Cleanup in Puerto Rico gets much praise
Pondering last week’s photographs of President Trump tossing rolls of paper towels to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, Chris Morano quoted former Michigan Rep. John Dingell’s Tweet: “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brawny.”
Leaving a performance of “Beauty and the Beast” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Richard Leslie overheard the woman behind him say to her companion, “Now that was a play . ... I fell asleep three times in ‘Hamilton.’ ”
Banishing all thoughts of scatological and pornographic references, Karen
Rhodes’ description of the new Salesforce Tower as a baby bottle without a nipple sent me down a whole new path. Why, it’s the handle of a Sonicare. Nope, says Joan Zawaski, it’s a Sharpie. On Wednesday, Oct. 4, Greg Zompolis was at Neal’s Coffee Shop in Burlingame when he heard a woman eyeing the Halloween decorations say to her friend, “I don’t know why everybody decorates this early for Christmas.” “No,” said the friend, “those are for Thanksgiving.”
Attending a Philip Glass concert in Carmel, Edith Kimbell overheard another music-lover say, “I love watching the strings adjust the volume knobs on their instruments at the beginning of a concert.” (At the sound of the oboe’s “A,” and everyone adjusting the “volume.”)
EatDrinkFilms.com, the online magazine created by Telluride co-founder Gary Meyer, includes Risa Nye’s notes on the recent Telluride Film Festival. This year’s panel discussion on “Real Life Wonder Women” included Billie Jean King (whose tennis match with Bobby Riggs is the subject of “The Battle of the Sexes”), Angelina Jolie (whose new movie is “First They Killed My Father,” about Cambodia), Alice Waters (whose new memoir is “Coming to My Senses”), and Natalie Portman (coproducer/narrator of the documentary “Eating Animals”). The moderator was Peter Sellars, whom Nye described as a “Telluride perennial ... there to moderate and (occasionally) mansplain”).
King, still fighting to empower women, said, “Let’s get on it, kids!” reports Nye. “We’re not just helping women, we’re helping the world. Vote! ... Hang out with old people!” Nye’s notes included the revelation that in preparation for the panel discussion, Waters insisted that plastic bottles of water be “removed from the stage and replaced with glasses of water.”
In the first five minutes after you met Judy Stone, the former Chronicle editor and movie writer who died at 93 last week, she let you know that she was the sister of the idolized muckraking journalist I.F. Stone.
Immediately, that served to establish her left-wing credentials, in keeping with her preference for independent movies over blockbusters, her passion for the works of Eastern European directors. But the pride she took in her brother also demonstrated that this feisty and peppery woman remained — even as she grew older — the baby sister who knew she was beloved by her family and later by friends.
Judy loved a good party, delicious food, ethnic jewelry ... but her love for movies transcended it all, and was so apparent to those she interviewed that she often forged long friendships from those professional encounters.
Like any adored “baby sister,” she could be demanding: A tiny woman, she’d take a seat at a movie screening behind someone already sitting, and then order that person to move because she couldn’t see. She asked publicists and theater owners to feed parking meters while she watched movies. After publication of “Eye on the World,” she’d show up at film festival events with a shopping bag full of books, in case anyone wanted to buy one. Chronicle legend had it that one Sunday she called the office and dictated a shopping list to a copy clerk who was asked to buy her a chicken and deliver it to her house.
But while she had lots of chutzpah, there was nothing tough about her. Her eyes would fill with tears describing a plot, or talking about some ethnic group’s political plight. And almost every time her brother came to town, she hosted a party for him, beaming as she urged guests to eat.
She wasn’t the kind of movie lover who cared about meeting the latest ingenue or matinee idol. She had her own place in the San Francisco movie community, a thread that made the tapestry richer. The Roxie’s Rick Norris emailed Gary Meyer on the day she died that he had put money in the parking meter outside the theater in her memory.