My mother was born in Montgomery, Ala., in December 1948. My grandparents could have given her a popular midcentury name like Linda or Nancy or Barbara, meaning “beautiful,” “gracious” or “protectress,” but they chose to call her Amy Ruth Garvin, meaning “a beloved companion of a rough or cruel fate.”
“It’s been exhausting,” Rebecca Pidgeon said of starring in David Mamet’s dialogue-heavy, two-woman play, “The Anarchist,” at Theatre Asylum through May 23. Pidgeon, who is married to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mamet (“Glengarry Glen Ross,” “American Buffalo”), plays a prison warden tasked with deciding whether a Weather Underground-type terrorist incarcerated for 35 years now deserves parole.
Reality television shows starring women are not usually flattering. They’re full of women physically assaulting one another, getting Botox injections and spending loads of money on fur coats and jewelry.
Dustin Hoffman famously tells the story that he prepared for a torture scene in “Marathon Man” by going without sleep for three days so he would look properly spent in front of the camera.
Question: What do Isaac, Jacob and Moses have in common?\n\nGreat wisdom? Beards? Jewish mothers?\n\nAnswer: None of them would have been qualified to serve as a “Kohen,” a priest in biblical Israel.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.