to be re-educated" because we apparently "can't write scripts," and followed up by offering to re-educate any women who wanted to be "helped" by him. The many women in the audience stared unhappily, turning to me (the lone woman on the panel) to stand up to him, but I wasn't biting.

He then followed up by presenting a script problem and offering a "big break" to anyone who could solve it. But it was a thorny problem that was impossible to solve for various reasons (I forget the specifics), and so he was really just setting up the audience to call out their solutions, only for him to brutally shoot them down. It was really kind of mean.

Finally he turned to me, and said challengingly "Let's see if YOU have a solution," and I immediately said demurely, "Oh, I couldn't possibly, Harlan, you see, I'm a woman." HOWLS OF LAUGHTER. I went up to him afterwards to say, hey, no harm no foul, yeah? And to his credit he grudgingly had to agree. As I said, he's a character.

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