The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Year of Change for a North Dakota Abortion Clinic, and the Composer John Williams

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

A year ago, the staff writer Emily Witt visited Fargo, North Dakota, to report on the Red River Women’s Clinic—the only abortion provider in the state. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision had just come down, and the clinic was scrambling to move across state lines, to the adjacent city of Moorhead, Minnesota. This spring, Witt returned to talk with Tammi Kromenaker, the clinic’s director. Kromenaker says the clinic’s new home has had some notable upsides—a parking lot that shields patients from protestors, for example—but North Dakota patients are increasingly fearful as they reach out for care, afraid even to cross the state line for an abortion. Plus, The New Yorker’s Alex Ross discusses John Williams, who has written scores for generations of blockbusters, including “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” and many films of Steven Spielberg. Ross considers him the last practitioner of Hollywood’s grand orchestral tradition, and his retirement will mark the end of an era in music: at ninety-one years old, Williams has said that his score for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” may be his last. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One year ago, staff writer Emily Witt visited Fargo, North Dakota. She was there to report on the Red River Women's Clinic, the only abortion provider in the state. The Supreme Court's Dobbs' decision had just come down, and the Red River Clinic was in deep peril. Since then, 14 states in the country, 14, including, including North Dakota, have now largely banned abortion. Pull over for a second.

So about a year later, Emily Witt went back to Fargo and the site of the Red River Clinic. Yeah, there used to be security. Well, the security clearance are still there and the kind of glass bricks to keep things private. But there's really no sign except for the sign that's still up against the wall there that this used to be a clinic for, I think, almost

25 years. All right. Turning on the car. She headed east, passed an anti-abortion billboard, passed some parking lots and auto shop, driving toward the river. The Red River, which is the border

between Minnesota and North Dakota, is really just a couple of blocks from the old clinic, and we're driving over it right now on the First Avenue Bridge. We're passing by a created Viking ship museum. The Red River isn't wide here, but it now forms a border,

a distinct border between starkly different realities for women. On the one side, North Dakota, which has banned abortion, and on the other, Minnesota, where Democrats are in power and they've expanded abortion access. So the Women's Clinic relocated from Fargo, right across the river, to Moorhead, Minnesota. So we're pulling in. It could not be more nondescript of a building.

It's kind of pale brown bricks. It's two stories. Emily Witt met with the director there, Tammy Kromenaker. So you can just, you know, come out in the building, and then you've got, you know, first layer of security. Tammy is just a person that really has her act together. She's very detail-oriented. She's very organized.

She's not easily. ruffled. Did you have to do a lot of work? Honestly, in this part of the space, not really. We have to paint some walls. She's often asked to lobby or testify not only locally in North Dakota, but also sometimes in Washington. I think she's really seen as a leader in the field nationally.

In fact, Krohmannaker had the foresight to start planning this move quite a while ago when the Supreme Court first announced it would take up the Dobbs case, and that was back in the fall of 20. And she figured that the clinic needed a backup plan. And she was right. Wow. What day did you officially open there? We saw our very first patients on August 10th of 2022.

And we bought the building at 3 p.m. on June 23rd before the day, less than 24 hours before they overturned row. Wow. So 47 days from purchase to seeing our first patients. At first, Tammy tried to keep the new location secret. When I visited last year, she wouldn't tell me where it was and didn't want me to know or the press to know. It was less than a week before we opened that anti-abortion protesters said, we know where the building is and made the announcement. And it was sort of actually a relief because I'd been coming over here incognito.

I was wearing a hat and glasses and a mask and coming in the back utility door, you know, because we had to keep the location secret and secure. The building that she bought in Minnesota is kind of a very ordinary office complex set up for small businesses. So she had to totally renovate it to turn it into a functioning clinic. And I could show you pictures too from the remodeling. But like these cupboards all came with. We just had to put new countertop on. We were able to get all new exam tables delivered, I think, five days before we saw our first patient.

there's kind of a lot of motion happening. And this is just to clarify, we're in an exam room, there's an examination table, ultrasound machine, the machine on the floor over there is the suction machine for the in-clin-clin suction procedure, you know, and just your regular, you know, kind of what you would see in any other doctor's office on the counter. Yeah.

Do you want to see some pictures really quick? Sure, yeah. I always say it's better to have. We were sitting in Tammy's. office and she brought up some pictures on her on her desktop screen and there were pictures of the renovation of the floor torn up of of her staff setting up the Wi-Fi on their phones for the first time so yes so the volunteer i mean i had been moving things slowly um and then once we you know it was out then i expanded the field to you know all of our escorts and there actually

was one gal who showed up in downtown Fargo at 10 a.m. and at 6 p.m. here, I said, Vanessa, go home. Like, you've been here all day. I mean, people were running to the hardware store and picking stuff up. But this was the Tuesday. So this is what the room looked like. And then this is 10 o'clock at night. We threw the flooring down. Oh, my gosh. And 12.39 a.m. And

I think that's the worst picture. picture right there. Were you exhausted? Oh my gosh. Yes. But also like exhilarated and nervous and scared and all of those things. I played that. Was that Sia?

I'm unstoppable because I just needed like an anthem. She seemed pleased and maybe a little bit surprised that they have managed to pull it off in such a short time and, you know, really that they were able to continue on almost seamlessly, even though everything she had worked for for more than 20 years in Fargo had been taken away. And then this is our staff debrief after our first day. But yeah. So that's what that room looked like the day before.

And then, hi. Hi. Hi. Sorry to interrupt. There's a patient on line one who is probably like 22-ish weeks along. Okay. The last period was in December. Could you talk to her about where to go besides here?

Thank you. Hi there. Thanks for holding. What's your name? All right. And where do you live? Okay. All right. And did you have an ultrasound then? No, but what was the first date of your last period? So if we guess like January 1st, does that feel like a fair guess? Okay. All right. So yeah, you are too far for us right now. And if you want to continue and have an abortion. and you're going to have to travel out of state. There's a number of places that you can go to, but it's going to take some effort on your part, and I can help you find some of those places. Red River only sees patients up to 16 weeks. That's mostly because their doctor only comes once a week, and procedures later in pregnancy need the patient to stay for another day, usually.

Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start texting you some of the names of the clinics, and you're going to have to call and make those appointments, and then we'll just keep in touch via text and get you all those other resources that you need, okay? Is there anything else I can answer for you right now? Okay, you bet. Take care of. Bye-bye. I, aye, aye, aye.

Tammy admits that the other side has won. They achieved what they hadn't achieved in decades, which was to ban abortion in North Dakota. But the silver lining to all this is that the new clinic is actually a better place to see patients than the old one was. And she's also now in an environment where she's not in political opposition to every legislative body in the state. It's been a game changer.

Having the parking lot, the protesters have to stand at the sidewalk over there. They cannot come into the parking lot. So patients' demeanors when they arrive in the building is so different when they used to come in. They'd be, you know, their adrenaline was pumping. They were crying. They were upset. And, I mean, sometimes some do, but it's not every patient every time.

So March and April, we're two of our busiest months in our history. We've seen a handful of patients from Texas. We saw a patient from Nebraska recently. I think we're seeing people from elsewhere. They're not necessarily telling us. Yeah, what kind of fears and misinformation are your patients exposed to now? Um, literally, I'm thinking that because abortion is illegal in North Dakota or South Dakota, that they cannot receive one. Um, and, um, I've had a patient within the first few weeks,

um, while we were still in Fargo, um, and the preliminary injunction was in place, say, am I too late? Did I lose my chance? Um, am I screwed? Is what they literally said to me. Um, just last week I had a patient from South Dakota, say, is it even okay, you know, for me? to leave South Dakota to come there. They are fearful that somebody's going to find out. And it's why we've changed some of our medication abortion administration because we don't want patients to go back into those hostile states. It only takes one rogue prosecutor, you know, to bring something forward.

And I think people know that and have it in the back of their minds. And so what have you changed just so they don't have to come back? So patients from banned states, whether it's South Dakota, North Dakota on and off, or maybe a place like Texas, those patients don't take right now myosoprostol back into those hostile states with them. So the second medicine in the medication abortion regimen, they insert while they're still here in the clinic into their vagina. So they're not taking a bottle with their name and the clinic's name and the physician's name a bottle of pills that are specifically for abortion back into those hot. all states. For decades, every time the North Dakota state legislature has tried to pass a law banning or restricting abortion, Red River Women's Clinic has been the entity that sues to try to protect it. And a few days after I left, on this most recent visit, they had to sue again for a law that passed in April that almost totally bans abortion in the state. We still are a North Dakota corporation and just because we, you know, moved five minutes across the river doesn't mean we're

abandoning North Dakota or abandoning the fight or giving up on continuing to lead the fight for bodily autonomy in North Dakota. And do they have any ability to control who comes here? No, there is no law. We'd actually heard rumors that they had anticipated. passing a law that said you cannot cross the border. And, you know, I had some people say, oh, my gosh, this is, you know, this is going to happen. I said, come on, you guys, there's at least three bridges over the river from Fargo to Moorhead that I myself might cross four or five times in a day, depending on where I'm going to go grocery shopping or which target I'm going to go to.

What are they going to have, you know, National Guard stationed on the bridge and a person who a peers female and of reproductive age has to, you know, submit to a pregnancy test? I mean, come on, let's get real about this. But it's something we routinely have to educate patients about. It's okay to cross state lines for this care. It's okay to come here. Nobody's going to prosecute you. And you were in a group chat with a bunch of abortion providers from around the country. I'm just wondering what you're hearing from your colleagues. I'm sure a lot of those clinics have had to close. How have people regrouped and readjusted? The folks that I've interacted with have not had as close a proximity that we do from Fargo to Moorhead and or had the space, I mean, literally we signed on the building the day before.

I think a lot of people said, oh, I'm going to or I dream to. And so some people have moved to Florida or New Mexico. a lot of those clinics also transitioned to being sort of practical support networks. Like, we can't see you, but we can help you go to this place. Or we work with this fund and we'll help you get elsewhere. So I think, and I too at a point, I was having some survivors guilt. And it was hard for me to talk to some of those friends and colleagues because I felt like, I mean, really, it was a victory of what happened for us and we're able to see those same patients.

And again, I'm not going to say it was easy, but from the outside, maybe it looked easy. And other people had to shutter their clinics and sell the buildings. And there was no close, you know, especially in the South. The whole South is a hot mess. You know, there was no easy place for them to go to. And so I was having some, you know, extreme guilt, you know, didn't want to talk about it. and so felt like I sort of had to keep it under wraps for a while. So it's just been, it's been a really hard year in a lot of ways for providers.

That's Tammy Cromenaker, director of the Red River Women's Clinic. Emily Witt is a staff writer, and you can read her reporting from North Dakota at New Yorker.com. In our next episode, a perspective from the other side of the abortion debate. We'll hear from the influential lawyer who crafted the abortion ban in Texas, known as the Heartbeat Act. And still ahead today, the music of John Williams. Stick around. Generations of us have grown up listening to John Williams. He's been composing film music for 65 years. That's more than half the history of the cinema. He's got over a hundred credits under his belt and five Oscars. But it's not the quantity so much that makes Williams extraordinary.

It's the impression that his music makes on us. Whether it's a serious draw, or a blockbuster, Williams doesn't just lurk in the background. Okay, even I know that. I feel a shark circling my feet. That's Jaws. Am I right? I think it's actually Ingmar Bergman's wild strawberries.

All right, so it's either Jaws or Wild Strawberries, we haven't decided which. The other day I sat down with the New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross to talk about the legendary John Williams, and Alex wanted to jog. my memory a little bit. I'm thinking one of the many Star Wars films. One of the many Star Wars films?

That's actually Superman. Oh, for God. Very kind of Richard Strauss, Ubermensch, Zarathustra kind of sound there. But, yeah, that's also Williams in his sort of high 70s corn gold mode. That's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Right? Right. Come on.

What I love about this is, you know, you've got the catchy theme on top. But then you have this stuff underneath in the trombones and timpony, which is sort of somewhat syncopated and just kind of creates this substratum of sort of a different kind of activity. This is jump. Buh, bum, bum, bum, bum. And it sort of destabilizes, you know, the march aspect of it. This happens in Star Wars, too. And, you know, these, you know, the themes that everyone remembers are simple enough,

but the way he frames them, orchestrates them, flushes them out, is actually very tricky, difficult to play, and just sort of, just fun to go back to and sort of experience, again. You just sort of hear new details popping out at you. So the reason we're talking about John Williams now is because Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is about to come out. That's the fifth Indiana Jones movie. And, of course, it stars the tireless Harrison Ford. And this is probably the last original film score that Williams will write. He said something to that effect recently.

Alex, how old is John Williams? He's 91. God bless him. But I wouldn't rule it out. He's slightly hedged on whether he's going to ever write another one. And he says that it's hard to say no to Stephen Spielberg. All right. Well, let's just stipulate that he's maybe on the back nine of his career.

And can you assess for us just to start his place in the world of film composers? He is really the last great living representative of this long tradition of orchestral film scoring that goes back to the Hollywood Golden Age of the 1930s when all these emigray composers like Max Steiner and Eric Wolfgang Korngold were writing for Hollywood. And he's really the last one. and the knowledge that he contains, just of the orchestra. I mean, there's no one alive, I think, who knows more about how orchestras work than John Williams does.

As much as or more so than classical composers and conductors? I think on a practical level, he knows as much as anyone. Wow. Wow. So this is his latest score for the Indiana Jones. What about some early examples of his very best work? He started his career headed into the 60s, am I right? Yes. Yeah, so, you know, he was, originally came out of the jazz world, but he first made his name as an arranger. And so when he moved into film scoring, he was doing a lot of comedies. His first movie was actually some kind of race car comedy called Dadio. You know, as the years go by, you began to hear, even in some of these early scores, like a kind of John Williams' voice emerging. Well, let's talk about that. You've got a score to one of the more emblematic.

movies for him early on, and that's How to Steal a Million, which starred Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole, and it came out in 1966. This is one of William Wyler's last movies, and I was on TCM, and I was kind of half watching it, and the credits were going by, and I forgot to see, I didn't see the name of the composer. So I was about to go on Google and look up the composer when something happened in the music, and I knew. these little quick, skirling grass figures, and it was just totally John Williams.

This is the same kind of just very, very agile, active, brilliant kind of music that you hear in Star Wars and a lot of other cues. Think about the fact that Schubert, when someone was telling Schubert about a new musician composer on the scene, Schubert would ask, Kaner Vos, what can he do once he got? And John Williams has it. He can do anything. Any style that you throw at him, any cinematic situation that he put him in, he can cope with.

So it's just an incredibly diverse group of scores. And he was also doing disaster movies like Towering Inferno into the 70s, towering inferno, Black Sunday earthquake, and a personal favorite of mine, the Poseidon Adventure. The best.

The best. Something bad is going to happen. Something horrible. It's also rather grand and romantic. You know, as a kind of slightly William Walton kind of British feeling to it. And, you know, he really elevates these pretty kitschy, although lovable movies, these disaster movies, with the nobility that he can't help bring you to bear. And it's never bombastic either because he doesn't pile it on.

His orchestration is actually very clear and lucid. It's not heavy romantic stuff. And so it just kind of dances around the images on the screen in a great way. You're a teens bit younger than I am, but not tons. And we've been going to concerts together for a long time with the New Yorker. We're talking about music for a long time. When we first started, I would not have guessed, because your tastes are pretty high-brow, even when it crosses over into rock and roll,

I would not have guessed you were a fan of John Williams. Was I being unfair? I've sort of had a slightly checkered journey history with sort of appreciating John Williams over the years because I was a kid when these classic movies came out in the mid-late 70s, Star Wars, Close Encounters, Rears of the Lost Dark, and Empire Strikes Back. Huge events, you know, for 10, you know,

10, 12-year-old kid, even one as weird as I was. I was especially obsessed by close encounters, the movie and the score. And it plays an incredibly important role in the film. There it is. There it is. Yeah, so this is the theme that he wrote for the communication between the, you know, people on the ground there at that station at Devil's Tower and the spaceship, the aliens when they land. The music is a dramatic player in the narrative.

Was it just in the script, insert theme from John Williams here, figure out later? Or how did it work? Yeah, he came up with the theme. You know, there was an idea that there had to be some simple, you know, recognizable theme that could sort of blast through space and reach the aliens and service sort of the language of communication. I went to visit him not long ago, and he showed me, the original score for Close Encounters, which sort of reduced me to kind of slack-jaw,

nine-year-old self. And he just, you know, he writes everything out. You know, there's this tremendous moment later on where the keyboard player, the human keyboard player, gets into this crazy duet with the spaceship. It gets faster and faster. Yeah, intensely contrapuntal and dissonant.

So on the score he showed me, He wrote it all out. But the amazing thing was there was also a piece of paper slipped into the middle of this score. And it was an array of, I don't know, 12 or 14 different attempts at that five-note theme. And he told me, I haven't seen this in a long time. And he was looking at them and like humming a few of them. It was funny because some of them just didn't seem to, you know, work at all. It's like Beethoven going, da-na-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's what you know. And some would just be these kind of little squiggles. Like, ah, that wouldn't have worked at all. And then toward the bottom, there was this, the five-note one that we know, and it was circled. What he told me in general was it just takes a tremendous amount of work to come up with these themes.

They need to be short. They need to be memorable. They need to kind of cut through the mayhem of these action and sci-fi movies with this just kind of storm of noise happening all around. And I think it's very important for his composition. process, they need to be malleable, you know, because it doesn't just sort of plop the theme out and leave it at that. His scores are this kind of very complex string of variations on these little motifs, and then when you go over the whole Star Wars cycle over nine films, you know,

it's a massive series of variations on these light motifs. One of the things that you like about him is this, what you call it, old Hollywood scoring technique. You've made reference to the 1942 film, King's Row. which started a former president, if I'm not mistaken. And that was scored by Eric Wolfgang Korngold. Let's listen to that and maybe try to relate it to John Williams. Fantastic. So you can hear where Star Wars comes from.

When Williams went to George Lucas on Spielberg's recommendation, Lucas supposedly was planning to issue the film with a lot of classical selections sort of imposed in the picture the way Kubrick did with 2001. John Williams went to Luke's and said, I can do all this for you. I can write new music

that echoes the kind of old-fashioned Hollywood's sort of afternoon serial adventure kind of atmosphere. And so I think Williams deliberately looked at these scores, learned from them. There is a family-reselior. emolence between, you know, that

Cornwall theme and the Star War theme goes up a fifth, and then it sort of goes down a couple steps. It's pretty amazing that this body of music exists. There's nothing quite like in a music history. A composer working on a, you know, not even Wagner,

wrote a cycle of nine, you know, works spanning, you know, 40 years. Has there ever been in the history of cinema a director, composer collaboration that even approaches the Spielberg

John Williams' relationship? Oh no, definitely not. I mean, there were sustained relationships between Hitchcock and Bernard Herman. You know, I think Takamitsu had great relationships in Japanese cinema.

But, you know, this has gone on for almost 50 years, almost 30 movies with Spielberg, going back to Sugarland Express in 1970. That's his first feature. I think it was, yeah. Alex, what should we go out on? You want to pick something

maybe a little lesser known from this gigantic body of work? I think I might choose a scar, which is atypical, the most familiar John Williams' style, which is music he wrote for Robert Altman's images. It's somewhat dissonant or sort of off-center in terms of the musical language, but it also has its

lyrical side. He actually brought up the score as one of his favorites, and so it kind of signified for him the kind of career he might have had if he hadn't got into film music at all, but sort of got into the concert music arena. And I think when you step back, you might see that this whole body work really hangs together. It is all one personality, sort of appearing through different media and in different styles. And that's probably more and more how we're going to think of John Williams as the years go by. Alex Ross, thanks so much. Thanks so much, David.

The New Yorkers Alex Ross talking about the work of John Williams. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny with Williams' score comes out next week. Alex's books about classical music include the rest is noise and Wagnerism. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbess of Tune Yards with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Max Walton, Frida Green, Adam Howard, Callalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gophen and Poutabuele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.