kim

Kim Cattrall has played everything from a Vulcan in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" to an Egyptian princess in 1987's "Mannequin," but her big break didn't come until 1997, when she was cast in HBO's "Sex and the City." Ms. Cattrall's portrayal of Samantha Jones in the series earned her five Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe award. This month, Ms. Cattrall, 51 years old, reprises the role in the new movie, "Sex and the City." She says her comic timing can be traced to her love of black-and-white screwball comedies. "I'm inspired by actresses like Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe," she says. "You can't teach what they do." She spoke with us about her favorite romantic comedies.

'My Man Godfrey,' 1936


In this comedy, Carole Lombard plays a daffy socialite who discovers a vagrant (William Powell) in the city dump and hires him as her butler. Before long, she is in love with him. "Carole Lombard is so glamorous," says Ms. Cattrall. "Every day she wakes up looking fabulous and somebody brings her breakfast. I haven't had breakfast in bed recently enough."

'His Girl Friday,' 1940

Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell star in Howard Hawks's remake of the 1931 newsroom comedy "The Front Page." Ms. Russell's character, Hildy Johnson, originally was written for a man. "She looked like a little guy, the way she would sit on the desk," Ms. Cattrall says of the performance.

'Sullivan's Travels,' 1941

Preston Sturges wrote and directed this film about a privileged Hollywood director, played by Joel McCrea, who decides the only way he can understand the poor is to pretend to be one of them. "Joel McCrea was such an underrated actor," says Ms. Cattrall. "I could watch that movie over and over just for his delivery."

'I Married a Witch,' 1942
René Clair directed this film about a witch who is burned in 17th-century Salem and returns in the guise of a 20th-century woman (Veronica Lake), only to fall in love with a descendant of the man who killed her. "It's supposed to be a comedy about love between a witch and a mortal, but really it's about accepting people as they are," says Ms. Cattrall. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/


'Woman of the Year,' 1942


Katharine Hepburn was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of a self-absorbed newspaper columnist who falls in love with Spencer Tracy's rumpled sportswriter. "My favorite scene is when Spencer Tracy comes to the office to ask her to marry him," Ms. Cattrall says. "The timing on that is impeccable."





Every winter, hordes of divers head to the congested, overdeveloped scuba-diving destinations of the Caribbean and the Red Sea. But there's a less-traversed option: Fly to Moscow, take the railroad 27 hours north, and drive two hours along snow-covered dirt roads to a village almost on the Arctic Circle, along an inlet of the White Sea. Then, take a snowmobile to a small black triangle cut into the ice.

Ice diving is one of the last great scuba adventures. WSJ's Mark Schoofs ice dives in the White Sea in Northern Russia and gives a peek into an underwater world full of sea creatures.

Ice diving is one of the last grand scuba adventures. Popular destinations include Antarctica, Newfoundland and certain lakes in the Austrian Alps. One of the best -- and least known -- is Russia's White Sea.

There, diaphanous, rainbow-tinged comb jellies (like jellyfish without the tentacles) float by. On rocks lie starfish and related brittle stars of every description. There are ophiuras, whose thin, spidery legs are striped wine-red and cream-white, and there are glittering, ruby-red crossasters with stubby legs, each tipped with delicate, filament tentacles. Luxuriant forests of large round anemones, each one ivory or pink-orange, look like some 1960s hallucinogenic art installation. Among them live multicolored sponges and algae, colonies of barnacles and tiny neon-lavender skeleton crabs. Wolf fish hide in crevasses. On the sea bed billow acres of low-growing kelp, whose undulation is as mesmerizing as a Bach fugue.

Above it all is the ice, almost alive, filtering sunlight into varying shades of emerald and gold. When one finally ascends back up through the ice hole, or maina, one literally ascends into light.

Marine life in the White Sea is so rich partly because cold water holds more oxygen than warm water, and in winter, the water is below freezing, about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. That means divers need gear -- lots of it. A dry suit, unlike the more common wet suit, is mandatory. With a zipper derived from a NASA design, and a seal on the neck, it keeps the body perfectly dry.

On my recent seven-day diving trip here with a Russian company, I wore three layers under a dry suit: a union suit made of polypropylene to wick away sweat, thick fleece long johns, and an even thicker Thinsulate-insulated undergarment that looks like a snowsuit. I wore two pairs of socks and Thinsulate booties, plus chemical toe warmers that react with air to generate heat. I used them on my hands, too, where I wore three layers of gloves under rubber outer gloves.

My head was in two neoprene hoods, a thin one underneath a thick one that tucked into a collar to protect my neck. A mask covered the skin around my nose and eyes. Only my lips, which held the mouthpiece connecting me to the air supply, were exposed directly to the cold water. Lips have such good blood flow that they don't go numb but merely tingle upon entry. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
Donning all this gear, plus fins, tank, and the lead weights that help a diver sink, takes about half an hour. We suited up in mobile huts on skis, where gas heaters made me feel like a mummy working out in a sauna. Slipping into the cold water was a relief.

How to Get There: Aeroflot flies to Moscow nonstop from Los Angeles for around $900. Delta flies nonstop from New York for around $1,000.Then it's a flight to Murmansk, or a train ride to Chupa.
Book a Trip: Peak ice-diving season is February to April. In summer, there's no ice, but the scenery and 24-hour daylight are draws. RuDive starts taking reservations a year in advance (www.dive.ru/pages/page/show_lang/25.en.htm2). Early booking is advised, especially for groups. Standard tours go from Sunday to Friday. Custom trips can last longer or, as some Russians and Finns prefer, for a weekend.
Price: A week of ice-diving at the White Sea with RuDive -- including lessons, a room with private bath and train travel to and from Moscow -- is about $1,750 per person.

But the cold harbors danger. Valves can freeze, either blasting a diver with free-flowing air or shutting off the air supply altogether. Every air tank for ice diving has two valves, not the standard one for warm-water diving, and the mouthpiece valve has a freeze-resistant design. Even so, I encountered an emergency. I wore a vest that inflated and deflated to control buoyancy, and a valve on it froze open, ballooning the vest and sending me straight up. I was pinned against the ice, unable to swim freely, with the air in my tank rapidly flowing out. The safety of the terrestrial world was less than a foot away but walled off by impenetrable ice.

This is the second danger of ice diving: To ascend to the surface, one must return to the ice hole. Out of air and wearing close to 100 pounds of gear, even 25 yards underwater can be a long, even lethal distance. Each diver is secured to a rope connected to two other people: a buddy in the water and a tender on the surface. My buddy saw my trouble and gave the emergency signal: Four yanks of the rope, and our tender hauled us in. We skated along the ice's underside, a sensation so fun and beautiful that I forgot the danger. Up on top, our tender doused the valve with hot water from a thermos, and we resumed our dive.

Living so intimately with ice, one realizes it is anything but static. A brilliant sun shone during the first two days. But then a heavy snow fell, and when we went to the maina, the water seemed to have risen, forming a puddle on the ice. The weight of the snow had pushed the ice down, forcing water up through the hole. On another day, we were diving when a storm roared in. Our guides, concerned that large waves on the open sea would create surges capable of cracking the ice, decided we would leave.

Even without storms, the tides rise and fall more than six feet, so the ice at the shore continually cracks, refreezes and cracks again. Underneath, the constant friction sculpts the ice into breathtaking forms through which light streams as if through a kaleidoscope.

Topside, the muted light of a snowstorm or a sunset brings forth the full range of color in arctic ice: every conceivable variation of white and grey and a softly iridescent blue that seems to emanate from deep within. At night, the wind sweeps stretches of ice clean of snow, and they gleam obsidian black. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx

The underside of the ice is bubbled like a sponge, and in many of the holes live tiny crustaceans. Blow scuba bubbles, and they fall out like living rain.

Two former marine biologists, Dmitri Orlov and Mikhail Safonov, founded the outfit that organized this expedition, the RuDive Group, which offers world-wide scuba tours. In 1996, after the Soviet Union crumbled and science funding dried up, Mr. Safonov and Mr. Orlov began offering diving lessons, and in 1998 they began taking customers to the White Sea.

Five years ago, they opened their own diving center there, with comfortable wooden chalets offering accommodations from hostel-style dorms with shared baths to private rooms. Meals are hearty, often featuring local smoked fish, fresh vegetables and fruit and preserves made from local berries.

About seven years ago, Mr. Safonov recalls, a woman ice-diving with a predecessor company he and his partner founded and ran died in a Moscow lake at a depth of about 10 feet. The exact circumstances weren't clear, but spurred largely by the event, RuDive now requires all customers to have ice-diving certification from the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. Customers can get ice-diving certification at the start of their trip. RuDive has added to the standard training to enhance safety.

In 1999, Mr. Safonov participated in what is believed to be the first successful scuba expedition to the North Pole. The ice there forms underwater "castles," he says, and the water is as clear as air. Last month, he returned from RuDive's fifth successful polar diving trip. The cost: $40,000 per person.

RuDive's White Sea center has two captive beluga whales, owned by a Russian aquarium and held in a netted sea pen. The one-ton males circled in swift arabesques, then came straight at me, playfully biting my leg and fins the way a dog would. It was amazing fun, but the experience had traces of the amusement park. It was an escape from reality, not an immersion in it.

By contrast, the maina, its black water a portal between worlds, feels exhilaratingly real. When a snowstorm transforms the topside into a swirl of white, it's the perfect moment to slip into a winter of anemones and comb jellies and luminous green-gold ice.








If you were asked to list literary classics, it is unlikely that "Little Red Riding Hood" would be the first to come to mind. You might think of the Bible or Shakespeare, since they are the two most widely owned masterworks of Western literature. But, as novelist A.S. Byatt notes, "Grimms' Fairy Tales," which contains the popular "Little Red Riding Hood," is probably third. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz



Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected tales from folk sources, and published their "Children's and Household Tales" in 1812. To make the stories more literary and more appropriate for children, they made revisions throughout their seven editions, the last published in 1857.

These fairy tales deal with the same issues, such as love and death, as all great literature. They do so without hiding violence, hate, or even lust, making them quite different from most children's books of today. They set a standard for literary works -- Vladimir Nabokov was right when he said that all great novels are great fairy tales.

The stories are presented both concretely and magically, matching the child's manner of thinking. With their great emotional and moral power, and with their being first heard at an early age, they are more than literary. They suggest a model of living for the child.

"Little Red Riding Hood" is about a beautiful girl leaving home to visit her sick grandmother. The heroine starts down a path, carrying cakes and wine to make Grandma feel better. Along the way, she meets a friendly wolf who asks her where she is going. The charming Red Riding Hood all but invites him to meet her at Grandma's by pinpointing the location of her house. The wolf thinks, "What a tender young creature! What a nice plump mouthful."

The wolf persuades Little Red Riding Hood to wander off into the woods to see the beautiful flowers, to hear the birds singing and to enjoy the merry woods. This ploy allows the wolf to rush off to eat Grandma, disguise himself as her, and wait in bed for the girl. When she arrives, she questions the wolf about his appearance. And when she finally asks about his big teeth, he famously replies "The better to eat you with" and devours her.

Sated, the wolf falls asleep. Luckily, a hunter walks by, checks on Grandma, and discovers what has happened. He cuts open the wolf's belly, releasing Grandma and Little Red Riding Hood, both unharmed. Then Red Riding Hood springs into action herself and kills the wolf by piling rocks in his belly. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/



The fairy tale is fantastic, but that is necessary because of children's magical thinking. Their thought is illogical, impulsive and omnipotent. They are not surprised that a wolf talks or that two people can be retrieved whole from his belly. The little girl hearing the story does not simply identify with the little girl in the tale, as an adult might -- she becomes Little Red Riding Hood. Some parents argue that there is too much unreality in fairy tales. On the contrary, the narrative resonates with a child's notion of reality. These tales speak directly to children in their own language; by doing so, they exert their influence.

Another device in "Grimms'" is the use of absolutes. In "Snow White," Mother is divided into the entirely good queen who died and the unremittingly cruel stepmother who wishes to kill the girl. In "Little Red Riding Hood," fatherly attributes are split between the good protective hunter and the sinful, animalistic wolf. Since children themselves think in absolutes, a clean division of attributes makes it easier for the child to consider opposite qualities.

Violence and sexuality are, as the Grimm scholar Maria Tatar says, "the major thematic concern of the tales . . . at least in their unedited form." Rumpelstiltskin tears himself in two, Snow White's stepmother dances herself to death in red-hot iron shoes, and Hansel and Gretel are left in the forest to die. (If these scenes are unfamiliar, you have read a bowdlerized version. These "retellings" are to the Grimms what Cliffs Notes are to Shakespeare.)

But the Brothers Grimm cannot be blamed for introducing alien thoughts into the child's mind. The child has his own fears of and desires for violence before encountering the fairy tales. He will never experience the precise situations that occur in "Grimms'," but he does fear death and abandonment. He also has his own monstrous and destructive wishes. All this is obvious from even the most cursory observation of preschoolers' play. The genius of these tales is that they intuitively address such wishes and fears -- and allow the child to use the narrative to master them. Little Red Riding Hood not only survives the wolf's cannibalism but she kills him -- she has become a more assertive person.

Sexuality is subtle in the Grimms' telling of that story, but not in earlier versions. In one, a werewolf demands that the girl strip and get in bed with him, but she escapes. In the Perrault version of 1797, Little Red Riding Hood takes off her clothes and climbs into bed with "Father Wolf." In the Grimms' story, she virtually invites him to Grandma's house, where she is bringing treats that are ideal for a party. The "old sinner" delights in conversing with her, gets rid of Grandma, and waits for her in bed. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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Why is sexuality present? One answer is that the stories are derived from bawdy folktales. A more compelling explanation is that the tales include it because children are sexual beings. Psychoanalysts have long held this view, which became popular through Bruno Bettelheim's tendentiously brilliant analyses in "The Uses of Enchantment."

Little Red Riding Hood is unconsciously working through her attraction to her own father, who is never mentioned in the story; instead, she becomes involved with the rapacious "father wolf" and is later saved by the protective fatherly hunter. In the end, she kills the wolf, thus renouncing her oedipal desires for her father. The child who hears the story has learned about the dangers of loving unwisely.

The dilemma for Little Red Riding Hood is the extent to which she must keep to the straight path. Thanks to her dallying in the woods, Grandma and she are eaten, but there is no overt moralizing. By the time the story ends, Little Red Riding Hood has not only taken action against the wolf but also makes a promise to herself to heed her mother's warnings, and thus is better prepared to avoid the wrong partner in the future. The Grimms allow the child to consider such issues unconsciously, without being subjected to a heavy dose of didacticism.

"Little Red Riding Hood," like the other great fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, ends happily -- but not with "they lived happily ever after." Red Riding Hood has more work to do; she is not yet ready for her prince.

For adults, telling the story to a child is the richest of pleasures. The storyteller revisits a classic and the vital issues it raises. He can marvel at the fascination of the child. But most important, the child's enchantment becomes the teller's too, and parent and child join to share that enchantment. It is one of those rare moments in adult life when one can recapture the magic of one's own early youth. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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Louis J. Sheehan Esquire