Rosanne Cash gets to meet a ‘real hero’
Will Parrinello and John Antonelli of the Mill Valley Film Group have long made the informative and emotionally engaging videos describing the work of Goldman Environmental Prize winners; they’re always shown at the prize ceremonies. Each video describes the work of one winner. This year’s North American winner was LeeAnne Walters, whose investigations helped to expose dangerous levels of lead contamination in the water of her hometown, Flint, Mich.
During prize week, when Parrinello and Walters realized they both had Sicilian roots, and both had grown up in working-class East Coast families, they and their spouses befriended each other.
A few weeks after the prizes were bestowed, the Flint couple were in the Bay Area again, on their way to and from an environmental conference in Carmel Valley. They hoped to arrange a dinner date with the Mill Valley couple, but Parrinello and his wife had tickets on the preferred night to see Rosanne Cash at SFJazz.
The Walterses are big fans, but the show was sold out. Happily, when Parrinello explained to SFJazz staffers that the tickets were for heroic Goldman prize winners, two extra seats were found. “She’s not comfortable playing that card for personal gain,” Parrinello said of Walters, but the visitors were thrilled to learn they’d be able to attend.
The show was terrific, its high point being an emotional Cash singing her dad’s song “I Walk the Line.” Afterward, SFJazz’s Barrett Shaver took the two couples backstage to meet the singer. “Your show was so emotional, you made us cry,” Walters said to Cash. “You’re the real hero!” Cash said when she learned of Walters’ actions in Flint. “Thank you so much for the work you do to protect all of us.”
Walters, says Parrinello, was typically self-effacing. “You’d do the same thing if your kids were being poisoned,” she told the singer.
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⏩ Sports Emmys were given out in New York last week, with two Bay Area brothers nominated in the reporting category. Both nominees had reported their projects for E:60 and ESPN the Magazine. Steve Fainaru was nominated as reporter for “The Dictator’s Team,” a story about a soccer team in Syria; and Mark FainaruWada, who used to work for The Chronicle, was nominated for a story on Ricky Dixon, an NFL player with ALS. Steve took home the prize.
⏩ Renowned psychologist Paul Ekman, an expert in the reading of facial expression, went to see “Two Minds,” Lynne Kaufman’s new play at the Marsh (until June 9). The play is about the collaboration and conflict between Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and MacArthur grant winner Amos Tversky, on studies of how people make decisions. Ekman, who’d been acquainted with both, told the playwright she’d made Kahneman more affable than he was in real life.
Meanwhile, Ekman will be talking about “Moving Toward Global Compassion,” in conversation with the livestreamed Dalai Lama, at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 17, at Cole Hall Auditorium at UCSF. More information: http:// dalailamapaulekman.com
“You’re not letting me be a toxic person. It’s not fair.”
Woman to man, overheard in New Orleans by Karen Rhodes
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David Duchovny, who came to town to promote his new novel, “Miss Subways,” appeared in conversation with Chronicle book editor John McMurtrie at Books Inc. in Opera Plaza. The book, about a New York woman who often takes the subway, is a love letter to New York, reports Adrienne Biggs, who was the escort assigned to take the author to appointments.
Anyway, its title will evoke nostalgia in New Yorkers old enough to remember ads in every New York subway car for the Miss Subways competition. The winner was selected at first by contest organizers, later by postcard vote, even later by phone vote.
“Was there ever a Mr. Subway?” McMurtrie asked, which led to a pondering of the whole concept. “You don’t have a subway system in San Francisco, right?” asked the author. “There’s Muni,” said the editor, “... and BART.”
And thereupon they landed: What about a modern version of Miss Subways, set in the City by the Bay: Miss Muni and Mr. BART? Or, in these enlightened times, Miss Muni and Miss BART, Mr. Muni and Mr. BART?
Maybe San Francisco commuters can bring back the glory days of the New York subways. Oh, wait a minute, now I remember: Standing on the platform, fingers and toes freezing, looking down the tracks in hopes that the Sea Beach will arrive . ... Maybe they weren’t so glorious at all.