Family Portrait

The oil painting by N.C. Wyeth depicting the artist with his wife and five children is an affectionate rendering of the famously creative brood from Chadds Ford. If you could rotate the canvas 180 degrees, however, and peer through the top layer of paint with a kind of X-ray vision, you would behold a snarling villain, his face lit by the red glare of an iron furnace. In fact, three scientists have done just that, unveiling their find yesterday at an American Chemical Society conference in Washington.

"Family Portrait" is the kind of movie that raises questions, the most pertinent of which is rhetorical: You think you've got problems? The movie opens as Cao Depei (Li Zuejian), a commercial photographer living in a cramped apartment with a wife and young son in Beijing, visits an orphanage and meets a child, just arrived from a remote province, who claims to Cao's son. Cao believes his chat with the boy will resolve the misunderstanding. Instead, he discover the boy is indeed his - by his first wife, who had the child after their divorce became final.

RE JILL PORTER'S Nov. 12 column on the Preston family, who were told they had no right to be in the house the city supposedly gave them: What is wrong with this picture and story? You have three adults and their numerous children who are sharing a home with a mother and grandmother who is about to be evicted. What is wrong with adults who want to continue to live on somebody else's dime year in and year out, having more babies along the way? Shame on these women for not getting out and making a way for themselves and their children.

Families of all kinds migrated from the city's oldest residential neighborhoods in the 1990s, pushing farther into its northern quarter, often led by immigrants. Neighborhoods such as North Philadelphia, Fairmount and South Philadelphia saw a decline in their share of single-parent and married-couple families, while areas along Roosevelt Boulevard saw an increase, according to census figures being released today. "Everybody is trying to escape the violence, the drugs, in North Philadelphia," said Rosaura Molina, 42, a single mother of two originally from Panama, who lived around the heavily Latino Fifth Street corridor for years before settling near Juniata Park.

MY DAD once told me that you can tell a lot about the character of a man if you look at his shoes. So last week in one of the New York papers was a family portrait of the Bush clan. Our president was sitting down so his cuffs were raised a bit. There it was! - the presidential seal on each boot. Mr. President, when you're sending off men and women to die in your personal little war, keep your monogramed boots in the closet. Yeah! We know you're in charge. Bruce Semigran, Norristown

From Michael Lacing: Some things that will take place at this year's Jackson Family Thanksgiving dinner: Brother or sister with smallest earnings during year made to come day early and kill turkey. Straws drawn to see who has to sit next to Dad. Usual agrument over whether Michael's chimp Bubbles should be allowed that second glass of wine. Spirited pre-meal game of football between family attorneys and limo drivers. Usual battle between Latoya and Michael over white meat from turkey.

Congratulations to The Inquirer and the Acel Moore Career Development Workshop for providing Archbishop Prendergast High School student Christa Oestreich the opportunity to write her wonderful article "A lifetime of lessons learned in the Great Depression" (April 2). I attended the same elementary school as Marie Oestreich - St. Bonaventure. Marie's sister, Catherine (the nurse in the family portrait), and I were in the same classes (eighth grade in 1938 and Little Flower High School in 1942)

Like Ang Lee's 1994 family portrait, Eat Drink Man Woman, Alice Wu's Saving Face deals with the ties that bind, and the lies that go with them, among several generations of a close-knit Chinese clan. Set in the teeming Asian-American community of Flushing, Queens, Saving Face stars Michelle Krusiec as Wilhelmina "Wil" Pang, a crackerjack young surgeon for a New York hospital who makes her weekly pilgrimage home from Brooklyn to "swim in the Chinese gene pool," patiently tolerating her mother's efforts to match her with an eligible Chinese guy. One problem: Wil is gay, a fact that her mother (a droll performance from Joan Chen)

Question: My in-laws had a family portrait taken with spouses and grandchildren. Then they wanted a picture with just their nuclear family - again, no problem. But then they wanted another portrait with their nuclear family plus the grandchildren minus the spouses. I thought this was incredibly insensitive and hurtful for the message it sent. Answer: "Incredibly insensitive" is leaving spouses out of every shot. Taking several shots organized by category - nuclear family, blood family, full extended family, single generation - is a smart way to scratch the varied itches of a big crowd.

You have probably seen Mount Airy artist Susan Schary's work without realizing it - and that's a crime, because it is extraordinary. It's also a crime because the pictures she paints often are about crimes, or their aftermath. Schary, 58, is a fine artist, trained in the classical skills of the European masters. But what she's best known for are her courtroom scenes - the ones that bring to a news-hungry public images of legal proceedings in states that still bar cameras from courtrooms.

Question: My in-laws had a family portrait taken with spouses and grandchildren. Then they wanted a picture with just their nuclear family - again, no problem. But then they wanted another portrait with their nuclear family plus the grandchildren minus the spouses. I thought this was incredibly insensitive and hurtful for the message it sent. Answer: "Incredibly insensitive" is leaving spouses out of every shot. Taking several shots organized by category - nuclear family, blood family, full extended family, single generation - is a smart way to scratch the varied itches of a big crowd.

Congratulations to The Inquirer and the Acel Moore Career Development Workshop for providing Archbishop Prendergast High School student Christa Oestreich the opportunity to write her wonderful article "A lifetime of lessons learned in the Great Depression" (April 2). I attended the same elementary school as Marie Oestreich - St. Bonaventure. Marie's sister, Catherine (the nurse in the family portrait), and I were in the same classes (eighth grade in 1938 and Little Flower High School in 1942)

To watch the movie producer Gregoire Canvel (played by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) walking through the streets of Paris in the heartbreaking Father of My Children is to witness a man with the weight of the world pressing down on him. In the early sequences of Mia Hansen-Love's beautifully observed family portrait, Canvel, wielding a mobile phone (or two), smoking cigarettes, fielding panicky missives from a Swedish film set, is all resilient charm. Sure, he owes millions to labs, to studios, to the banks.

The oil painting by N.C. Wyeth depicting the artist with his wife and five children is an affectionate rendering of the famously creative brood from Chadds Ford. If you could rotate the canvas 180 degrees, however, and peer through the top layer of paint with a kind of X-ray vision, you would behold a snarling villain, his face lit by the red glare of an iron furnace. In fact, three scientists have done just that, unveiling their find yesterday at an American Chemical Society conference in Washington.

RE JILL PORTER'S Nov. 12 column on the Preston family, who were told they had no right to be in the house the city supposedly gave them: What is wrong with this picture and story? You have three adults and their numerous children who are sharing a home with a mother and grandmother who is about to be evicted. What is wrong with adults who want to continue to live on somebody else's dime year in and year out, having more babies along the way? Shame on these women for not getting out and making a way for themselves and their children.

Like Ang Lee's 1994 family portrait, Eat Drink Man Woman, Alice Wu's Saving Face deals with the ties that bind, and the lies that go with them, among several generations of a close-knit Chinese clan. Set in the teeming Asian-American community of Flushing, Queens, Saving Face stars Michelle Krusiec as Wilhelmina "Wil" Pang, a crackerjack young surgeon for a New York hospital who makes her weekly pilgrimage home from Brooklyn to "swim in the Chinese gene pool," patiently tolerating her mother's efforts to match her with an eligible Chinese guy. One problem: Wil is gay, a fact that her mother (a droll performance from Joan Chen)

These eyes are set in a field of fluffy and matted feathers in hues of brown and cream. Magnified and isolated from the rest of the owl, they are haunting. Owl Eyes, a photograph taken by Ralph Alfors, a self-employed pharmacist from Lumberton, offers a different perspective on the barred owl. One can't help but gaze back. Look closely to see the faint image of Alfors with his camera, and its white flash, reflected in the eyes. The photograph is among more than 200 on display at the Palmyra Cove Nature Park Environmental Discovery Center, at the foot of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.

MY DAD once told me that you can tell a lot about the character of a man if you look at his shoes. So last week in one of the New York papers was a family portrait of the Bush clan. Our president was sitting down so his cuffs were raised a bit. There it was! - the presidential seal on each boot. Mr. President, when you're sending off men and women to die in your personal little war, keep your monogramed boots in the closet. Yeah! We know you're in charge. Bruce Semigran, Norristown

There's an unresolved syllogism that some Orthodox Jews struggle with daily. It goes something like this: If Judaism is good and homosexuality is proscribed by the Bible, can one be a practicing Jew and a practicing homosexual? It is written in Leviticus that sex between men is an abomination punishable by death. Likewise, it is also a tenet of Jewish law that sex between women is a transgression. Still, there are many observant Jewish homosexuals - dozens of whom are profiled in the documentary Trembling Before G-d (ultra-religious Jews consider it a sacrilege to spell out the name of the deity)

Families of all kinds migrated from the city's oldest residential neighborhoods in the 1990s, pushing farther into its northern quarter, often led by immigrants. Neighborhoods such as North Philadelphia, Fairmount and South Philadelphia saw a decline in their share of single-parent and married-couple families, while areas along Roosevelt Boulevard saw an increase, according to census figures being released today. "Everybody is trying to escape the violence, the drugs, in North Philadelphia," said Rosaura Molina, 42, a single mother of two originally from Panama, who lived around the heavily Latino Fifth Street corridor for years before settling near Juniata Park.