March 5, 2025 • 33 mins
On this episode of Backyard Oasis, Dennis Lee sits down with Nina Kleinberg to discuss our favorite topic here on the show: transitions. She started her career editing films but then took a turn...and became a midwife for years, ultimately assisting in over 300 births!! The pair discuss that big transition and more, ultimately getting to how she still helps her community today...by solving computer problems!
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Hosted by Dennis Lee
Edited by Bobby Falco-Killoran
Produced by Alex Audette in the Teaching and Learning Innovation Center's Multimedia Studios at Greenfield Community College
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Backyard Oasis, a podcast designed by and for older adults living in the beautiful
(00:09):
Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and produced in the tech studios at Greenfield
Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Backyard Oasis reaches out to older adults who seek knowledge to help them live more
thoughtfully, healthily and happily, who hope to inspire others with their ideas and who
(00:31):
serve their communities in the interest of the greater good.
Hi, this is Dennis Lee.
My guest today on Backyard Oasis is Nina Kleinberg.
She's had an interesting and varied life we will explain.
(00:52):
Nina, welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you for inviting me.
Oh, thanks for being here.
I know you attended film school at USC in Los Angeles.
So let's go back a little bit in the time machine.
Why did you get into film?
Good question.
I was actually in graduate school for teaching.
(01:13):
I thought that would be my career as a teacher and one day I walked into the lecture hall
and someone said, well, we're going to have a special guest today.
He teaches film.
And I thought, what does that have to do?
I want to be an English teacher.
But he then proceeded to show the first five minutes of David Lean's version of Great Expectations
(01:39):
followed by five minutes of a television adaptation of Great Expectations.
And he asked us which we liked better.
Well, of course, we all liked David Lean's version better.
How can you not like David Lean?
And he said, but why?
And then he proceeded to go through the scripting, the camera work, the lighting, the editing,
(02:07):
the acting, the sound effects, the music.
And I felt as though my eyes were open in a way that they had never been opened before.
I walked into that room one person and I walked out a different person.
(02:29):
And within two months, I went to the admissions office at my graduate school and I said, give
my fellowship to someone else.
I'm going to be a filmmaker.
Wow.
Where in New York, I'm guessing?
Good guess.
My parents were from New York, but I was actually raised in Philadelphia.
Well, I knew that was the area.
I had grandparents from the Bronx, so I kind of always attuned to anywhere near there.
(02:56):
Let's talk about being a film editor in the 70s.
That's when you did a lot of that stuff.
What did you do?
Now, people that are listening to this, there might be some film junkies out there and people
might have heard the term film editor, but what did you do?
Good question.
My family to this day still thinks that film editors just cut out the bad stuff.
(03:22):
But from our point of view, as film editors, we always felt that we were really the people
who made the movies.
It was as if someone had given you a dictionary full of words, but your job was to arrange
those words in a way that made sense from storytelling point of view and sense from an emotional
(03:44):
point of view.
The editor chooses timing.
They choose focus.
Depending on the film you're working on and who you're working with, you have a fair amount
of independence or basically you're doing just what the director tells you.
But it's usually a collaboration and I worked with several directors who gave me a lot of
(04:09):
freedom.
My first job, for instance, was I was doing film editing for Encyclopedia Britannica back
in the days when they made movies.
Someone gave me 20 hours of footage they had shot from all interesting angles at the Los
Angeles time to make a film called Newspaper Story.
(04:32):
I remember his words to this day and it was over 50 years ago.
He said, there's a movie in here.
Find it.
The job in the editing room is to find all the interesting pieces of film, put them in
order, give it texture, give it momentum, give it timing and tell an interesting story.
(04:57):
What other films did you work on, anything we would know?
I did not work as an editor on any film that you would have heard of for the very simple
reason that back in the 70s, all of the unions were very tightly controlled in Los Angeles.
(05:20):
If you were going to work on a major feature film, you needed to be in the union.
The unions were just beginning to open up to people my age at the end of the 70s when
I left the film industry.
I worked on a lot of documentaries, a lot of educational films.
I worked on just a couple of features right towards the end of my film career.
(05:46):
One of the many reasons that I got out of the film industry is that I knew I would never
get out of the editing room.
There were not that many jobs beyond editing for women in the 70s.
I challenge you to name me five women directors who have achieved fame who were making films
(06:08):
in the 70s.
There are a few and a few very good ones.
But generally, women were assigned, if you got to anything creative, were assigned to
the editing room.
I was going to ask you why you left the business, but you answered that, I think that's part
of it.
(06:29):
I thought we'd, or I should ask you, tell me something about working on a film and you
talked about it a little bit.
Tell us something that the average person would have no idea about editing a film or
putting a film together.
Something the average person wouldn't even think about.
Well, I've given a lot of lectures actually at Amherst Cinema about the process of filmmaking.
(06:55):
The one that comes to mind right away is you think of something like Gene Kelly dancing
in the rain, in Singing in the Rain.
That is completely put together in the editing room.
When he was actually shooting it, he was lip-syncing back to his recording of the song.
It wasn't till you got into the editing room that you add sound effects.
(07:20):
You add the sound of the rain.
You add the splashing of the puddles.
You add the taps.
He literally would stand in front of a screen and watch himself dance and they would record
his feet.
And if he was on the street, his feet would sound one way.
If he was splashing in a puddle, it would sound the other way.
(07:42):
This is all done in the editing room.
It's really amazing.
And most people have no idea when you go to the movies or look at a documentary.
They have no idea about this.
You just look at it and you see the finished product.
But it's the coming together of it that is actually from your standpoint, if you were
doing it, pretty exciting, right?
(08:02):
Oh, when you get a film together and you make it work, it's incredibly exciting.
I can look at films that I edited 50 years ago.
And I still remember, I remember that cut and how easily that worked.
And one of the things that I discovered when I moved to Massachusetts, which is why I started
(08:22):
lecturing at Amherst Cinema about filmmaking, is that people who don't work in the film
industry have no idea how movies are made.
I remember walking out of a movie and I said to a friend, do you realize that movie had
only eight cuts? and they looked at me and they said, what's a cut?
(08:45):
So then I knew I had to kind of explain to people how movies are actually made.
Some great experiences, I think.
How about, and you mentioned it a little bit before, but then you decided to get out of
the film business.
I think I read somewhere you were in that for about nine years, something like that.
Yes.
I know that because you sent me some notes.
(09:06):
I thank you.
Well, I've never given up, as my friends will tell you, I have never given up my love
of filmmaking and film history.
And I still offer talks at Amherst Cinema, but the business was not a fun business to
be in, especially as a woman in the 70s.
I knew I would never get out of the editing room.
(09:30):
And part of me wanted more connection to the real world and real people.
And even if I made a film that had a wonderful lesson or taught something or showed something,
it would be the film that would go out and interact with the audience.
It wouldn't be me.
And I needed more interactions with human beings.
(09:55):
And for a while, I really wasn't sure what I could do.
And again, I've often described my life as like a pinball.
I'm going in one direction and I go to that lecture and suddenly I'm in another direction.
I was on a film shoot on a cruise ship.
(10:17):
We were doing a promotional film for a cruise line.
And someone started talking about her friend who was a midwife.
And I had been pre-med in college.
I had always wanted to be an obstetrician, but I didn't like the way they approached
women's health care.
And I was a staunch feminist.
(10:39):
And I thought, gee, I could become a midwife.
To me, that's amazing because talk about left turns.
I mean, this is crazy.
You mentioned to me one time, I ran into you somewhere in Northampton.
You mentioned that you went to a graduation or rather a reunion.
(11:01):
It was my high school reunion.
A reunion.
That's what it was.
And you said they gave you the award for the biggest change that you made in your life.
I mean, it's amazing from making films to help making babies.
I mean, that's really something.
Well, I'd like to point out that I didn't make babies.
I understand.
I understand.
It's a turn of a frame.
(11:21):
Yeah.
I mean, the real question to me, and I've always said that I am lucky in that it's always
been relatively easy for me to do what I want to do.
It hasn't been that easy for me to know what I want to do, but as soon as I know what I
want to do, I can do it.
(11:42):
And so I thought, all right, I'll become a midwife.
But then I looked around and it's not that easy to become a licensed certified professional
midwife, certified nurse midwife in most states.
You need a nursing degree.
(12:03):
Then you need experience in labor and delivery.
And then you need your training that is prescribed by the American College of Nurse Midwives.
And at this point, I was in my late 20s, early 30s, and I was looking at seven or eight years
of training.
Fortunately, there was a program, and there are several programs like this.
(12:27):
Mine happened to be at Yale University, where in three years, I got the equivalent of a
second bachelor's degree.
They would take you if you had a bachelor's in anything, and mine was in British history
and literature.
They prepared me for nursing, right?
And I got the equivalent of a second bachelor's degree in nursing, and then two years at the
(12:49):
master's level.
So I combined about seven or eight years of training and experience into three, and I
was very lucky to get into that program.
Why do most people use a midwife?
I've always heard the term, I guess I know what you do, kind of, but why do people decide
(13:14):
on a midwife rather than the usual way using a doctor, their own doctor or a specialist
in babies?
Good question.
Those of us who became midwives in my generation, and I'm talking about, I went to school from
1978 to 1981, a lot of us were staunch feminists.
(13:39):
And we felt that women's bodies and women's healthcare had been taken over by a very male
and very scientific model.
And we felt very strongly that that was not the way to approach women's healthcare.
(13:59):
I had been a volunteer at age 14 at an inner city hospital, at Hanuman Hospital in Philadelphia,
where my job was folding linen outside the delivery room.
And I said to the nurse one day, oh, I'd like to see a baby being born.
And she said, well, go right in.
(14:19):
I mean, they had no idea of privacy, nothing.
And even then at the age of 14, I knew there was something wrong with the way healthcare
and especially birthing care was being delivered.
What I saw was mostly young male interns and residents, frankly, abusing very, very frightened,
(14:45):
primarily black teenagers.
And I knew that was wrong.
And then I always thought, well, I'll be an OBGYN and I'm going to change that.
And when I started in pre-med in college, I realized it was going to be the medical
model and that didn't strike me as the right way to approach it.
(15:08):
On the other hand, I wanted to be a licensed professional.
I wanted the medical training, but I wanted to practice differently.
And when I became a midwife, there was a strong movement getting back to quote unquote normal
birthing, letting women actually have their babies without a lot of intervention.
(15:33):
I'd also like to point out that CNM, certified nurse midwives, do not just deliver babies.
We do prenatal care.
We do gynecological care.
We do family planning like inserting IUDs and we have prescriptive authority.
(15:53):
We at the last place I worked, which was at Holyoke Hospital for 30 years, we were the
first to assist at Caesarean Sections.
If our patients needed C-sections, we did the, you know, the surgeon obviously did the
surgery, but we were the surgical assists.
So we also took care of postmenopausal women.
(16:15):
We took care of a lot of broad range gynecology, but in a very, I don't want to say different,
but a very caring way.
Do you get a lot of, or did you get a lot of pushback from the regular medical community
that were not aware or cared about what you were interested in as being a midwife?
(16:37):
Well, that's a very, very good question.
And I think it goes beyond that.
I think especially in a place like Holyoke where there is a very large Puerto Rican community
and a lot of these private doctors didn't know how to direct their care at that community.
(17:02):
Our practice required that we all speak Spanish, that we, you know, that we included the whole
family in the whole process of birthing, but we obviously, we had to work very closely
with the OBGYNs, the pediatricians, the anesthesiologists, the nursing staff.
(17:26):
And the last 20 years, almost 20 years of my career in Holyoke was at the birthing center,
at Holyoke Medical Center.
It was a family.
We had great doctors, great nurses.
We worked together as a team.
And it was very similar to when I worked in the film industry where you're working on
(17:46):
a team.
If you were out shooting a movie, you were a team.
And each person had their job, but they were working for the same goal, same in the birthing
center.
You're a team and everyone works together.
And I loved that.
But you needed people.
You mentioned one of the things you didn't like about the film industry was you were
(18:09):
inside a lot of times.
In a dark room, in a dark room.
And now you're with a team bringing people into existence, which, do you ever go home
over the years, the 31 years, you ever say, wow, I mean, plain and simple, wow, this is
what I did this?
I mean, did you ever get over the idea that what you saw when it was just another day
(18:34):
at work?
I look back now.
I have been retired since 2019.
And I look back and I can't believe that I attended close to 3,000 deliveries.
It still astounds me.
But I didn't do it alone.
I did it with the most incredible team of nurses and midwives and our families, the
(19:02):
women who came to us and brought their families and then brought their sisters and their daughters
and their grandmothers.
It was the most wonderful community.
I cannot imagine practicing in any other community where I would have had the sense of just great
joy.
(19:23):
The other thing I would like to point out, and I grew up in a very academic family.
We never did anything.
We never went outdoors and hiked or skied or rode bikes.
And what I learned from both filmmaking and being a midwife is how much I love to work
with my hands.
All of these had hand skills.
(19:46):
And I loved having those hand skills.
I loved having careers where you could use your hands, your heart, and your brain all
at the same time.
That's a good threesome.
I mean that is a wonderful threesome.
Yeah.
And well, and I was lucky to be able to do that.
Right.
(20:06):
You've got to be a special person to do what you do.
A doctor has to be a special person.
I mean, not everybody can do what you do under the stress that was there in the job.
That's true of doctors, obviously, and midwives.
You know, I was driving around last night.
I knew we were going to talk today.
And I'm thinking, should I ask this question?
(20:28):
And then I said, if I don't, don't think it's the way to go.
So you mentioned you had 3,000 births.
All right.
Now, some babies probably were lost out of a 3,000.
Not all of them were successful births, I'm guessing, unless maybe that's not the case,
(20:52):
but I'm guessing not every birth works out.
How do you, as a human being and somebody that cares, how do you deal with that?
I think about that with doctors, too.
I mean, how do you, you know, for you, it's a day at work, but it's somebody's life and
death and their family.
(21:12):
How do you deal with that?
That's a very good question, because very often when people found out I was a midwife,
they would say, oh, isn't that wonderful?
You have such a joyous, positive experience.
But very often, you would have to tell somebody, I don't hear the heartbeat.
I think you've had, I think you've had a fetal demise, or they'd come in bleeding and I'd
(21:38):
say, I think you're having a miscarriage.
Or they would have a difficult birth and the baby would end up in the nique, or I had a
baby that was doing great and stopped breathing as soon as it was born, because this poor baby
had no lungs.
I mean, you can do everything you want, and there's still going to be some bad outcomes.
(22:04):
And part of what I loved about the job is that there was room for compassion.
How do you deal with that, though?
In other words, okay, you're telling me what happened and you just talked about people
that did not succeed having a baby.
So when you go home that night, how do you deal with the grief that they felt or you
(22:25):
felt?
I've always been fascinated by that.
I remember one day I was in Northampton and I was near the emergency room and I was talking
to some doctors and they were counseling with somebody.
I'm thinking, boy, on the other side of that wall, somebody's living and dying.
And yet they have to go along and live their life and go out to lunch and they can't walk
(22:46):
around being modeling all the time.
So as a human being who cares and obviously 31 years of work, you did.
How do you deal with that?
Boy, that's a good question.
I'm not sure I've ever asked myself other than feeling that in the moment I am as caring
and compassionate as I possibly can be, that I give people the support that I hope they
(23:13):
needed at that time, but then life goes on.
And it goes on for them as well as it goes on.
I personally had a stillbirth.
My first baby was stillborn and it's horrible and it's tragic and some days it's like it
didn't happen and other days it's like it happened yesterday, but life goes on.
(23:37):
You always hear that expression and I guess when somebody's going through it, they're
thinking how can life go on?
In other words, it does over time, but when you're in the moment, you're thinking the
world seems to stop and spin.
I mean, I remember thinking and this is maybe a little bit related, perhaps not.
(23:58):
At the end of my mom's life, it was a nice day.
It was a sunny day.
I knew she wasn't going to be around for probably the rest of the day.
I was going up to the hospital and I'm thinking, this feels like a normal day.
This is a normal day, but it's not a normal day.
I'm putting my shoes on.
I'm putting my pants on.
I'm going to, you know, I'm going out.
(24:19):
I'm going to have breakfast.
It's normal, but it wasn't a normal day because I was going through this or one of your parents
to be are going through this.
It's not a normal day for them or for you.
Yes, but as you say, you walk out of the hospital, the sun is shining, the birds are singing,
(24:40):
and then a few hours later you think, gee, I'm hungry.
I haven't had lunch yet, so you go and have your lunch and life goes on.
It's interesting, so interesting.
I want to change pace if we can because we talked about some really negative things here.
(25:00):
And we talked a lot about transitions in jobs.
You're transitioning from one job from film to being a midwife, but you're retired now,
but you're not finished.
You're involved with Northampton neighbors, which is helping people live in retirement
or in their life, and you're involved with all kinds of things, including technology.
(25:23):
You mentioned you like to work with your hands, and you're helping people, older people, with
computers.
You must have a lot of patience.
I don't mean patience as in the hospital.
I mean patience to deal with the people because older people are frustrated at sometimes by
(25:44):
computers.
We all are.
No matter what, if you don't know how to do something, you're frustrated.
But to some people with computers, it's like, oh my God, what do I do?
And they say, call Nina at Northampton neighbors.
Call Nina.
I was trying to put something.
There's a thing on Northampton neighbors that's called Listserv where you can put some information
(26:06):
on.
And as a matter of fact, I'm putting some information on Northampton neighbors on their Listserv
mentioning our podcast so people can, and I was talking to somebody and I said, how
do I do that?
And she said, I think you're doing an interview with Nina tomorrow.
Ask Nina.
So everybody, this sounds like a TV show.
(26:28):
Ladies and gentlemen, ask Nina.
What are you doing in Northampton neighbors?
Let me start by saying that if I had a dollar for every senior who had said to me, I'm so
stupid I can't do this.
I would have a lot of dollars.
To me, computers are like a foreign language.
It's very hard to learn a foreign language at our age.
(26:53):
But it's really easy to learn a foreign language when you're young, which is why all our kids
and grandchildren can run circles around us when it comes to tech.
I have been talking computer for 40 years.
I got my first actually more than 40 years.
I started with an Osborne and then I had a K-Pro too.
(27:15):
I mean, these are old computers and I loved them and I decided that they weren't going
to intimidate me.
So I've been speaking computer for a long time.
I'm a little more fluent than most people our age.
What's the bigot?
Let's go, we could go on this topic for an hour and a half.
(27:37):
I'm sure I could pick your brain and I would learn something immediately.
But what are some of the biggest problems people have other than the fear of, oh my
goodness, it's a machine.
What do I do if I hit F9?
Is the computer going to blow up?
Beside that.
You cannot break your computer.
You cannot break your computer.
(27:58):
That's the one thing I say to people.
But the biggest problem is especially at our age, getting people to feel comfortable with
tech.
And then of course we had this huge problem during COVID when people really needed tech
to communicate with the outside world.
(28:19):
I still remember going to a meeting in March of 2020, last in-person meeting before COVID
really hit where everyone's going, how are we going?
This is with Northampton neighbors.
How are we going to help our seniors?
And I remember sitting at that meeting and saying, I've heard of this thing called Zoom.
(28:39):
Why don't I look into it and maybe I can be the Zoom master for Northampton neighbors.
So we got Zoom going.
And then once there were vaccinations and we went out, I started going into people's
homes and showing them how to transfer their files and showing them how to get rid of viruses
(29:02):
and unjamming their printers and doing all kinds of things.
Then the next big thing that really upset me was the digital divide.
And not just the digital divide between people who understood it and didn't, but the people
who couldn't afford the technology.
(29:23):
So we started what we call the Laptop Exchange Program where people would give us their old
laptops and we would wipe them clean and open them up, put in new hard drives, add some
RAM, maybe fix something else, reinstall the operating system and give them out to people
who couldn't afford that level of technology.
(29:46):
And we've done that with over 60 laptops in the last couple of years.
We're going to be up against the clock.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I could go on forever.
No, no, no.
I could talk about this forever.
This is great.
I mean, your story is so interesting and so varied.
I think it's wonderful.
I'm so glad you're here today.
Before we go, though, I know you did a program for Northampton neighbors telling them how
(30:09):
to save a little bit of money with their computer.
Give me just only two quick ideas that people can do to maybe save some money with their
computer.
Well, it was really the talk I gave yesterday was how to save money and not pay Comcast.
So much because so many people are spending over $200 a month with Comcast.
(30:35):
And there are many ways to do that, even if you stay with Comcast.
Can we broaden it out?
Because when we do something like this, I don't know who's going to hear this.
So not everybody deals with Comcast.
A lot of people in Franklin County, I don't think they have Comcast, perhaps.
So give us a couple ideas, generally speaking, that broaden it out, if you will.
(30:59):
Well, a couple of the things that I talked about on my talk yesterday is you don't have
to pay so much for a TV package.
If you're buying a TV package, you can stream that with packages.
If you have a smart TV or a computer, you can get something like Slang or Hulu Plus
(31:19):
or TV or whatever.
And you can put up an antenna.
Now you can't get a whole lot with an over-the-air antenna.
You can put it on your roof or there's indoor antennas.
But you can get a fair number of your local channels that are still required to broadcast
(31:39):
their signal.
So that was one way using that.
And the other was to negotiate with whoever is your provider.
You call them up and you say, I don't want to pay this much and they will offer you a
lower price.
I didn't think they would do that.
Somebody told me they tried that and they didn't have any luck.
(32:00):
So I wondered if that would actually work.
Well, I gave a lot of examples in the talk I gave and it is recorded.
And if people go to the Northampton Neighbor's YouTube channel, they'll find the talk I gave.
Terrific.
So somebody, no matter where they are listening to this, and I know a lot of people with podcasts
(32:22):
tell other people about it, but they could be in Cleveland.
So we don't know who's listening on a particular day, but that's good.
Go to YouTube, Northampton Neighbor's and you'll hear Nina's words of wisdom.
Well, I don't know if they're words of wisdom, but they're pretty practical about different
ways to get Wi-Fi and TV and telephone into your house without spending a fortune.
(32:49):
I want to thank you for being here.
We probably could go on till next Tuesday.
Lots to talk about.
You're obviously an interesting lady and I'm going to keep your number on speed dial because
I'll probably need help with the computers.
Nina, Kleinberg, thanks so much for joining us and being with us on Backyard Oasis.
(33:11):
It was a pleasure to be here.
Thanks, Dennis.
This concludes today's podcast.
We're always looking for new ideas, so feel free to reach out to Judy Raper, Associate
Dean of Community Engagement at Greenfield Community College at 413-775-1819.
If you have an idea, you'd love to share.
(33:34):
Special thanks to the creators of Backyard Oasis, Denise Schwartz, Chad Fuller, Dennis
Lee, and Christine Copeland.
Have a great day.
Welcome to Backyard Oasis, a podcast designed by and for older adults living in the beautiful
(00:09):
Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and produced in the tech studios at Greenfield
Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Backyard Oasis reaches out to older adults who seek knowledge to help them live more
thoughtfully, healthily and happily, who hope to inspire others with their ideas and who
(00:31):
serve their communities in the interest of the greater good.
Hi, this is Dennis Lee.
My guest today on Backyard Oasis is Nina Kleinberg.
She's had an interesting and varied life we will explain.
(00:52):
Nina, welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you for inviting me.
Oh, thanks for being here.
I know you attended film school at USC in Los Angeles.
So let's go back a little bit in the time machine.
Why did you get into film?
Good question.
I was actually in graduate school for teaching.
(01:13):
I thought that would be my career as a teacher and one day I walked into the lecture hall
and someone said, well, we're going to have a special guest today.
He teaches film.
And I thought, what does that have to do?
I want to be an English teacher.
But he then proceeded to show the first five minutes of David Lean's version of Great Expectations
(01:39):
followed by five minutes of a television adaptation of Great Expectations.
And he asked us which we liked better.
Well, of course, we all liked David Lean's version better.
How can you not like David Lean?
And he said, but why?
And then he proceeded to go through the scripting, the camera work, the lighting, the editing,
(02:07):
the acting, the sound effects, the music.
And I felt as though my eyes were open in a way that they had never been opened before.
I walked into that room one person and I walked out a different person.
(02:29):
And within two months, I went to the admissions office at my graduate school and I said, give
my fellowship to someone else.
I'm going to be a filmmaker.
Wow.
Where in New York, I'm guessing?
Good guess.
My parents were from New York, but I was actually raised in Philadelphia.
Well, I knew that was the area.
I had grandparents from the Bronx, so I kind of always attuned to anywhere near there.
(02:56):
Let's talk about being a film editor in the 70s.
That's when you did a lot of that stuff.
What did you do?
Now, people that are listening to this, there might be some film junkies out there and people
might have heard the term film editor, but what did you do?
Good question.
My family to this day still thinks that film editors just cut out the bad stuff.
(03:22):
But from our point of view, as film editors, we always felt that we were really the people
who made the movies.
It was as if someone had given you a dictionary full of words, but your job was to arrange
those words in a way that made sense from storytelling point of view and sense from an emotional
(03:44):
point of view.
The editor chooses timing.
They choose focus.
Depending on the film you're working on and who you're working with, you have a fair amount
of independence or basically you're doing just what the director tells you.
But it's usually a collaboration and I worked with several directors who gave me a lot of
(04:09):
freedom.
My first job, for instance, was I was doing film editing for Encyclopedia Britannica back
in the days when they made movies.
Someone gave me 20 hours of footage they had shot from all interesting angles at the Los
Angeles time to make a film called Newspaper Story.
(04:32):
I remember his words to this day and it was over 50 years ago.
He said, there's a movie in here.
Find it.
The job in the editing room is to find all the interesting pieces of film, put them in
order, give it texture, give it momentum, give it timing and tell an interesting story.
(04:57):
What other films did you work on, anything we would know?
I did not work as an editor on any film that you would have heard of for the very simple
reason that back in the 70s, all of the unions were very tightly controlled in Los Angeles.
(05:20):
If you were going to work on a major feature film, you needed to be in the union.
The unions were just beginning to open up to people my age at the end of the 70s when
I left the film industry.
I worked on a lot of documentaries, a lot of educational films.
I worked on just a couple of features right towards the end of my film career.
(05:46):
One of the many reasons that I got out of the film industry is that I knew I would never
get out of the editing room.
There were not that many jobs beyond editing for women in the 70s.
I challenge you to name me five women directors who have achieved fame who were making films
(06:08):
in the 70s.
There are a few and a few very good ones.
But generally, women were assigned, if you got to anything creative, were assigned to
the editing room.
I was going to ask you why you left the business, but you answered that, I think that's part
of it.
(06:29):
I thought we'd, or I should ask you, tell me something about working on a film and you
talked about it a little bit.
Tell us something that the average person would have no idea about editing a film or
putting a film together.
Something the average person wouldn't even think about.
Well, I've given a lot of lectures actually at Amherst Cinema about the process of filmmaking.
(06:55):
The one that comes to mind right away is you think of something like Gene Kelly dancing
in the rain, in Singing in the Rain.
That is completely put together in the editing room.
When he was actually shooting it, he was lip-syncing back to his recording of the song.
It wasn't till you got into the editing room that you add sound effects.
(07:20):
You add the sound of the rain.
You add the splashing of the puddles.
You add the taps.
He literally would stand in front of a screen and watch himself dance and they would record
his feet.
And if he was on the street, his feet would sound one way.
If he was splashing in a puddle, it would sound the other way.
(07:42):
This is all done in the editing room.
It's really amazing.
And most people have no idea when you go to the movies or look at a documentary.
They have no idea about this.
You just look at it and you see the finished product.
But it's the coming together of it that is actually from your standpoint, if you were
doing it, pretty exciting, right?
(08:02):
Oh, when you get a film together and you make it work, it's incredibly exciting.
I can look at films that I edited 50 years ago.
And I still remember, I remember that cut and how easily that worked.
And one of the things that I discovered when I moved to Massachusetts, which is why I started
(08:22):
lecturing at Amherst Cinema about filmmaking, is that people who don't work in the film
industry have no idea how movies are made.
I remember walking out of a movie and I said to a friend, do you realize that movie had
only eight cuts? and they looked at me and they said, what's a cut?
(08:45):
So then I knew I had to kind of explain to people how movies are actually made.
Some great experiences, I think.
How about, and you mentioned it a little bit before, but then you decided to get out of
the film business.
I think I read somewhere you were in that for about nine years, something like that.
Yes.
I know that because you sent me some notes.
(09:06):
I thank you.
Well, I've never given up, as my friends will tell you, I have never given up my love
of filmmaking and film history.
And I still offer talks at Amherst Cinema, but the business was not a fun business to
be in, especially as a woman in the 70s.
I knew I would never get out of the editing room.
(09:30):
And part of me wanted more connection to the real world and real people.
And even if I made a film that had a wonderful lesson or taught something or showed something,
it would be the film that would go out and interact with the audience.
It wouldn't be me.
And I needed more interactions with human beings.
(09:55):
And for a while, I really wasn't sure what I could do.
And again, I've often described my life as like a pinball.
I'm going in one direction and I go to that lecture and suddenly I'm in another direction.
I was on a film shoot on a cruise ship.
(10:17):
We were doing a promotional film for a cruise line.
And someone started talking about her friend who was a midwife.
And I had been pre-med in college.
I had always wanted to be an obstetrician, but I didn't like the way they approached
women's health care.
And I was a staunch feminist.
(10:39):
And I thought, gee, I could become a midwife.
To me, that's amazing because talk about left turns.
I mean, this is crazy.
You mentioned to me one time, I ran into you somewhere in Northampton.
You mentioned that you went to a graduation or rather a reunion.
(11:01):
It was my high school reunion.
A reunion.
That's what it was.
And you said they gave you the award for the biggest change that you made in your life.
I mean, it's amazing from making films to help making babies.
I mean, that's really something.
Well, I'd like to point out that I didn't make babies.
I understand.
I understand.
It's a turn of a frame.
(11:21):
Yeah.
I mean, the real question to me, and I've always said that I am lucky in that it's always
been relatively easy for me to do what I want to do.
It hasn't been that easy for me to know what I want to do, but as soon as I know what I
want to do, I can do it.
(11:42):
And so I thought, all right, I'll become a midwife.
But then I looked around and it's not that easy to become a licensed certified professional
midwife, certified nurse midwife in most states.
You need a nursing degree.
(12:03):
Then you need experience in labor and delivery.
And then you need your training that is prescribed by the American College of Nurse Midwives.
And at this point, I was in my late 20s, early 30s, and I was looking at seven or eight years
of training.
Fortunately, there was a program, and there are several programs like this.
(12:27):
Mine happened to be at Yale University, where in three years, I got the equivalent of a
second bachelor's degree.
They would take you if you had a bachelor's in anything, and mine was in British history
and literature.
They prepared me for nursing, right?
And I got the equivalent of a second bachelor's degree in nursing, and then two years at the
(12:49):
master's level.
So I combined about seven or eight years of training and experience into three, and I
was very lucky to get into that program.
Why do most people use a midwife?
I've always heard the term, I guess I know what you do, kind of, but why do people decide
(13:14):
on a midwife rather than the usual way using a doctor, their own doctor or a specialist
in babies?
Good question.
Those of us who became midwives in my generation, and I'm talking about, I went to school from
1978 to 1981, a lot of us were staunch feminists.
(13:39):
And we felt that women's bodies and women's healthcare had been taken over by a very male
and very scientific model.
And we felt very strongly that that was not the way to approach women's healthcare.
(13:59):
I had been a volunteer at age 14 at an inner city hospital, at Hanuman Hospital in Philadelphia,
where my job was folding linen outside the delivery room.
And I said to the nurse one day, oh, I'd like to see a baby being born.
And she said, well, go right in.
(14:19):
I mean, they had no idea of privacy, nothing.
And even then at the age of 14, I knew there was something wrong with the way healthcare
and especially birthing care was being delivered.
What I saw was mostly young male interns and residents, frankly, abusing very, very frightened,
(14:45):
primarily black teenagers.
And I knew that was wrong.
And then I always thought, well, I'll be an OBGYN and I'm going to change that.
And when I started in pre-med in college, I realized it was going to be the medical
model and that didn't strike me as the right way to approach it.
(15:08):
On the other hand, I wanted to be a licensed professional.
I wanted the medical training, but I wanted to practice differently.
And when I became a midwife, there was a strong movement getting back to quote unquote normal
birthing, letting women actually have their babies without a lot of intervention.
(15:33):
I'd also like to point out that CNM, certified nurse midwives, do not just deliver babies.
We do prenatal care.
We do gynecological care.
We do family planning like inserting IUDs and we have prescriptive authority.
(15:53):
We at the last place I worked, which was at Holyoke Hospital for 30 years, we were the
first to assist at Caesarean Sections.
If our patients needed C-sections, we did the, you know, the surgeon obviously did the
surgery, but we were the surgical assists.
So we also took care of postmenopausal women.
(16:15):
We took care of a lot of broad range gynecology, but in a very, I don't want to say different,
but a very caring way.
Do you get a lot of, or did you get a lot of pushback from the regular medical community
that were not aware or cared about what you were interested in as being a midwife?
(16:37):
Well, that's a very, very good question.
And I think it goes beyond that.
I think especially in a place like Holyoke where there is a very large Puerto Rican community
and a lot of these private doctors didn't know how to direct their care at that community.
(17:02):
Our practice required that we all speak Spanish, that we, you know, that we included the whole
family in the whole process of birthing, but we obviously, we had to work very closely
with the OBGYNs, the pediatricians, the anesthesiologists, the nursing staff.
(17:26):
And the last 20 years, almost 20 years of my career in Holyoke was at the birthing center,
at Holyoke Medical Center.
It was a family.
We had great doctors, great nurses.
We worked together as a team.
And it was very similar to when I worked in the film industry where you're working on
(17:46):
a team.
If you were out shooting a movie, you were a team.
And each person had their job, but they were working for the same goal, same in the birthing
center.
You're a team and everyone works together.
And I loved that.
But you needed people.
You mentioned one of the things you didn't like about the film industry was you were
(18:09):
inside a lot of times.
In a dark room, in a dark room.
And now you're with a team bringing people into existence, which, do you ever go home
over the years, the 31 years, you ever say, wow, I mean, plain and simple, wow, this is
what I did this?
I mean, did you ever get over the idea that what you saw when it was just another day
(18:34):
at work?
I look back now.
I have been retired since 2019.
And I look back and I can't believe that I attended close to 3,000 deliveries.
It still astounds me.
But I didn't do it alone.
I did it with the most incredible team of nurses and midwives and our families, the
(19:02):
women who came to us and brought their families and then brought their sisters and their daughters
and their grandmothers.
It was the most wonderful community.
I cannot imagine practicing in any other community where I would have had the sense of just great
joy.
(19:23):
The other thing I would like to point out, and I grew up in a very academic family.
We never did anything.
We never went outdoors and hiked or skied or rode bikes.
And what I learned from both filmmaking and being a midwife is how much I love to work
with my hands.
All of these had hand skills.
(19:46):
And I loved having those hand skills.
I loved having careers where you could use your hands, your heart, and your brain all
at the same time.
That's a good threesome.
I mean that is a wonderful threesome.
Yeah.
And well, and I was lucky to be able to do that.
Right.
(20:06):
You've got to be a special person to do what you do.
A doctor has to be a special person.
I mean, not everybody can do what you do under the stress that was there in the job.
That's true of doctors, obviously, and midwives.
You know, I was driving around last night.
I knew we were going to talk today.
And I'm thinking, should I ask this question?
(20:28):
And then I said, if I don't, don't think it's the way to go.
So you mentioned you had 3,000 births.
All right.
Now, some babies probably were lost out of a 3,000.
Not all of them were successful births, I'm guessing, unless maybe that's not the case,
(20:52):
but I'm guessing not every birth works out.
How do you, as a human being and somebody that cares, how do you deal with that?
I think about that with doctors, too.
I mean, how do you, you know, for you, it's a day at work, but it's somebody's life and
death and their family.
(21:12):
How do you deal with that?
That's a very good question, because very often when people found out I was a midwife,
they would say, oh, isn't that wonderful?
You have such a joyous, positive experience.
But very often, you would have to tell somebody, I don't hear the heartbeat.
I think you've had, I think you've had a fetal demise, or they'd come in bleeding and I'd
(21:38):
say, I think you're having a miscarriage.
Or they would have a difficult birth and the baby would end up in the nique, or I had a
baby that was doing great and stopped breathing as soon as it was born, because this poor baby
had no lungs.
I mean, you can do everything you want, and there's still going to be some bad outcomes.
(22:04):
And part of what I loved about the job is that there was room for compassion.
How do you deal with that, though?
In other words, okay, you're telling me what happened and you just talked about people
that did not succeed having a baby.
So when you go home that night, how do you deal with the grief that they felt or you
(22:25):
felt?
I've always been fascinated by that.
I remember one day I was in Northampton and I was near the emergency room and I was talking
to some doctors and they were counseling with somebody.
I'm thinking, boy, on the other side of that wall, somebody's living and dying.
And yet they have to go along and live their life and go out to lunch and they can't walk
(22:46):
around being modeling all the time.
So as a human being who cares and obviously 31 years of work, you did.
How do you deal with that?
Boy, that's a good question.
I'm not sure I've ever asked myself other than feeling that in the moment I am as caring
and compassionate as I possibly can be, that I give people the support that I hope they
(23:13):
needed at that time, but then life goes on.
And it goes on for them as well as it goes on.
I personally had a stillbirth.
My first baby was stillborn and it's horrible and it's tragic and some days it's like it
didn't happen and other days it's like it happened yesterday, but life goes on.
(23:37):
You always hear that expression and I guess when somebody's going through it, they're
thinking how can life go on?
In other words, it does over time, but when you're in the moment, you're thinking the
world seems to stop and spin.
I mean, I remember thinking and this is maybe a little bit related, perhaps not.
(23:58):
At the end of my mom's life, it was a nice day.
It was a sunny day.
I knew she wasn't going to be around for probably the rest of the day.
I was going up to the hospital and I'm thinking, this feels like a normal day.
This is a normal day, but it's not a normal day.
I'm putting my shoes on.
I'm putting my pants on.
I'm going to, you know, I'm going out.
(24:19):
I'm going to have breakfast.
It's normal, but it wasn't a normal day because I was going through this or one of your parents
to be are going through this.
It's not a normal day for them or for you.
Yes, but as you say, you walk out of the hospital, the sun is shining, the birds are singing,
(24:40):
and then a few hours later you think, gee, I'm hungry.
I haven't had lunch yet, so you go and have your lunch and life goes on.
It's interesting, so interesting.
I want to change pace if we can because we talked about some really negative things here.
(25:00):
And we talked a lot about transitions in jobs.
You're transitioning from one job from film to being a midwife, but you're retired now,
but you're not finished.
You're involved with Northampton neighbors, which is helping people live in retirement
or in their life, and you're involved with all kinds of things, including technology.
(25:23):
You mentioned you like to work with your hands, and you're helping people, older people, with
computers.
You must have a lot of patience.
I don't mean patience as in the hospital.
I mean patience to deal with the people because older people are frustrated at sometimes by
(25:44):
computers.
We all are.
No matter what, if you don't know how to do something, you're frustrated.
But to some people with computers, it's like, oh my God, what do I do?
And they say, call Nina at Northampton neighbors.
Call Nina.
I was trying to put something.
There's a thing on Northampton neighbors that's called Listserv where you can put some information
(26:06):
on.
And as a matter of fact, I'm putting some information on Northampton neighbors on their Listserv
mentioning our podcast so people can, and I was talking to somebody and I said, how
do I do that?
And she said, I think you're doing an interview with Nina tomorrow.
Ask Nina.
So everybody, this sounds like a TV show.
(26:28):
Ladies and gentlemen, ask Nina.
What are you doing in Northampton neighbors?
Let me start by saying that if I had a dollar for every senior who had said to me, I'm so
stupid I can't do this.
I would have a lot of dollars.
To me, computers are like a foreign language.
It's very hard to learn a foreign language at our age.
(26:53):
But it's really easy to learn a foreign language when you're young, which is why all our kids
and grandchildren can run circles around us when it comes to tech.
I have been talking computer for 40 years.
I got my first actually more than 40 years.
I started with an Osborne and then I had a K-Pro too.
(27:15):
I mean, these are old computers and I loved them and I decided that they weren't going
to intimidate me.
So I've been speaking computer for a long time.
I'm a little more fluent than most people our age.
What's the bigot?
Let's go, we could go on this topic for an hour and a half.
(27:37):
I'm sure I could pick your brain and I would learn something immediately.
But what are some of the biggest problems people have other than the fear of, oh my
goodness, it's a machine.
What do I do if I hit F9?
Is the computer going to blow up?
Beside that.
You cannot break your computer.
You cannot break your computer.
(27:58):
That's the one thing I say to people.
But the biggest problem is especially at our age, getting people to feel comfortable with
tech.
And then of course we had this huge problem during COVID when people really needed tech
to communicate with the outside world.
(28:19):
I still remember going to a meeting in March of 2020, last in-person meeting before COVID
really hit where everyone's going, how are we going?
This is with Northampton neighbors.
How are we going to help our seniors?
And I remember sitting at that meeting and saying, I've heard of this thing called Zoom.
(28:39):
Why don't I look into it and maybe I can be the Zoom master for Northampton neighbors.
So we got Zoom going.
And then once there were vaccinations and we went out, I started going into people's
homes and showing them how to transfer their files and showing them how to get rid of viruses
(29:02):
and unjamming their printers and doing all kinds of things.
Then the next big thing that really upset me was the digital divide.
And not just the digital divide between people who understood it and didn't, but the people
who couldn't afford the technology.
(29:23):
So we started what we call the Laptop Exchange Program where people would give us their old
laptops and we would wipe them clean and open them up, put in new hard drives, add some
RAM, maybe fix something else, reinstall the operating system and give them out to people
who couldn't afford that level of technology.
(29:46):
And we've done that with over 60 laptops in the last couple of years.
We're going to be up against the clock.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I could go on forever.
No, no, no.
I could talk about this forever.
This is great.
I mean, your story is so interesting and so varied.
I think it's wonderful.
I'm so glad you're here today.
Before we go, though, I know you did a program for Northampton neighbors telling them how
(30:09):
to save a little bit of money with their computer.
Give me just only two quick ideas that people can do to maybe save some money with their
computer.
Well, it was really the talk I gave yesterday was how to save money and not pay Comcast.
So much because so many people are spending over $200 a month with Comcast.
(30:35):
And there are many ways to do that, even if you stay with Comcast.
Can we broaden it out?
Because when we do something like this, I don't know who's going to hear this.
So not everybody deals with Comcast.
A lot of people in Franklin County, I don't think they have Comcast, perhaps.
So give us a couple ideas, generally speaking, that broaden it out, if you will.
(30:59):
Well, a couple of the things that I talked about on my talk yesterday is you don't have
to pay so much for a TV package.
If you're buying a TV package, you can stream that with packages.
If you have a smart TV or a computer, you can get something like Slang or Hulu Plus
(31:19):
or TV or whatever.
And you can put up an antenna.
Now you can't get a whole lot with an over-the-air antenna.
You can put it on your roof or there's indoor antennas.
But you can get a fair number of your local channels that are still required to broadcast
(31:39):
their signal.
So that was one way using that.
And the other was to negotiate with whoever is your provider.
You call them up and you say, I don't want to pay this much and they will offer you a
lower price.
I didn't think they would do that.
Somebody told me they tried that and they didn't have any luck.
(32:00):
So I wondered if that would actually work.
Well, I gave a lot of examples in the talk I gave and it is recorded.
And if people go to the Northampton Neighbor's YouTube channel, they'll find the talk I gave.
Terrific.
So somebody, no matter where they are listening to this, and I know a lot of people with podcasts
(32:22):
tell other people about it, but they could be in Cleveland.
So we don't know who's listening on a particular day, but that's good.
Go to YouTube, Northampton Neighbor's and you'll hear Nina's words of wisdom.
Well, I don't know if they're words of wisdom, but they're pretty practical about different
ways to get Wi-Fi and TV and telephone into your house without spending a fortune.
(32:49):
I want to thank you for being here.
We probably could go on till next Tuesday.
Lots to talk about.
You're obviously an interesting lady and I'm going to keep your number on speed dial because
I'll probably need help with the computers.
Nina, Kleinberg, thanks so much for joining us and being with us on Backyard Oasis.
(33:11):
It was a pleasure to be here.
Thanks, Dennis.
This concludes today's podcast.
We're always looking for new ideas, so feel free to reach out to Judy Raper, Associate
Dean of Community Engagement at Greenfield Community College at 413-775-1819.
If you have an idea, you'd love to share.
(33:34):
Special thanks to the creators of Backyard Oasis, Denise Schwartz, Chad Fuller, Dennis
Lee, and Christine Copeland.
Have a great day.
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