Suko's Night with Genius

Something will usually trigger what I write about and this week it was the song James and Madame Aries played just before I came on the show. It was "I Think I'm Gonna Like it Here" from the movie "Annie". It's hard to believe the movie opened in 1982. It certainly doesn't seem that long ago to me but perhaps it's because I watched it for the first time with my now 12 year old daughter only a few years ago. The movie starred Aileen Quinn as Annie, Albert Finney as Daddy Warbucks, Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan, Ann Reinking as Grace Farrell, and two of James' favorites, Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters as the villanous Rooster Hannigan and Lily St. Regis. But it is the actor who played Punjab, Daddy Warbuck's faithful bodyguard who rescues Annie at the end, to whom the word "genius" refers to. The brilliant Geoffrey Holder. It was last month that I met him and his wife, the famous dancer, Carmen Delavallard. My brother invited me to a screening of a documentary about the couple called "Carmen and Geoffrey" at the Film Forum in New York's Greenwich Village of which my brother is the director of reperetory programming. The movie was shown after which they were introduced by my brother and interviewed by Jennifer Dunning, the distinguished dance critic for the New York Times. This couple is elegance personified. So striking, he being 6' 6" tall and she still unbelievably gorgeous for a woman of 76. Geoffrey who was a magnificent dancer and choreographer uses a cane now due to a hip replacement but still possesses his wonderful laugh and joie de vive he is famous for. The movie tells how they met doing a musical by Truman Capote and Harold Arlen called "House of Flowers" and wed a month later. Fifty-three years later they seem madly in love. Geoffrey has not only been in many movies including "Live and Let Die", "Dr. Doolittle" and most recently the narrator in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" but he is a Tony award winning director and costume designer ("The Wiz"), a choreographer, set designer and an acclaimed fine artist whose paintings appear in museums and private collections around the world. Carmen, dancer, actress, director, writer has appeared in many movies, notably "Carmen Jones" and "The Egyptian" and television productions as well as the stage including the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Their marriage is a symphony of brilliance. And to top it off, they are really, really warm and lovely. Geoffrey even said to me "I love you" as he drove away. I'll post some pictures of the evening including one of me with the dreamy actor, Frederico Castellucio, who played Furio on "The Sopranos", the pony-tailed "hitman with a heart" who was getting a little too close to Carmella when he suspiciously disappeared. He, also a brilliant artist, is a good friend of Geoffrey. He was so sweet and attentive to me which really topped off this amazing night.