Compassion in the clinic.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: UNPLUGGED - Column

The Supreme Court decided from within its 100-foot buffer zone that Massachusetts' thirty-five-foot buffer zone around clinics interfered with citizens wanting to dialogue with other citizens, mostly women, who were trying to get to health care appointments.

A couple of days after the SCO-TUS decision, I went to see the movie Obvious Child. It was nice to get out of the house and take a break from my new hobby: putting contraceptives in bedazzling glue guns.

Getting into the movie was difficult that evening because placid visitors to Provincetown were lined up outside a busy ice cream store, blocking access to the theater. So I waved my "Death by Chocolate" sign at the gauntlet of comatose cone-lickers and screamed in their faces that they were killing their children with sugar. It was a good chat.

The Waters Edge Cinema is a one-and-a-half-a-plex, and the thin walls separating the large theater from the smaller viewing room could use some sound buffering. Most locals have learned to compartmentalize aurally, so were not bothered when the Jersey Boys next door sang "Big Girls Don't Cry" just as Donna, the lead in Obvious Child, sobs after getting dumped by her boyfriend.

Obvious Child is an independent romantic comedy about Donna, a twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn standup comic who gets dumped, has a drunken breakup hookup, gets pregnant, and has an abortion.

I usually avoid so-called rom-coms because I get so worried for straight people.

I usually avoid movies about stand-ups because they are bathetic, such as Sally Fields in Punchline or Sandra Bernhard in King of Comedy.

I usually avoid movies about abortion because they are about abortion.

But I needed a break, and the movie was only eighty-six minutes long.

From the first scene of Donna doing a stand-up gig at a Brooklyn bar, there is an immediate warmth, sexiness, authenticity, and humor that...