News for today's 2018

KOSOVO: NATURAL RESOURCES JACKPOT?

1:27 PM Tukiyooo 0

<br /> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrt6he-wOSiqT5S-tT7Wdn1zxmMDt7MuOWLSHj0QGlYmc5AuycWy25Ean2iDV_6vyxmE1iddLdpaIqg9xma_lRc9Ym7LWdtvAQ5aInWn8rTBJ5T1ltjzP3MQKBXilVAV5PR-iNzatRLmza/s1600/rs-ks@al.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrt6he-wOSiqT5S-tT7Wdn1zxmMDt7MuOWLSHj0QGlYmc5AuycWy25Ean2iDV_6vyxmE1iddLdpaIqg9xma_lRc9Ym7LWdtvAQ5aInWn8rTBJ5T1ltjzP3MQKBXilVAV5PR-iNzatRLmza/s320/rs-ks@al.gif" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">FIRE SALE: “PRIVATIZING” KOSOVO, THE MADELEINE ALBRIGHT WAY</span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Source: GSI</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The Balkan states of ALBANIA and KOSOVO are, without doubt, the most pro-AMERICAN Muslim-majority countries in the world.</span> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">According to a new census including religious affiliation – the first since 1930 – ALBANIA now counts 57% of its total population of 2.8 million as Muslim, down from 70% eighty-two years ago. Its Catholic population has remained stable at 10%, and ALBANIAN citizens identifying themselves as Orthodox Christians have fallen from 20% in 1930 to about 7%.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Although KOSOVO does not tally figures for religious communities, the Muslim share of the population is thought to be larger, at around 80%. Both republics are secular.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">TURKISH PRESSURE ON ALBANIA TO VOTE “YES” FOR PALESTINIAN OBSERVER SEAT IN THE UNITED NATIONS</span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">AMERICANS are beloved in ALBANIA thanks to a significant history of ALBANIAN immigration and success in AMERICA, and early contributions by ALBANIANS in the U.S. to the national movement for freedom from the OTTOMAN EMPIRE. At the end of November, the ALBANIAN government of Prime Minister Sali Berisha was prepared to vote with the U.S. against a Palestinian observer seat in the United Nations, and, following unsuccessful pressure to vote “yes,” from the TURKISH Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ALBANIA became the sole Muslim-majority UN member to abstain on the Palestinian issue.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">KOSOVO does not belong to the UN, although if it did, it might likely have followed the AMERICAN lead and voted against the Palestinian bid, which was supported, among the ex-YUGOSLAV successor states, only by SERBIA. The ALBANIANS of KOSOVO have expressed undiluted appreciation for the actions of the Clinton administration, represented by then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and former General Wesley Clark as Supreme Allied Commander for Europe at NATO, in the 1998-99 military intervention that rescued the KOSOVAR ALBANIANS from SERBIAN repression.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Its pro-AMERICAN stance has caused the KOSOVO Republic to be denied diplomatic recognition by most of the Arab states. The late LIBYAN dictator Mu’ammar Al-Qadhdhafi dismissed the KOSOVARS contemptuously as “AMERICAN lapdogs.”</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">ENERGY QUEST: KOSOVO</span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Recently, however, Albright and others have commenced new efforts at involvement in KOSOVO that left local people concerned about the intentions of their benefactors of more than a decade past. In <i>The New York Times</i> on December 12, Matthew Brunwasser wrote under a page-one headline, “That Crush at KOSOVO’S Business Door? The Return of U.S. Heroes.” The <i>Times</i> account described Albright and James W. Pardew, a special envoy sent to the Balkans by President Bill Clinton, offering competing bids for privatization of the KOSOVO state postal and telecommunications agency, known as PTK (from its ALBANIAN and SERBIAN initials).</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">KOSOVO COAL MINES: POTENTIAL FOR SYNTHETIC FUEL PRODUCTION</span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCT8QSUslH33rD9UP2lUPJtE3tYdN6HdT8tyqx1hPWCvHWBfe6BVJnEdE7dZteymv7v99kqOBBrswedpdt3bKDbSWjwZDvVCPy4gLiboAtn2tSg9QA72GmQMRNWJDF_PZJ3AohOCxVd3UO/s1600/Outcrop_Showing_Layering_of_Lignite_and_Consolidated_Calcareous_Mud.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCT8QSUslH33rD9UP2lUPJtE3tYdN6HdT8tyqx1hPWCvHWBfe6BVJnEdE7dZteymv7v99kqOBBrswedpdt3bKDbSWjwZDvVCPy4gLiboAtn2tSg9QA72GmQMRNWJDF_PZJ3AohOCxVd3UO/s1600/Outcrop_Showing_Layering_of_Lignite_and_Consolidated_Calcareous_Mud.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Coal mining in Kosovo</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">General Wesley Clark, chairman of Envidity, a CANADIAN firm interested in KOSOVO’S coal mines and potential for synthetic fuel production, has also gone to KOSOVO in search of financial advantage. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">But Albright’s involvement has given her the highest profile in the discussion of KOSOVO’S economic future. According to the <i>Times</i>, “Albright Capital Management, founded by Ms. Albright, has been shortlisted in the bidding for a 75 % share in PTK.” </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The<i>Times</i> estimates the probable payout to KOSOVO political leaders for PTK, if a deal is consummated, at “between $400 million and $800 million.” Officials of another Albright entity, Albright Stonebridge Group, have a minor share in PTK’s only competitor, the private company IPKO, based in SLOVENIA. <i>Times</i> correspondent Brunwasser wrote that the situation could “threaten… market competition if Ms. Albright’s consortium wins the bid” for PTK.”</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Privatization in post-Communist economies often presents multiple problems: State enterprises may be handed over to individuals or groups favored by the prior dictatorial authorities, as has allegedly occurred in SLOVAKIA, previously a part of CZECHOSLOVAKIA. Government-owned companies may also be privatized, turned profitable, and then re-nationalized by authoritarian rulers. In RUSSIA, the Yukos oil company was branded an example of “oligarchic privatization” and taken over by the government of Vladimir Putin, only to be bankrupted between 2003-2007.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">“VOUCHER” PRIVATIZATION</span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The abolition of statist “command” economics has most often been considered a positive outcome in any context. Some observers have advocated “voucher” privatization, through which shares in government-controlled companies are distributed to all the citizens of a country, either free or at a low cost. “Voucher” privatization succeeded most notably in the CZECH Republic.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">KOSOVO is among the poorest countries in EUROPE, with the growth of its economy hampered by the failure of the “supervising” international authorities, with titles like the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in KOSOVO (UNMIK) and the EUROPEAN Union Rule of Law Mission in KOSOVO (EULEX). </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">They have imposed all of KOSOVO’S most important political decisions, but these have left the country in a calculated stasis since the end of the 1998-99 war. They have interfered with media, elections, and border relations with SERBIA, but have neglected to reform KOSOVO’S financial regulations or even to settle who owns various industries, such as the large-scale Trepca mining complex in northern KOSOVO. Trepca, which produced lead, zinc, gold, silver, and rare minerals, is the object of opposing claims of proprietorship by SERBIA and KOSOVO; it also owes about 40 million Euros to FRENCH, GREEK, and BULGARIAN companies. Similar state assets are KEK, the KOSOVO Energy Corporation, and its subsidiary KEDS, or KOSOVO Electricity Distribution.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">TURKISH STRONGHOLD IN KOSOVO</span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In June 2012, KEDS was sold by the KOSOVO government to a TURKISH consortium, Limak Yatirim Enerji and Calik Enerji Sanayi. <b>Limak owns KOSOVO’S only international airport. Limak also purchased KEDS for 26 million Euros</b>, although its capitalization totaled 180 million Euros. Economic analysts criticized a lack of transparency in the transfer to TURKISH control. KOSOVO still suffers frequent electrical power outages.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Unemployment in KOSOVO is estimated officially at around 50%, although local reporting suggests it is closer to 60%.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">When Albright and other humanitarian liberators appear in KOSOVO as “privatizers,” questions are bound to be asked. Although “entrepreneurship” usually means investment and expansion of commerce, in the absence of a secure domestic financial system and other guarantees for legitimate and desirable foreign ventures, KOSOVO’S economy continues to shrink. As a prominent Democrat and Clinton administration figure, Albright is associated with that party’s strident rhetoric against the free market in the 2012 AMERICAN presidential election, including allegations of Republican corporate looting and similar “heartless” practices.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNmdeO5X-Gpz_AsjaUeSsiMLtNTCv7OhPqWx-j6dS18UhMUErll7qzC1hp6YUXh0K54x4dYnnNS_gYzXo2NQQbrZSBe8BZC8cwUOGg456sKJo97tQ1Uk4oUl_VgnoI5ZzDlLfBAtpqaaeh/s1600/kos_UNMIKmine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="387" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNmdeO5X-Gpz_AsjaUeSsiMLtNTCv7OhPqWx-j6dS18UhMUErll7qzC1hp6YUXh0K54x4dYnnNS_gYzXo2NQQbrZSBe8BZC8cwUOGg456sKJo97tQ1Uk4oUl_VgnoI5ZzDlLfBAtpqaaeh/s640/kos_UNMIKmine.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">It is difficult for some KOSOVAR political leaders to imagine that Albright’s leap into their economy would create jobs, greater efficiency, and modernization of infrastructure. The KOSOVO “Self-Determination” movement, which is represented in the republic’s parliamentary opposition and which stands for a maximum standard of independence for the country, issued an open letter to the KOSOVAR public. It appealed for e-mails to be sent to prospective bidders for privatization of PTK, criticizing the project for the sell-off of the post and telecoms agency. “Self-Determination” warned that properties were being offered for sale as if they were the private holdings of politicians, rather than resources of all KOSOVO residents.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The “Self-Determination” representatives argued that Kosovo’s leaders aim to drive down the value of the state assets, so that they may be expropriated and sold. “Privatization is a name behind which these officials hide,” the opposition advocates declared. The call by leaders of “Self-Determination” for protests against privatization behind the backs of the populace led to accusations that “Self-Determination” is a violent, anti-American movement.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Albin Kurti, a young philosopher and the articulate founder of “Self-Determination,” refuted in late December charges by U.S. ambassador Tracey-Anne Jacobson that he and his colleagues threatened Madeleine Albright. The leaders of “Self-Determination” pointed out that after they published their letter in September against a distorted privatization, they met with Albright in Kosovo in November. “Self-Determination” did not oppose her visit, or threaten her as Ambassador Jacobson alleged. Kurti has insisted that he and his colleagues respect American principles of freedom, independence, and public responsibility.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The friendship of Kosovo, as a Muslim-majority state, is a major benefit for American foreign policy. The Balkan republic has resisted Islamist radicalization, excluded religion from public education, and acted to protect women’s rights.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">Background Information</span></u></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">: See <a href="http://news-these-days.blogspot.com.ar/2012/04/kosovo.html">http://news-these-days.blogspot.com.ar/2012/04/kosovo.html</a></span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">Comment by <span style="color: blue;"><span style="color: red;"><b>GEOPOLITICAL ANALYSIS AND MONITORING</b></span>:</span>  </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">PART OF THE KOSOVO PROBLEM HAS ALWAYS BEEN NATURAL RESOURCES</span></b></span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">Though not admitted officially……….</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">The vast amounts of Mineral deposits in KOSOVO have and still are part of the problems the small country faces, asides of ethnic and religious differences. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">KOSOVO POSSESSES THE WORLD'S FIFTH-LARGEST PROVEN RESERVES OF LIGNITE;</span></b></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="color: blue;">KOSOVO also has substantial amounts of other natural resources such as </span></span><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">lead, zinc, gold, silver, rare minerals and allegedly uranium. See Mineral Deposits <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Kosovo">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Kosovo</a>. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">It is alleged that the USA built Balkans largest army base, <b>Camp Bondsteel</b> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Bondsteel">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Bondsteel</a>deliberately on top of a large uranium ore basin in KOSOVO.</span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">In view of these facts it becomes obvious that the northern SERBIAN enclaves of KOSOVO, Mitrovica <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovska_Mitrovica">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovska_Mitrovica</a>etc. where the </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">Trepca mining complex is located insist on “reuniting” with SERBIA and that certain USA entities once again want to make sure to keep a foothold in the region in case, rare minerals, lignite and uranium indeed are available in quantities worthwhile to extract, pending increased market demands for afore mentioned minerals. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;"><b>CONTROVERSIAL OPPOSITION FIGURE: ALBIN KURTI </b></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">Albin Kurti</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albin_Kurti">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albin_Kurti</a>, has been and still is a controversial figure in KOSOVO. According to known sources Kurti allegedly fosters ties to certain radical UCK </span><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_Liberation_Army">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_Liberation_Army</a></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">entities that still are active today and who envision a GREATER ALBANIA  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Albania">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Albania</a>as well as having alleged ties to organized crime groups that terrorize communities, and ties to radical Islamic factions in KOSOVO as well as the notorious </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">SANDŽAK</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;"> region in MONTENEGRO. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9kCUFbJzWriy9RE62mRi4zscjevuECi1hk1LzL1GnmHMPpMkTuf2rqGuoDw94Yqxcv6BhE2cm5zLmQj_V_cgcm2f1pmajf2LzEPu5Z7KO9tYqNszU8idNOj3HER1r1Q1EQZkYW0DlwB6e/s1600/Ethnic_albania.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9kCUFbJzWriy9RE62mRi4zscjevuECi1hk1LzL1GnmHMPpMkTuf2rqGuoDw94Yqxcv6BhE2cm5zLmQj_V_cgcm2f1pmajf2LzEPu5Z7KO9tYqNszU8idNOj3HER1r1Q1EQZkYW0DlwB6e/s400/Ethnic_albania.jpg" width="296" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Vision of <span style="font-size: x-small;">"</span>Greater Albania"</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">See </span><cite><span style="line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://www.bmlv.gv.at/pdf_pool/publikationen/crime_omero.pdf"><span style="font-style: normal;">www.bmlv.gv.at/pdf_pool/publikationen/</span><b><span style="font-style: normal;">crime</span></b><span style="font-style: normal;">_omero.pdf</span></a>and </span></cite><cite><b><span style="font-style: normal; line-height: 115%;">S</span></b></cite><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">andžak region, not only the gateway for Balkans organized crime syndicates, but also for spreading Wahhbism to Europe?</span></b><cite><span style="line-height: 115%;"> <a href="http://news-these-days.blogspot.com.ar/2012/08/wahhabism-in-bosnia-herzegovina-part-4.html"><span style="font-style: normal;">http://news-these-days.blogspot.com.ar/2012/08/wahhabism-in-bosnia-herzegovina-part-4.html</span></a></span></cite></span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">SANDŽAK IS AN IMPOVERISHED REGION IN SOUTHERN SERBIA</span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8aHFZ2Tz_ExFQSQx53XsHveJLknmlV-V7M8YkWwF8-_129x6M4YzAkZTEBrcNvgGk9UfOnAi9o6IERhWnwceJDV5FiqAGUrjiuRe5b2MlFcn7FNEk8feMKNr-1FMmi3L_spsDAKMajeZ4/s1600/sandzakregion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8aHFZ2Tz_ExFQSQx53XsHveJLknmlV-V7M8YkWwF8-_129x6M4YzAkZTEBrcNvgGk9UfOnAi9o6IERhWnwceJDV5FiqAGUrjiuRe5b2MlFcn7FNEk8feMKNr-1FMmi3L_spsDAKMajeZ4/s400/sandzakregion.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;"></span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">that is predominantly occupied with ethnic Bosniaks, (Bosnian Muslims)with the region technically extending into the northeastern part of MONTENEGRO as well. SANDŽAK is also populated with ALBANIANS within the Preševo Valley region. The citizens of SANDŽAK are fairly content with remaining a part of SERBIA, but have highlighted the dearth of economic activity, lack of political representation, and social woes (<b>mainly organized crime and drug use amongst the youth</b>) as primary obstacles for their communities. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">SLOW GROWING WAHHABI MOVEMENT </span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">These two factors are also targeted as being a reason that various frustrated youth been drawn by the small Wahhabi movement that’s steadily growing in the region. SANDŽAK was treated as a special interest region during the BOSNIAN war, where (SERBIAN military) General Mladić was strictly forbidden from killing Muslims on SERBIAN territory. The bulk of the terror reigned on SANDŽAK’S citizens included harassment and humiliation techniques. But this didn’t stop many SANDŽAK locals from being forcibly bussed across the BOSNIAN border to be killed. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">The pre-war census in 1991 stated that approximately 224,000 BOSNIAKS were living in SANDŽAK, with between 60-80,000 SANDŽAK refugees leaving the region in 1992 to WESTERN EUROPEAN countries, according to UN sources. It is a tell-tale sign of the devastation that the region experienced less than 20 years ago. The region has experienced significant trauma, and growing poverty and perceived discrimination have aggravated existing inter-ethnic tensions in the country. These tensions are simmering, and while they are not an imminent threat to SERBIA and the regions’ stability, the region’s BOSNIAKS must have their overall standard of living improved to enhance other integration mechanisms.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;"></span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

KOSOVO: NATURAL RESOURCES JACKPOT?

FIRE SALE: “PRIVATIZING” KOSOVO, THE MADELEINE ALBRIGHT WAY Source: GSI The Balkan states of ALBANIA and KOSOVO are, without doubt, the mos...

EN ROUTE TO ELYSIAN FIELDS

8:00 AM Tukiyooo 0

<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0aJXwQuxWCPOIY1ZCUfJxWf87zgroqgih7_D0TcXFOFUcTqNHHpP8S9wIG27Z-bj9oNJXEyiX6zFsbLPs3Hqzvn5Q5WTM439zEw1DZsyjyLtZWC_OGFSv0Km9wTVGA9t_wA3KrddE_5xD/s1600/tennessee+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0aJXwQuxWCPOIY1ZCUfJxWf87zgroqgih7_D0TcXFOFUcTqNHHpP8S9wIG27Z-bj9oNJXEyiX6zFsbLPs3Hqzvn5Q5WTM439zEw1DZsyjyLtZWC_OGFSv0Km9wTVGA9t_wA3KrddE_5xD/s320/tennessee+2.jpg" width="305" /></span></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">When playwright Tennessee Williams decided to pick up where he left off on the play-in-progress he called <i>The Poker Night</i>, it was 1946 and he was comfortably ensconced in New Orleans in a French Quarter apartment overflowing with fine antiques.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Less than a year earlier, Williams's <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> had opened on Broadway. With this play, in the words of playwright Arthur Miller, Williams "lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre's history." But Williams struggled before this success came, suffering lean years after winning a special prize given by The Group Theatre in 1938. Though he had received grants, gotten a play produced and even been under contract as an MGM screenwriter during those years, none of it had panned out. His play <i>Battle of Angels</i>, starring Miriam Hopkins, previewed in Boston to good reviews, but created a furor and closed. He flopped at MGM, unwilling or unable to create "a celluloid brassiere for Lana Turner."</span><br /><a name='more'></a><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikSXqEcEfxqPqupOXBM9izq1LQdZHgxN6MHW2x2EwQfl2m-iE9ENHhIECoy3MuLvOpUK_HVc5tiRJaeg5i4be0VUnjvJOz8MPZZroMzts0GhYDVVHFhHHmPAO7NXiMyJXaEKLT-KmuGx30/s1600/laurette+as+amanda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikSXqEcEfxqPqupOXBM9izq1LQdZHgxN6MHW2x2EwQfl2m-iE9ENHhIECoy3MuLvOpUK_HVc5tiRJaeg5i4be0VUnjvJOz8MPZZroMzts0GhYDVVHFhHHmPAO7NXiMyJXaEKLT-KmuGx30/s200/laurette+as+amanda.jpg" width="155" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Laurette Taylor, star of <i>The Glass Menagerie</i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It was in 1943 while visiting his family in St. Louis, that Williams began work on a play he called <i>The Gentleman Caller</i>. He became the toast of Broadway in 1945 when the play, retitled <i>The Glass Menagerie</i>, opened to rave reviews and was voted the best play of the year by The New York Drama Critics Circle. During the play's run Williams put together a poker game in order to learn and understand a game that would figure in a story that had begun to form in his mind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A lifelong wayfarer, Williams had spent time in The Big Easy before and found it a most congenial city. When he returned to linger for a while in 1946, he quickly settled into a regular routine. Writing throughout the early part of the day, he would need a breather by afternoon and head for a favorite nearby watering hole. There he indulged in the bar's specialty, a Brandy Alexander, and played the jukebox until it was time to get something to eat and, later, go for a swim.</span><br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAAj5DML0LiJ4XNh6dj8_jKwsdeW747yAFTbIXy3SGTnYs4_a_ayFcX9mOhGeqjvQ6u2mjDxLOONik2GXK2fsFy9OKgm_0ZE3yFg0XwUNghcnm_70EYN_ClB2M1Fuy5-E6m7CoBu40qafC/s1600/La+Concha+Old.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAAj5DML0LiJ4XNh6dj8_jKwsdeW747yAFTbIXy3SGTnYs4_a_ayFcX9mOhGeqjvQ6u2mjDxLOONik2GXK2fsFy9OKgm_0ZE3yFg0XwUNghcnm_70EYN_ClB2M1Fuy5-E6m7CoBu40qafC/s1600/La+Concha+Old.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hotel La Concha, Key West</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Williams was in the midst of his work on the play when his grandfather, the Rev. Walter Edwin Dakin, arrived in New Orleans for a visit. Widowed, nearing 90 and nearly blind, the beloved old man had been living in some distress at the home of Williams's parents. The playwright decided to take a break from dreary weather and go on a motor trip to Florida with his grandfather. They eventually reached Key West and took a suite at the top of the Hotel La Concha. Here Williams continued to work in earnest on completing his play. Exuberant spirit that he was, he took time to party with friends in the area, Miriam Hopkins and Ernest Hemingway's ex-wife Martha among them. It wasn't until he returned to New Orleans that Williams completed his final draft of <i>The Poker Night </i>and sent it to his literary agent.</span><br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">~</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Irene Mayer Selznick had been a true Hollywood princess. Her father, Louis B. Mayer, was the head of MGM for more than 25 years, and Irene and her older sister Edie were the only children of L.B. and his first wife, Margaret. The girls' lives were incredibly charmed as well as profoundly sheltered.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Irene and Edie both married in 1930, their weddings only weeks apart. Irene's husband was David O. Selznick, the movie-making wunderkind who later headed his own studio and masterminded the production of <i>Gone With the Wind</i> and the career of Jennifer Jones.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">L.B. Mayer had famously remarked that Irene could've run MGM...if only she'd been a boy. What Irene did run for many years was the complex Selznick household, the at-home version of Selznick's studio...an opulent, frenetically busy 24-hour operation. Selznick may have lived to make movies, but he also gambled, womanized, popped speed and swilled alcohol at a breakneck pace. By 1945, Irene had had enough. Late one night her husband turned to her in bed and asked why she was still awake - she blurted that the the jig was up and she wanted out...then promptly rolled over and fell asleep.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5s5OOWcTMoMZQ9AVijCpiz-DFFJKqvReVPPd1JCPmC_qVDlodc3bG9ZtQOw-RaO3Mvu3Eaa9fJ-qN8eOuzZbj4mGqEVWTQ7GSKrnMLVhZ0i2ihS_aLN5GywXfbvp_R4_MUH2gwaIfKvQB/s1600/irene+and+david+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5s5OOWcTMoMZQ9AVijCpiz-DFFJKqvReVPPd1JCPmC_qVDlodc3bG9ZtQOw-RaO3Mvu3Eaa9fJ-qN8eOuzZbj4mGqEVWTQ7GSKrnMLVhZ0i2ihS_aLN5GywXfbvp_R4_MUH2gwaIfKvQB/s1600/irene+and+david+2.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Irene and David Selznick</td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Though she and David Selznick didn't immediately divorce and her father tried to induce her to stay on the West Coast with a high level job at MGM, Irene relocated to New York. She had dreams of becoming a theatrical producer and, on the advice of good friend Moss Hart, rented an office and hired a general manager. Her first outing was the production of an Arthur Laurents play, <i>Heartsong</i>, starring Shirley Booth. The play closed in Philadelphia but evolved over the years (and with another title) into a Broadway hit that still later became David Lean's <i>Summertime</i> (1955) with Katharine Hepburn.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Irene's first production may not have made it to Broadway, but she was noticed. Soon after, she heard from literary agent Audrey Wood who told her, "My most cherished and important client has a play I would like to put in your hands. It is his best play yet. His name is Tennessee Williams." Irene received the script on her 40th birthday.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Wood, aware of Irene's inexperience but appreciative of her taste, dedication and connections, cajoled and coaxed and eventually arranged for her to meet Williams in Charleston, South Carolina. The playwright asked the up-and-coming producer if she preferred the play's original title, <i>The Poker Night</i>, or the one he was presently considering. And he asked her about the newer title - did she prefer "called desire" or "named desire"? The encounter had begun with both parties ill-at-ease, but in the end contracts were signed and the pair was set to embark on the original production of <i>A Streetcar Named Desire</i>.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">~</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD6hi7Zrvx5Ys-9qPd7SOrEQIDCxMp3fZeBrj03rNkMzWjKrL6PnDW-m2YCGVzYB8majOx2xuw2sSXUWQuAI56fSrlJkSPRh9XTI7M8S0D_WzSGSnWXOWsKN8i4v3NTYeGmYE061H-yWOk/s1600/irene+gadge+and+tennessee+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD6hi7Zrvx5Ys-9qPd7SOrEQIDCxMp3fZeBrj03rNkMzWjKrL6PnDW-m2YCGVzYB8majOx2xuw2sSXUWQuAI56fSrlJkSPRh9XTI7M8S0D_WzSGSnWXOWsKN8i4v3NTYeGmYE061H-yWOk/s320/irene+gadge+and+tennessee+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Irene Mayer Selznick, Elia Kazan and Tennesee Williams</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Irene returned to New York and Tennessee soon followed. Once he arrived he methodically made his way around to town to check on the latest plays. After he'd seen Arthur Miller's <i>All My Sons</i>, his heart was set on Elia Kazan, the play's director, for <i>Streetcar</i>. Irene was originally familiar with Kazan as an actor, having seen his breakout performance in the 1935 production of Clifford Odets's <i>Waiting for Lefty</i>. Kazan had begun to direct major stage productions in the early 1940s. Irene sent him the <i>Streetcar</i> script and he turned it down. Influenced by his wife, Molly Day Thacher, who had been instrumental in discovering and championing Tennessee Williams, and the lucrative contract he was offered, he reconsidered.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Bette Davis was Irene's first choice for the role of Blanche Dubois, the female lead, but she was unavailable. Margaret Sullavan was considered, but Williams didn't think she was right for the part, he "kept picturing her with a tennis racquet in one hand." Fay Bainter's name came up and Kazan apparently mentioned Mary Martin, but it was through Williams that the play's leading lady was found.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgnOSz-_ieyvHEuONGNtd-aUgyiSNGYpeYpfHmHcIZBjdPyo97aLdTqSrO2LUyUgCMBPxy18hBsgQ0y8sYgMJmmdm7VpIpTuG8XcuH2FYKBBwBKwwz0LOa-G0WDo2gLxJVe5aTeAM_-vfT/s1600/Jessica+as+Blanche+1947+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgnOSz-_ieyvHEuONGNtd-aUgyiSNGYpeYpfHmHcIZBjdPyo97aLdTqSrO2LUyUgCMBPxy18hBsgQ0y8sYgMJmmdm7VpIpTuG8XcuH2FYKBBwBKwwz0LOa-G0WDo2gLxJVe5aTeAM_-vfT/s320/Jessica+as+Blanche+1947+2.jpg" width="207" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Actor Hume Cronyn, a financial supporter of Williams in his early days on the scene, had recently produced and directed four one-act plays at The Actor's Lab in Hollywood. Three were by Williams and one of them, <i>Portrait of a Madonna</i>, starred Cronyn's wife, Jessica Tandy. Cronyn arranged to have this play staged for Williams when he, Irene and Kazan were on the West Coast. All three attended and were astonished by Tandy's performance. She was quickly signed to play Blanche. For the primary supporting roles, Karl Malden was the only actor considered for the part of Mitch, and Irene suggested Kim Hunter for the role of Stella.</span></span></span></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">John Garfield was everyone's first choice for the male lead, Stanley Kowalski. The actor had worked steadily on the New York stage before venturing to Hollywood in the late '30s. His screen career began with a star-making turn in Michael Curtiz's <i>Four Daughter's </i>(1938). In 1947 Garfield was about to begin production on Kazan's film adaptation of <i>A Gentleman's Agreement</i>. He would be available afterward and was interested in the play - but his demands proved to be too great.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Next to be offered the role was youthful Burt Lancaster who had just debuted onscreen in Robert Siodmak's <i>The Killers</i> (1946). Though Lancaster didn't take the role, he later told Irene that he'd "yearned" to. Other actors considered for the part included Van Heflin, Edmund O'Brien and...Gregory Peck.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilYQvrJp_nNpSTbMT9P8BWiGsCdmYc3Y3ogBJSxzeBQe0SqJzWbg2OlIe6DHYXzKql5GZ3yNvR5O7qyrXDlT2hYfqFSnnbDs3VseOHqEvvqfAjDLUwknXy3VBjQgVTiWoGSJS2rzODnjHH/s1600/i_remember_mama+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="185" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilYQvrJp_nNpSTbMT9P8BWiGsCdmYc3Y3ogBJSxzeBQe0SqJzWbg2OlIe6DHYXzKql5GZ3yNvR5O7qyrXDlT2hYfqFSnnbDs3VseOHqEvvqfAjDLUwknXy3VBjQgVTiWoGSJS2rzODnjHH/s200/i_remember_mama+2.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marlon Brando (center) in<i> I Remember Mama</i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">23-year old Marlon Brando had been a busy young actor since his first major stage role in <i>I Remember Mama</i>. He appeared in <i>Antigone</i> with Cedric Hardwicke, gained notice in Maxwell Anderson's <i>Truckline Caf</i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><i>é</i>, co-starred in a revival of <i>Candida</i> with Katharine Cornell and appeared in Ben Hecht's <i>A Flag is Born </i>with Paul Muni. In 1946 he was voted Broadway's Most Promising Newcomer. According to Brando, Harold Clurman, who directed him in <i>Truckline Caf</i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><i>é</i>, suggested him to Kazan for <i>Streetcar</i>. But neither Kazan nor Irene were completely convinced and the final decision was left to the playwright. After spending time with Brando, Williams was ebullient and the actor was hired; he was the last of the principals to be cast. Williams later compared the "luminous power" of Brando's onstage charisma to that of Laurette Taylor who had dazzled as the star of <i>The Glass Menagerie</i>.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />When the play opened in New Haven, Louis B. Mayer was there. Irene hadn't wanted to be distracted by his presence and tried to discourage him - to no avail. Despite technical difficulties, the consensus was that <i>Streetcar</i> had played well. But Irene was disappointed at the lack of excitement expressed by the group gathered in her hotel room after the show. She recalled that there was "too much respect floating around and not enough enthusiasm." Then her father asked to speak with her privately. He told her "you don't have a hit, you've got a smash...you wait and see," then he told her to go back to her guests - but not to listen to them.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><i>A Streetcar Named Desire </i>premiered on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on December 3, 1947 and was an instant sensation, receiving a standing ovation that lasted for half an hour. Jessica Tandy, who was universally singled out in the opening night reviews, won a Tony Award, the play was voted the best play of 1948 by the New York Drama Critics Circle and Tennessee Williams won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. <i>Streetcar </i>ran for two years and 855 performances and it was the last play of Marlon Brando's theatrical career. The actor soon left for Hollywood, enormous fame and a long, erratic, if often brilliant, film career.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />In 1949 Laurence Olivier directed <i>Streetcar </i>on London's West End. Vivien Leigh starred as Blanche with Bonar Colleano as Stanley. </span></span></span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhObNT0hrGexOzV6R-xeaXRU9NtIHTxSUw0tGwOz9wa-Nlz9ejAr95RPr9_juR2MMPWpUfo3bdf3bZXpHa9nkxJXiIFsIkNENrXXrTQDiI1eWNDB_S0ni6top6N30aVmFhrXjIbz4hyphenhyphenOHk3/s1600/Marlon+and+Vivien++film.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhObNT0hrGexOzV6R-xeaXRU9NtIHTxSUw0tGwOz9wa-Nlz9ejAr95RPr9_juR2MMPWpUfo3bdf3bZXpHa9nkxJXiIFsIkNENrXXrTQDiI1eWNDB_S0ni6top6N30aVmFhrXjIbz4hyphenhyphenOHk3/s1600/Marlon+and+Vivien++film.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh</td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />When the play was adapted to film in 1951, all the Broadway principals were retained except Jessica Tandy. The role of Blanche went to Vivien Leigh. Years later Karl Malden observed, "If Jessica had played it, I wouldn't have been in the movie and neither would Kim Hunter. Because Jessica was no star, and neither was Brando. But Vivien, who after <i>Gone With the Wind</i> was the biggest thing you ever saw - she could carry us all." Kazan, who accepted the casting of Leigh, remembered, "She had a small talent, but the greatest determination to excel of any actress I've known." Brando thought Leigh was a perfect Blanche because, "...in many ways she <i>was</i> Blanche." Kazan allowed that her emerging psychological problems may have been an asset to her performance as the disintegrating belle, and Leigh later said that the grueling role had tipped her into madness.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Elements of the play, particularly the seamy details of Blanche's past, were toned down or altered for the film, but Kazan was able to preserve the integrity of Williams's creation, masterfully translating its dark poetry and palpable sensuality to the screen. <i>Streetcar </i>was much celebrated, nominated for twelve Academy Awards and winner of four - including a Best Actress award to Vivien Leigh. It is considered the classic among film adaptations of Williams's work.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">~</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">More than 35 years later Irene Mayer Selznick would look back and reflect on that spectacular evening when <i>A Streetcar Named Desire </i>opened in New York. For all that the play's success meant to her that night, she did not foresee the impact it was about to have. With her first Broadway production, she became an established, sought-after theatrical producer. The play, she remembered, made Elia Kazan "a king" and changed forever the lives of all four of its principal players. Most fittingly, she wrote, "it gave Tennessee enduring glory."</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: #660000;">March 26, 2011 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tennessee Williams. The University of Texas at Austin, home of the Williams archive, is presenting "Becoming Tennessee Williams" from February 1 - July 21. The exhibit includes manuscripts, correspondence, photos and artwork.<b> </b></span><a href="http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2011/williams/"><b><span style="color: #660000;">Click here</span></b></a><span style="color: #660000;"> to learn more.</span></i></span><br /><br /><br /></div><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/o_lToyPAUyE" width="425"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Sources</b>:</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><u>Memoirs</u> (1975) by Tennessee Williams</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><u>A Private View</u> (1983) by Irene Mayer Selznick</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><u>The Kindness of Strangers</u> (1985) by Donald Spoto</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><u>Songs My Mother Taught Me</u> (1994) by Marlon Brando</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><u>Elia Kazan</u> (2005) by Richard Schickel</span>

When playwright Tennessee Williams decided to pick up where he left off on the play-in-progress he called The Poker Night , it was 1946 and ...

Nora Ephron’s Final Act - NYTimes.com

12:18 PM Tukiyooo 0

<base href="data:"><div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; color: black; text-align: left; "><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">At 10 p.m. on a Friday night in a private room on the 14th Floor of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on 68th and York Avenue, my mother was lying in her bed hallucinating, in that dream space people go on their way to being gone.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">She spoke of seeing trees, possibly a forest. And she mentioned to Nick, my stepfather, that she had been to the theater where her play was showing and that the audience was full. In reality, she had not left the hospital in a month, and the play, "Lucky Guy," was nearly a year away from opening.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">My brother, Max, and I stood there in disbelief. Though it had been weeks since her blood count showed any sign of improvement, the gravity of the situation had crept up on us. Mom's housekeeper, Linda Diaz, who had worked for her for 25 years, was in the corner sobbing.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">At some point, a team of doctors and nurses arrived to assess the situation, and Mom became slightly more lucid.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"Can you tell me your name?" one of them asked.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/nora_ephron/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Nora Ephron." class="meta-per" style="color: rgb(102, 102, 153); text-decoration: none; ">Nora Ephron</a>," she said, nodding.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"Can you tell me where you are?"</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"New York Hospital."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"Who is the president of the United States?"</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">At this point, my mother looked annoyed, gave a roll of the eyes and refused to answer the question, which later on was the source of some debate between Max and me about whether her sarcasm and humor remained even as her memory and focus faded or whether she was simply irritated at being treated like an infant.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">A few hours later, after falling asleep for a short time, she woke up, ate ice cream with Max and me and was able to talk with some coherence about Jerry Sandusky's conviction earlier that day.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">When Max said, "Mom, I'm going to miss you so much," she said: "Miss me? Well, I'm not dead yet."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">For most of the next three days, before she entered a coma and died, she was sort of herself, asking for the papers and doing the crossword. On Sunday, one of the nurses arrived to give her medication and innocently asked if she was planning on writing about what was happening to her. My mother simply said, "No."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">I took this more or less at face value until after her death, as plans moved forward with her play "Lucky Guy," and it occurred to me that part of what she was trying to do by writing about someone else's death was to understand her own.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><strong>Illness, and how</strong> a person handles it, was not the first thing on my mom's mind when she began writing "Lucky Guy" back in 1999. At that point, she wasn't even sick.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Based on real events, "Lucky Guy" is about a tabloid journalist named Mike McAlary. In the early '90s, he became one of the highest-paid newspaper columnists in the country. Crime was still rampant in New York, and the Internet had not yet destroyed the economics of the newspaper business. My mother said that she saw his career as "the end of something," a bookend to a time when reporters could still believe there was power in the job; when Elaine's was still one of the city's most glamorous rooms; when much of Times Square still belonged to prostitutes and drug dealers; and when the West Village had not yet been taken over by hedge-fund magnates and Russian oligarchs.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">My mother knew a lot about McAlary's world. She dreamed of being a newspaper reporter from the time she was in high school, and wound up spending much of her 20s working at The New York Post. Moreover, McAlary was what she liked to call "a problematic human being." And after a decade of writing and directing romantic comedies, a lead character who wasn't entirely likable seemed like a good way to keep herself from getting boxed in.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">The project, however, kept getting sidelined. There was a movie, "Bewitched." And a play Off Broadway, "Love, Loss, and What I Wore," which she wrote with her sister Delia. Then another movie, as well as two anthologies of her essays. Another problem she kept running into: She'd conceived "Lucky Guy" (then called "Stories About McAlary") as a film for HBO, but the structure was unconventional, relying largely on the other characters to tell their versions of what happened to him, essentially breaking the fourth wall. And everyone, including her, was unsure of how it was going to work on-screen.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Then in 2008, Colin Callender, the man guiding the development of "Lucky Guy" at HBO, left the network. Callender had taken a personal interest in the project because he'd known McAlary. Shortly after striking out on his own as an independent producer, he called my mother with a new idea: What if her script was not a movie but a play, where characters regularly talk to the audience?</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Two weeks later, she handed him a new draft. By this time, there was something else pulling her toward McAlary as well.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">McAlary got the scoop of his life just nine months after receiving a diagnosis of advanced colon cancer. In 1997, he wrote the story of a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima who was brutally assaulted by a New York City police officer. In the spring of 1998, McAlary won the Pulitzer Prize for his work. On Christmas of that same year, he died at 41. Shortly before his death, he was quoted as saying: "If you are a doctor or a lawyer, you take the case. If you're a reporter, you write the story. I didn't think about being sick."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">When Mom returned to working on the script in 2008, this was something she knew all about, though it was a secret confined to a tiny group of people: my stepfather, my brother, her sisters, a couple of close friends and me.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><strong>In late 2005,</strong> my mother went to see her doctor because she had been feeling, as she later told me, "punky." She had always been a little anemic, but now, she appeared to be getting worse, with fevers and inexplicable infections. After years of seeing a trainer two to three times a week and being pretty fit for a woman in her mid-60s, she found herself dreading having to climb stairs.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">She eventually made her way to J. Gregory Mears, a hematologist at Columbia University, who quickly gave her a diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, an aggressive blood disorder that destroys the body's ability to make healthy blood cells and ward off infections. The only known cure for it is a stem-cell transplant, but stem-cell transplants are especially difficult in older patients. Among other potential complications, the body may reject the donor cells or develop graft-versus-host disease, in which the transplanted cells can attack the patient.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">This is what happened to Susan Sontag, who also died of acute myeloid leukemia brought on by MDS, and had many of the same doctors as my mother. Discussing the aftermath of her unsuccessful transplant in an article for this magazine in 2005, Sontag's son, David Rieff, wrote, "To me 'torture' is not too strong or hyperbolic a word."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">My mother had seen her closest friend, Judy Corman, go through a series of increasingly painful treatments that didn't do much but extend her suffering from the cancer that eventually killed her. Between watching this and reading about what happened to Sontag, Mom became unambiguous in her opposition to testing fate, to gambling away comfort for the remote possibility of being cured. She was determined to have a "good death."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">I'm not sure what would have happened had a stem-cell transplant been a viable option  — if her sisters had been a match, for instance — but thankfully, it didn't come to that. Soon after my mother went to see Mears, Jerome Groopman, a doctor at Harvard with extensive experience in treating cancer, was called in for a second opinion. After running a series of tests, he concluded that she quite likely had an unusual variant of MDS, which could be treated with less drastic measures.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Over time, the worry I felt when she first told me about the disease began to fade. We knew the statistics, but statistics — as Alice McAlary recounted to Mom about her husband, Mike — get you only so far. Besides, my mother had never been ordinary.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">A moderate dose of prednisone helped stabilize her blood count for a couple of years. When the prednisone stopped working, she went to see Stephen Nimer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. He put her on Vidaza, a low-dose form of chemotherapy with few side effects. Along with monthly blood transfusions, it effectively controlled the disease for two years.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Then while on a trip in the South of France in 2010, she went swimming and felt something stab her arm. She believed she had been stung by a jellyfish but was not sure. A few weeks later, she wound up in a hospital in Los Angeles with an inexplicable bacterial infection that led to a bump on her arm the size of a tangerine. Miraculously, when she got out, she was transfusion-independent. Her doctors had no idea what had happened, except to speculate that her bone marrow responded to a threat in an unusually dramatic way and was now producing healthy blood cells and platelets. My mother was not one to go in for superstition or miracles — godlessness was for her a form of religion, a belief in self-sufficiency above all else — but she was near certain her recovery had something to do with the jellyfish.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">At various points over the years, she considered coming clean to her friends and colleagues about her illness. But she knew the effect it could have on her career. Certainly, she could continue writing books and essays. But getting a movie made would be impossible, because no insurance company would sign off on it. Arguably, she could do a play, but bringing it to Broadway would be difficult, given that the development process takes years. Beyond that, what my mother didn't want was to have her illness define her, turning every conversation into a series of "how <em>are</em> you?"s.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">All her life, she subscribed to the belief that "everything is copy," a phrase her mother, Phoebe, used to say. In fact, when Phoebe was on her deathbed, she told my mother, "Take notes." She did. What both of them believed was that writing has the power to turn the bad things that happen to you into art (although "art" was a word she hated). "When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh," she wrote in her anthology "I Feel Bad About My Neck." "So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">And she applied that maxim everywhere. She wrote a magazine article about The New York Post and her former boss there, Dorothy Schiff ("It is a terrible newspaper. The reason it is, of course, is Dorothy Schiff"); her breasts ("If I had them I would have been a completely different person"); even getting fat injections in her lips ("I looked like a Ubangi, so I never did it again"). There was also an entire book and movie devoted to her divorce from my father. (But never mind that.)</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">The thing is, you can't really turn a fatal illness into a joke. It is almost the only disclosure that turns you into the victim rather than the hero of your story. For her, tragedy was a pit of clichés. So she stayed quiet, though clues were sprinkled through much of what she wrote during the six years she was sick.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">They were there in "I Feel Bad About My Neck": "Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know, it's everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again you could be."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">They were there in "I Remember Nothing": "The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven't. I try to figure out what I really want to do every day, I try to say to myself, If this is one of the last days of my life, am I doing exactly what I want to be doing? I am low. My idea of a perfect day is a frozen custard from Shake Shack and a walk in the park. (Followed by a Lactaid)."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">And they were there in her last edits of "Lucky Guy," the final piece of work she completed.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><strong>My mother didn't know</strong> Mike McAlary personally, but she was certainly familiar with his kind. And what details she didn't know were quickly filled in by his friends, colleagues and relatives, almost all of whom she interviewed.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">McAlary was born in Oahu, Hawaii, and he grew up in Goffstown, N.H. After graduating from Syracuse University, he went to work at The Boston Herald American, covering sports, then eventually scored a job at New York Newsday. There, he made a name for himself as a particularly aggressive reporter, covering crime and police corruption. After that he began to bounce back and forth between The New York Daily News and The New York Post, getting bigger and better contracts each time he made a move.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">In 1993, he broke his contract with The Daily News to become the highest paid reporter at The Post, with a salary of $945,750 over three years. The Daily News was granted a preliminary injunction that prevented him from making the move, and McAlary wound up with too much time on his hands. After a night out at a Yankees game, he totaled his car on the F.D.R. Drive. His injuries were so serious that he spent several days in a coma and a month in the hospital. Rupert Murdoch, who hired him at The Post, never called or came to see him. But Mort Zuckerman, who owned The News, did. So he stayed at The News.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Not long after McAlary returned to work, he made a career-killing mistake. A woman in Prospect Park had reported being raped, but McAlary's sources had doubts. He was told that the results of the rape kit had come back negative for sperm, that it was only a matter of time before she was found out. But the most crucial points in McAlary's stories turned out to be wrong. The woman had been raped. What the source didn't realize was that no sperm didn't necessarily mean no semen. McAlary had made no attempt to speak with the victim herself, an act of laziness that his supporters believed was partially attributable to his accident.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">The News reduced the frequency of his column. The official explanation was that he was writing his novel. It was around this time that he began to get sick. He was jaundiced and losing weight. In conversations, he seemed dazed.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"He still had these symptoms," said his widow, Alice, when I went to see her last month. "You have to remember, they put him all back together again. So when he started having issues with his colon, his stomach, all that stuff, we attributed them to the accident."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">By the time McAlary got his diagnosis of colon cancer, it had already progressed to an advanced stage.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"It was a desperate situation," said Ed Hayes, one of McAlary's closest friends and the man who negotiated all of his contracts. "The nurse took one look and said: 'Forget this guy. He's a dead man. There's no hope for him.' "</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Nevertheless, he underwent surgery to remove as much of the cancer as possible, then started chemotherapy in 1997. He was hooked up to the chemo drip when he received a tip that a man had been severely assaulted by a police officer. He drove from his treatment to see Abner Louima in the hospital. He was the first reporter to interview the victim. In horrifying detail, Louima told him how he'd been wrongfully arrested outside a nightclub and taken back to a police station, where one of the cops raped him with a plunger.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">In a series of articles, he not only exposed a monstrous incident of police brutality but started the earliest debate about the Giuliani-era approach to law enforcement. In short order, McAlary's career was rehabilitated.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">In the play my mother wrote, there's a scene toward the end, in which McAlary, sick with cancer, goes to the Poconos to visit his friend Jim Dwyer, then a columnist at The Daily News. It's a glorious summer day, and McAlary's 12-year-old son, Ryan, wants to do a flip off the diving board, but he gets scared and can't do it. So McAlary takes off his shirt, walks to the edge of the diving board and says to him: "When you do these things, you can't be nervous. If you think about what can go wrong, if you think about the belly flop, that's what'll happen."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">And then McAlary does the flip himself and makes a perfect landing.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">It's a metaphor, obviously, for his view about life. And I've come to think it might as well have been about my mother. The point is that you don't let fear invade your psyche. Because then you might as well be dead.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">As she saw him, McAlary was a role model not so much in life, but in death, in the way that he used writing to maintain his sense of purpose and find release from his illness. In the six years my mother had MDS, she wrote 100 blog posts, two books and two plays and directed a movie. There was nothing she could do about her death but to keep going in the face of it. Work was its own kind of medicine, even if it could not save her when her MDS came roaring back.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><strong>"I'm having a</strong> little health crisis."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">That's how she put it when she called me shortly before Memorial Day weekend.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">I dropped everything, got into a cab and headed up to see her at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. While I was en route, the phone rang; it was Max, who told me that Mom's MDS had turned into leukemia. I think I already knew, even though I hadn't asked her for specifics. For six months, Mom's blasts — the bad guys that make it difficult for people with MDS and leukemia to produce healthy platelets and white blood cells — had been creeping back up, indicating that she was developing a resistance to her medication. Now she would need a brutal form of chemotherapy if she hoped to survive. Max and his girlfriend, Rachel, were getting on a plane from L.A.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">When I arrived in her room, my mother was crying. She cried a lot that first night, and then, the next day, she cried some more because she was certain Christopher Hitchens had done no such thing, and she was devastated at the thought that she might not be as brave as him about death.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">It terrified me to see her cry like that. She loved me, showered me with gifts, e-mailed or called every time I wrote something that made her proud. But even after all the weekly meals, the shared vacations, the conversations about movies and journalism and the debt ceiling and Edith Wharton, I still viewed her with a mix of awe and intimidation. It wasn't often that I caught a glimpse of her vulnerability.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Now there she was, in her Chanel flats and her cream-colored pants and her black-and-white-striped blouse, looking so pretty and so fragile as she dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex; and I finally understood what she meant when she said she was a bird — that she wasn't just talking about her looks but something inside as well.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">As she explained it that first night, the odds of the chemo working were below 50 percent, and even if it did, it would probably not buy her more than a year and a half or so. "I want to live to be 100," she said. "I want to see how things turn out for you and Max." But she wasn't sure the chemo was worth doing for such a limited upside.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">I told her that I hoped she would reconsider, that a year and a half is a lot of time during which something else may emerge as a viable treatment. Still, I said I would respect whatever she wished to do, that it was her body, her life, her choice. I think this is what she needed to hear, that we wanted her to live more than anything but that she was still in control. Because within minutes, she seemed resigned to the idea that she was going to be nuked, as she put it.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Forty-eight hours later, she was hooked up to an IV. Her sadness seemed to lift, and her humor returned. The side effects of the chemo wouldn't kick in for at least a week, so she spent her days with Delia powering through a TV pilot they were writing for Scott Rudin. At night, Nick brought in Shake Shack or Cuban-Chinese, and we watched episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Binky Urban (Mom's book agent and one of her closest friends) and Ken Auletta (a writer for The New Yorker) were there frequently as well. So was Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist and one of her oldest friends. Because of my mother's tremendous sense of will and a modest dose of steroids, the script was finished before the chemo was.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">At first, there were some encouraging signs. She wasn't in remission, but the blasts were below 20 percent, which is considered the threshold for being fully leukemic. Then, about a week and a half later, she got pneumonia. As her doctors explained it, the body often takes three weeks or so to begin producing neutrophils after chemotherapy of this type. And neutrophils are the good guys that defend the body from infections. One day, she would seem to be getting better; the next, worse. At night she was experiencing heart palpitations. It was confusing to all of us, including my mother.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">So we waited.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">We waited as she went on and off oxygen. We waited as her appetite left her. We waited as she lost her hair, and this I remember vividly, because I did not see her cry at all. Crying, I believe, is a sign that there's still hope. Instead, she seemed sort of numb.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">My mother loved looking good. She had her hair blown out weekly. She wore makeup. She had a closet filled with Prada and Armani. When she realized that she might be too old to wear a very expensive dress by Azzedine Alaïa that she bought in Paris, it was like a little arrow to the heart.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">She had fallen in love with and married a man who was as fastidious about presentation as she was. Even in the hospital, day after day, Nick arrived looking impeccable in his fancy slacks and his beautiful loafers, because getting dressed up was a way to say to her that things were still normal, that he hadn't lost hope. All sorts of men had rejected her when she was younger as cute but not beautiful. She wrote about it, turned it into a comic riff — everything is copy — but privately, it was heartbreaking for her until this noble man came along and made her feel that she was as fabulous to look at as she was to talk to.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">And now, here she was without her hair, confined to a bed, using a nurse to help her go to the bathroom. It was the beginning of her losing her dignity. It was the beginning of a bad death.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">In the days that followed, conversation became harder, and the silences grew longer. People who live thousands of miles from their parents often express regret at not being able to say goodbye, or about having spent too little time with them during their final days. But being there every day, as I was, produced its own kind of sorrow. It wasn't just the big things we were avoiding saying (although there were certainly some of those). It was the sadness of having run out of news to deliver, gossip to report, new books and movies to discuss. I actually believe that had Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes announced their separation a week earlier, we might have kept her smiling one more night.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">On June 18, four weeks after my mother went into the hospital, the Public Theater held its annual benefit to raise money for Shakespeare in the Park. For more than a decade, my mother attended the gala every year, considering it the unofficial beginning of summer. Often it would start to rain in the middle of the show, and everyone would pull out their umbrellas and wait for it to pass. But it didn't matter. It was an evening when her favorite park in her favorite city turned into an enchanted forest.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">The night before the benefit, my mother was able to get out of her hospital bed, but she couldn't really speak. She wrote down the names of all the people she had invited to sit at her table that year and organized the seating arrangement for me. When I got to Central Park the next evening, it was a mess: two of her guests had canceled; others knew she was in the hospital but not why; some appeared not to have been told anything at all and looked puzzled when I informed them that she and Nick weren't going to make it.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">I was too discombobulated to ask a waiter to please remove the two empty chairs from the table. I just sat there helplessly, hands clasped underneath the table, trying to avoid the concerned looks of nearly a dozen people who suddenly knew that something was rotten in the state of Denmark but were too polite to say it.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">After I got home, this admittedly trivial detail gnawed at me. How useless I was, how incompetent. I spent nearly 34 years at the foot of one of New York's best hostesses and I could not even figure out how to ask a waiter to take away two chairs. I had failed to pay adequate attention all those years, and could not even be trusted to do this one small thing for my mother as she neared the end.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Did she know she was dying that final week, that she was not ever going to leave the hospital?</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Richard Cohen, who spent much of the final weeks in the hospital with us, says: "She knew. There wasn't a moment of confusion. I'm certain of that."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">I go back and forth.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Absolutely, she planned for it. She redid her will earlier in the spring when her blood counts were going the wrong way, typed an exit letter on her computer, spelling out what she wanted after she died: a party in the apartment with Champagne and cucumber sandwiches from William Poll; a memorial held days after. "Get it over with" was the gist of her instructions. She even supplied the speaker list.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Nevertheless, as she ran out of time, she chose not to acknowledge, at least explicitly, what was happening to her. One of the last e-mails she sent went out five days before she died. It was addressed to her film agent, Bryan Lourd. "I am as sad as you can imagine to report that I have leukemia. Early reports are not particularly hopeful but not hopeless either."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">The weekend before she went into a coma, Jerry Groopman called her from Boston. If she wanted to know, he was prepared to tell her that she had entered the terminal phase of her illness. She chose not to call him back.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">And then there was that conversation with Max, the one in which she said, "I'm not dead yet."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">In "I Feel Bad About My Neck," my mother wrote of turning 60: "Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial. It seemed to me that the only way to deal with a birthday of this sort was to do everything possible to push it from my mind."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Some part of me would like to believe this is what she was doing at the end as well, because it would indicate that her hope remained as she left the world. But it's just as likely that she felt too sad to have this conversation with me. Or that I was too sad to have it with her.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><strong>Sunday, June 24</strong>, was a pretty good day. The sun was shining, and Mom spent most of the afternoon on a couch in the front of her room, doing the crossword puzzle with Max. Binky was there, as was Richard Cohen and his companion, Mona. Amy stopped by with her husband, Alan. "We're going to the Guggenheim," Amy said. "Do you want anything from the outside world?"</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"Sure," my mother said. "A de Kooning."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Another thing she requested was a pineapple milkshake, so Max brought one from Emack and Bolio's, made from fresh pineapple. But as far as my mother was concerned, a milkshake is one thing that's actually better with crushed pineapple. Dole.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"When I get out of the hospital, I'm going to go home and I'm going to make a pineapple milkshake with crushed pineapple, pineapple juice and vanilla ice cream, and I'm going to drink it and I'm going to<em> die</em>," she said, savoring the last word. "It's going to be great."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">On this day, I told her some things. After she moved to her bed, I said that sometimes, I thought of the possibility of her not being around and wondered if I'd ever be able to write again. If I'd even want to. And she told me that I would, that I would find it within me, and that whatever happened, she hoped my brother and I would lead the kind of lives where we did stuff big enough to occasionally say, "Wow, I wish Mom was around for this."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">We stared out at the 59th Street Bridge and tried to remember all the others that connect Manhattan to the rest of the world. The Brooklyn Bridge. The Williamsburg Bridge, the Queensboro Bridge, the Triboro Bridge. We got about halfway before she began to doze off.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">On Monday, Nick called to say she'd had another tough night. I got to the hospital, and there was more blood work, none of it good. The blasts were everywhere. She didn't have a single neutrophil.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Hours later, she began to drift in and out of consciousness. We took turns holding her hand. Delia would come, then Max, then me, then Amy, then Binky, then Richard. Nick sat beside her and wept.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"In, out, in, out," she said, waving her hands at the windows. Also: "This is it," which she said in a tone that seemed to be half-question, half-declaration. It occurred to me later that it might have been the first uncertain moment she'd had in her entire life.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">I started calling her friends to explain what was going on, that she was shutting down, that we were sorry for not having told them sooner. They were startled and confused, but gracious.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">I told several of them that they would be speaking at her memorial, that she actually requested it in writing and that she'd also requested that they try to keep it to under five minutes.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Over and over again, they said to me, "This must be so hard for you." But making those calls wasn't. It was strangely beautiful. The people I called told me stories about great advice she'd given them; e-mails she'd sent that they'd loved; and occasionally, what a total pain she could be. Those were funny to hear. They were real.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">While I did phone duty, Max relaxed and took off his button-down shirt. Two sleeves of tattoos ran down his arms. Mom had seen one of them years before and had not reacted favorably, so when he went in to get the other arm done, he decided that she would never see it. Never again did he wear a short-sleeve shirt in her presence.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"Wow, Max, look at those tattoos," Binky said.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"Shh!" he said, flashing her a smile.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">My mother's eyes popped open.</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"Mom, I'm so sorry about my tattoos."</p><p itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">"You. Aren't. Really," she said, her eyebrows raised in a kind of resigned indignation. And then she fell back asleep.</p><nyt_author_id style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><div class="authorIdentification" style="margin-bottom: 2.8em; "><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 15px !important; margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px; font-style: italic; "><a href="mailto:jacob.bernstein@nytimes.com" style="color: rgb(102, 102, 153); text-decoration: none; font-size: 15px !important; line-height: 22px; ">Jacob Bernstein</a> is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, where he writes regularly for the Styles section.</p></div></nyt_author_id></div><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/nora-ephrons-final-act.html?pagewanted=all&src=longreads&_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/nora-ephrons-final-act.html?pagewanted=all&src=longreads&_r=0</a><div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; color: black; text-align: left; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>

Nora Ephron’s Final Act - NYTimes.com

At 10 p.m. on a Friday night in a private room on the 14th Floor of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on 68th and York Avenue, my mother was lyi...

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Nora Ephron’s Final Act - NYTimes.com

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