A conversation with Natalie Portman

When people hear I go out with someone from Columbia, their first response is to be afraid for me. "Isn't that right near Harlem??" Yes it is, and it is terrifying. Just going outside means chancing your life; one false move and your brain matter is a fresh coating for the crumbling Gothic university walls.

I don't know whose bright idea it was to build an Ivy League university in the middle of Manhattan's very own South Central, but it must have been the same Einstein who put The Bronx Zoo in The Bronx.

This danger element adds a poignancy to the teaching at Columbia. Professors spend all this time ballooning these young brains with knowledge, even though half of what they teach is soon scattered into bits on the pavement. It's humbling for professors to witness their words blasted into the wind so literally, and I think they're a lot more philosophical because of it. Plus they could die at any second too.

Obviously, most celebrities are afraid to speak here, but some have the guts. I saw President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak a few weeks ago. The CIA had convinced Columbia President Lee Bollinger to invite the totalitarian leader, expecting him to get shot down in a random drive-by or a drug-related turf war or something. But Ahmadinejad had more street cred than the CIA had accounted for, and he's back in Iran, ruling again.

Today it was Natalie Portman who braved it here. No, she wasn't here to publicize "Garden State" or discuss whether she was naked in "Hotel Chevalier".  She was here to discuss the problem afflicting many developing countries: the plague called micro-finance.

The lecture was free to Columbia students, so I signed up under a false alias and borrowed a student's ID. On the way to the building, I heard a student saying, "Facism on the Columbia Campus" and passing out fliers. I figured this must be about Natalie Portman, but I took a flier and apparently this student was promoting David Horowitz and his Islamo-Facism awareness week.

The Natalie Portman event took place in a fairly small lecture room, and I got there fairly early, but the first row was reserved, and the best seats in the second row were taken. So I went to the third row.

Eventually the room was full but not over-crowded. Either this wasn't well-known, or everyone had already seen Natalie Portman speak about micro-finance at Berkley or NYU. OR... the idea of seeing a beloved celebrity pitching a cause rather than talk about her favorite movie kiss was too frustrating a prospect for Columbia's die-hard Natalie Portman fans.

Natalie Portman did show up, her hair creeping down her neck again (finally recovering from that V for Vendetta shaved-hair catastrophy that should have been called F for Faux Pas), wearing what appeared to be a potato sack on crack.

Her mom was there too - blond streaks highlighting her light brown hair - sitting in the exact seat I tried to take before I realized it was reserved. Her mom kind of looked like Leslie, my old boss from Angelica Kitchen, except that Natalie Portman's mom seemed more approachable. She was proud of her little girl who - like many actors and actresses before her - had temporarily put aside her childish games of make-believe for something much more important: in this case, the scourge of the day, micro-finance.

Also sitting in the reserved seats were two people Natalie Portman later introduced as her friends, and they were easily the two dorkiest-looking people I've ever seen. She probably met them before she was famous, which would make them the only friends she can trust.

There were two chairs on stage. One for Natalie Portman, the other for a Columbia student who purported to be a micro-finance expert. Yeah, sure, just like us experts in the audience, eager to hear our fellow colleague present her research. The Columbia guy went to the mic and introduced Natalie Portman, never once mentioning Mars Attacks! or Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

Then he showed a video featuring Natalie Portman somewhere in Africa, on top of a mountain, her knees pulled to her chest,  intimately looking into the camera (as the sound person apparently knocked the mic into various objects), musing about the poor people she'd met on her journey and how they've taught her that exploitative micro-finance organizations like FINCA need to forgive all their loans.

The real Natalie Portman in the room didn't seem to know what to do while this video played. Sometimes she looked at the ground, sometimes at the audience, and sometimes at the screen. It would have been less awkward if she had lip-synced to herself speaking in the video.

The video was short, and afterward Natalie Portman apologized for "not being as articulate as might have been expected" in it. Expected by whom? We all knew she was an actress dabbling into issues outside her realm of understanding. Who was expecting anything?

She opened her lecture with the story of how she learned about micro-finance. A friend of hers was "affected by violence in Israel," and when Natalie Portman heard about it, she felt powerless. What could she do about such problems in the world? Well, what any of us would do. She spoke to Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan. While recalling the royal conversation, Natalie Portman called the Queen of Jordan "one of the most eloquent Palestinians I know," which suggests that she doesn't know a single Palestinian.

Queen Rania Al-Abdullah told Natalie Portman about the problem of micro-finance, which then led Natalie Portman to that mountain in Africa. What this had to do with violence in Israel, I'm not sure, except that Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan obviously didn't want Natalie Portman meddling in the Middle East.

Natalie Portman didn't go on too long before the Columbia guy introduced what he wanted to be "a conversation between us and Natalie Portman, rather than a Q&A," but which seemed to me to be a standard Q&A. Except that nobody got tazed.

The first "victim" to the mic was an overly-earnest kid who thanked Natalie Portman for her work against micro-finance, and lambasted his own friends for knowing about such things "but being happy to turn a blind eye to them." I hate to see someone sacrificing their friends to impress a celebrity, but in this case it backfired, because Natalie Portman adroitly responded, "What does it say about you, that you're friends with people like this?"

That was probably the most interesting exchange of the day, as most of the questions involved fawning over Natalie Portman and pretending to care about micro-finance, someone even claiming to have stopped micro-finance in Israel, one-upping Natalie Portman's own crusade by combining it with the Middle East.

When I couldn't take any more nonsense, I went to the mic and asked, "What's the greatest act of charity you've done lately? Going to these poor African countries and rescuing them from the quagmire of micro-finance? Or being in Hotel Chevalier to try to rescue Wes Anderson's disastrous career?"

"That's a really good question," Natalie Portman said, and gave the mic to someone from her charity entourage, who talked about these "micro-finance" loans that are intentionally targeted toward desperately poor people who don't know how to manage money, starting as low as $50 to make sure they can't do anything productive with it, and since the micro-finance loan victims are so high-risk, the interest doubles and triples and quadruples almost instantly, and they will never be able to pay it off, since the loan wasn't enough to start anything worthwhile in the first place.

"Thanks, Natalie!" I said, when her micro-finance friend was done. "You were so sexy in The Professional, I mean, Leon! Think you'll ever work with Luc Besson again?" But Natalie Portman's mom shook her head at me with a scolding glare, and anyway, the event was coming to a close. The Columbia guy wrapped it up, and Natalie Portman tried to escape before the crowds could close in.

The first guy who bashed his apathetic friends offered Natalie Portman his V for Vendetta book to sign, but she declined - her movie career being passe to her now - leaving him to look like the hypocritical, phony do-gooder fool he was.

Preach on, Natalie.

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She went to Havard and got a degree in psychology, put off her movie career to do so. Is an Israel, born in Jerusalem and grew up between there and the states, her knowledge of violence isn't just from a secondary source, it's from her own experience too. She's smart and knowledgeable and knows her stuff, even Fareed Zakaria agreed, and he's not a fan of celebrities like that.

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I'd heard that too. But maybe that was before she went all around the world and saw the "reality" of it.