BED LIST: JEREMY NORTHAM
The best thing about the movie adaptation of Emma (although I have to admit Gwenyth Paltrow did a great job as our erstwhile matchmaking heroine) was Jeremy Northam as Mr. Knightley. Jeremy Northam in anything is wonderful. He tends to choose roles in movies that require a brain, like Gosford Park, Amistad, Carrington and An Ideal Husband. But for full-on heavy breathing, put Possession at the top of your Netflix queue. It's not a great adaptation of A.S. Byatt's book, but those scenes between Northam's Randolph Ash and Jennifer Ehle's Christabel LaMotte could set their poems on fire. Love the eyes, love the smile, love the look, but especially love the brain. Isn't sex more about the organ between your ears than the one between your legs anyway?
DINNER LIST: AUGUST WILSON
The sad news that August Wilson, probably the most influential African-American dramatist ever, has terminal liver cancer, hit me hard. I've been reading and enjoying Wilson's plays for years now. Wilson is renowned for his Twentieth-Century cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the African-American experience in each decade of the century. The best-known of these, The Piano Lesson and Fences, won the Pulitzer Prize (Fences also took the Tony for Best Drama). About half of them won New York Drama Critics Circle awards. Here's the spooky thing: Wilson is putting the finishing touches on the final play of the cycle, Radio Golf. Most likely, he will not live to see it produced on Broadway, nor will he ever write anything else. It's almost as if we were allowed to enjoy his gift in this particular way, and then it'll be gone.
I'd love to have dinner with August Wilson. I'd thank him profusely for helping me better understand a culture that's so closely entwined with my own (I did, after all, grow up in the South). Any white person who actually thinks that racism in this country is something of the past ought to be required to read August Wilson.
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