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I fell in love with Annabella Sciorra back when we had HBO, which meant whenever the Mets’ bullpen was blowing a lead I could channel-surf movies.
One night I happened upon an essentially corny tale about two people who have divorced but remain involved in each other’s lives. That’s all you need to know. Somehow or other, she and her new beau are at a charity fund-raiser and are called up to sing, while her ex sits with his new lady friend. The former wife is Annabella Sciorra, previously unknown to me, and heartbreakingly adorable. She shakes her gorgeous ringlets and modestly hits the right notes for the popular “I Say a Little Prayer,” recorded by Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin, both great. Somehow, two women materialize from behind a curtain, in nurses’ outfits, singing backup, like two-thirds of the Supremes. In a front row, the ex-husband, Matt Dillon, is sitting with his new lady, Mary-Louise Parker, and Dillon suddenly realizes he has made a terrible mistake in divorcing this girl, and he glowers (apparently his only facial expression in any movie) and his lady friend glances sideways and susses the situation: Poor glowering Matt is in love. By that time, so are many other persons of the XY chromosome persuasion, including me. I don’t know how that movie turned out because I invariably tuned back to see how the Mets blew another game, but Annabella Sciorra is now permanently in my memory. Let us fast-forward to this Thursday when Ms. Sciorra testified in court that Harvey Weinstein raped her back in 1993 or '94 and terrorized her for months or years afterward. She is a witness in the trial of this monster, who is accused of raping and haunting dozens of other women. Her agony is on the public record, she and friends talking about how her career suffered, her personality changed, after the alleged assaults by Weinstein. She was never the same, some friends have said. This makes me feel guilty for following her in her time with “The Sopranos,” when she was the femme-fatale luxury-car saleswoman who takes up with Tony Soprano, who beats her up, just before her tragic end. Given what we know now, how awful to play that role. The best role Annabella Sciorra plays now is that of witness. This is what that man did. Her testimony will perhaps make every man question something he said, or did, without ever getting anywhere near Weinstein levels. Reading what she went through brings out the vigilante impulse, but there’s enough of that floating around. Brava to Ms. Sciorra for going public, after decades of terror. No quick justice for Harvey Weinstein, now a lumbering old man, allegedly with back troubles. May he push his walker into jail, for a very long sentence surrounded by inmates who, in the pecking order of prisons, don’t like his kind. From this Annabella Sciorra fan, my toast to Harvey Weinstein: “Cent’Anni.” One hundred years. In the slammer. * * * Sciorra talks about Weinstein, interview by Ronan Farrow: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/weighing-the-costs-of-speaking-out-about-harvey-weinstein Movie review: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/15/movies/a-story-of-electricity-men-women-and-con-ed.html Weinstein trial: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/nyregion/harvey-weinstein-annabella-sciorra-trial.html?searchResultPosition=1
John McDermott
1/24/2020 09:48:26 am
Harvey should share a cell with Dr. Cosby.
Randolph
1/24/2020 10:08:46 am
George,
Hansen Alexander
1/24/2020 10:50:07 am
A powerful editorial George. And an appropriate one. While the also implicated President of the United States pushes back against TheMeToo Movement, we are witnessing its victims in live testimony. And you use the correct word to describe Weinstein, Trump, and all the others: Monster. This is truly the ugly and sickening side of he story of women's attempt to gain equality in the last two generations.
George Vecsey
1/24/2020 11:50:08 am
John, Cosby, another creep. I interviewed him years ago when he was getting an away from the Football Foundation. What were we doing?
John McDermott
1/24/2020 01:43:52 pm
George, you know I grew up in Philly where Bill Cosby was one of our local heroes and an icon. And he abd his wife did do a lot of good with their generous donations to educational institutions and other causes. But behind the “Cos” facade there was always a sexual predator lurking. So Cosby ended up where he belongs. May Weinstein soon join him.
Mike from a quaint part of Queens! >:)
1/25/2020 12:41:47 am
GV, I appreciate this piece, the artsy part and more important, the arrows for Weinstein, I saw the walker thing, at the risk of being nasty, uncanny timing.
george
1/25/2020 11:45:39 pm
george, Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html |
