But Shirley stipulated that he didn’t want the story told until after his death. “I’m gonna make it one day.” In his 20s, Vallelonga, an actor and occasional screenwriter, interviewed his father and Shirley about how these two men from starkly different backgrounds navigated the racism they encountered. “That’s an unbelievable movie,” he remembers thinking. As a child Vallelonga visited Shirley in his studio in Manhattan and heard stories about their trip. After they returned more than a year later, the men lived their separate lives-Shirley played to acclaim in Europe and Lip became an actor-but they remained friends. Vallelonga was 5 years old when his father headed out on the road with the pianist.

“My father said it was almost on a daily basis they would get stopped, because a white man was driving a black man,” recalls Lip’s son Nick Vallelonga, who has turned their journey into Green Book, a new film garnering Oscar buzz. When the trio set out on another tour later that year, Shirley hired a white driver, a gregarious Italian-American bouncer known as Tony Lip, to handle problems that might arise in the “sundown towns” of the North and the Jim Crow-era South. A hateful sign stood at Manitowoc’s city limits: “N-, don’t let the sun go down on you in our town.” Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali star in Green Book, a film inspired by a true friendship that transcended race, class, and the 1962 Mason-Dixon line. The program of show tunes, jazz and classical music, the local paper reported, was “brilliant and exciting and warmly received by the large crowd.” But its famed leader and pianist, Don Shirley, who was black, knew his welcome was conditional. It was well after dark on a Saturday night in January 1963 when the Don Shirley Trio took the stage in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Who is eligible for a Green Pass and what is its validity Vaccinated people: Those vaccinated with three doses one full week from the date of the third dose. Viggo Mortensen (left) and Mahershala Ali star in Green Book.

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