Even Planet Uranus knows Eve Ensler wrote “The Vagina Monologues.” That was ’96. Back again with “In the Body of the World,” she says:
“I travel constantly, a nomadic lifestyle, nine months a year. I actually live all over and spend much time in the Congo. I move with one bag — not carry-on. This I wrote by hand in my quiet, beautiful Paris apartment. I’m able to write there from 10 a.m. to 4.
“It’s a memoir. How we connect our bodies to the earth. My journey after surgery. I was abused as a child. The worst violence. Shattered as a result, it’s why I got sick and it landed inside me. I was pricked, prodded, operated on and chemo’d. Putting that poison into me was transformational. It burned away all the bad things in my life. My bones became porous. It was like drilling in an oil field.
“And always I’ve tried to get back to my body.
“Everyone gets excited about the strange word vagina. It resonates. It’s our source of pleasure. Freedom. Movement. Vitality. Access to everything. Where we were born. The appropriate word is vulva. Had I called it ‘The Vulva Monologues,’ nobody’d have come.
“My earlier life was surviving an onslaught of big rejection. New York’s a tough place. Brutal. My first play about a cat one critic labeled ‘a dog.’ Stuff like that forces you to learn your craft.
“Now writing and massages keep me alive. I do yoga, sometimes five-hour treatments, wherever I can around the world. And I tell people, don’t look for a big grand love. Everyone keeps looking for it. All the love I always searched for is right here. My friends. Board members. They’re my world community.”
About actor Dylan McDermott, whom she legally adopted when he was 15: “He’s great. A wonderful person. We’re family. I’ve been his mother 35 years.”
About this new book published yesterday: “I’m doing a book tour. I give half of what I make away. And I’m writing my new play ‘Emotional Creature’ about my experiences in Africa and India.”
NOW, this Miranda/not Miranda hullabaloo with that beast brother still breathing in the hospital:
Specialists say the legal issue isn’t whether suspects are apprised of their rights. It’s whether their answers are admissible in court.
A public safety exception was carved in 1982. Sol Wachtler, then former chief judge of New York’s highest Court of Appeals, ruled that “overriding considerations of public safety might warrant questioning without first advising suspects of their rights . . . Prosecutors must prove some public safety threat to justify failing to tell a suspect the right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer before interrogation . . . but resolving immediate emergencies is as far as we should go in delaying Miranda or creating exceptions to it.”
The United States Supreme Court then embraced Wachtler’s “emergency exception” to Miranda, allowing police to defuse a dangerous situation before administering the warning.
Joanna Wright, author of a 2011 Columbia Law Review article on this exemption: “To the extent that Tsarnaev worked in concert with others or had information about potential future attacks, the government would argue that an imminent threat still existed and therefore the exemption was justified.”
WILL Smith and Beyoncé’s husband Mr. Carter producing an “Annie” movie remake. Jamie Foxx is maybe Daddy Warbucks. It’s at least one thing not happening from that other Mr. Carter, who’s producing everything, Vanity Fair’s Graydon . . . Late Cambodian king Sihanouk’s daughter HRH Princess Norodom Devi in town for her country’s ballet festival.
DAVID Rockwell, who designed the Tom Hanks play set, designed the “Kinky Boots” set, designs everything everywhere, just designed and opened the old, unused, dusty mezzanine Public Theater space, which houses original ’60s drawings of the building’s conversion. He explains it aesthetically: “Before or after theater come to this library bar for a nosh.”
And is he expecting another Tony? “I don’t know. I’m planning to act humble.”
THE 2015 spring will bring the show “Houdini.” Award-winning Jack O’Brien directs, award-winning Rockwell, who loves magic, designs. Award-winning Stephen Schwartz does the score.
O’Brien: “It’s not a period piece. Based on the magician’s life, it’s created around the main character.” How about the tricks? “Not difficult. Guys in Vegas perform those. We know how to do them all because he’s explained them all.
“We’ve researched Houdini’s extraordinary life. One thing he wanted was to get in touch with his mother, and this subject fascinates people. After World War I, many wanted to get in touch with those they lost. Conan Doyle was a spiritualist. Coolidge was a spiritualist.”
Yeah, but they’re all gone and can’t buy tickets to the show.
“Please. You know how many spiritualists are around? In the USA alone, 20 million.”
ON the IRT. A Jewish gentleman said he proposed to his Christian girlfriend and “She accepted on the proviso she doesn’t have to eat Chinese food twice a week.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.