New Woman

On our weekly stroll around the park, he casually drops the bomb. Somewhere between discussion of Barry Bonds' batting average and a description of the carnations he has just put on my mother's grave, my father tells me he is seeing someone! An old friend of theirs. And, before I even have time to digest this information, he mumbles that he and his friend are thinking about moving in together. I'm speechless. When I recover my voice, I question him, as I would one of my kids. I know, even as I do it, that this is inappropriate, but I can't hide my concern.

The charm of B movies is that they can handle serious themes with an efficiency that mocks the often stodgy pomposity of "serious" motion pictures. The cheapie action flick "Eve of Destruction," for example, is based on the idea that feminism has allowed the modern woman to re-invent herself. This new woman is tougher, more resilient and more aggressive. As the male of the species has demonstrated, however, aggression can be a difficult impulse to control. What if this new woman found out that she could not control hers?

The man accused of killing and mutilating the body of his live-in girlfriend to make room for a new woman was found guilty of first-degree murder Monday. A Philadelphia jury convicted Eric Nathaniel Johnson, 38, in the 2007 murder of Jean Jackson. Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was also found guilty of possessing a weapon and abuse of a corpse. Jackson's body was found in the corner of an empty lot on the 3000 block of Witte Street in Port Richmond on March 31, 2007.

In his latest thriller, Without Remorse, Tom Clancy takes all the elements that espionage aficionados love and expect and goes them one better. (Well, this isn't quite espionage, but it still has all the elements.) There's the war-hardened hero, John Kelly, featured in earlier Clancy tales and now further emotionally numbed by the death of his young wife. To make matters worse, she was pregnant with their first child. Then you get the glimmerings of early love when a new woman - vilely used and abused - comes onto the scene.

OK, we all know what happens when Hollywood adapts a foreign film, don't we, movie lovers? Goodbye art, goodbye good storytelling, and hello cheap and tawdry. It's a profit pursuit that all but destroys the original. Or does it? Consider two new entries: "Sommersby," a uniquely American interpretation of "The Return of Martin Guerre," set in the Civil War era. And director George Sluizer remakes "The Vanishing," his 1988 Dutch film, into an American setting. But did they get it right?

Hillary's Choice," Gail Sheehy's latest study of political character, confirms Sheehy's status as America's leading village explainer - which, as Gertrude Stein once pointed out, "is fine if you're a village. If not, not. " Sheehy is the journalist-turned-self-anointed psychologist who transformed the scary-sounding "crises" of academic adult-development theory (such as the midlife crisis) into the user-friendly "Passages," the name of her 1976 mega-best-seller. Sheehy's diagnosis of the first lady-slash-senatorial candidate has the compelling obviousness of good local gossip, though with the upbeat ending you'd expect from an author whose message has consistently been, "The more intense the suffering, the better the chance to grow.

The subject of the Soviet Union came up in a recent interview with Diane Sawyer. She had been there recently with 60 Minutes. "The change in the atmosphere is amazing," Diane said and gave me an example. One day she accompained the head of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, as he made his way around the city on a tour of inspection. "Of course, everything was set up ahead of time but not everything went according to schedule. " At a grocery store he remarked to the salesman that the lettuce was of very good quality.

It's not news that female sexuality has always been a problematic thing in Hollywood. Traditionally, "bad women" have gotten punished and "good women" have gotten married. And we all know what "bad" means - sexy, tough, independent. And now it's the late 1980s. Feminism has been around for decades. Women are moving ahead in business. But in the movies, it often seems, all we've done is go from the old madonna-and-prostitute dichotomy to a new version - the wife vs. the career woman.

Ever wonder what it's like to have your cage rattled in rehab? Outside of addicts, few people get to see what life is like inside these therapeutic crucibles where dark secrets are revealed, crippling fears are confronted, and destructive habits are uprooted. But if you watch the new Starting Over (11 a.m. weekdays on Channel 10), you get a pretty good notion of how it feels to submit your personality to an extreme makeover in a rehabilitation setting. This syndicated series from the makers of MTV's The Real World, that hardy pioneer of "reality" programming, puts six women in a communal house in Chicago and tapes them as they deal with each other and with a variety of tough issues: weight, booze, self-esteem, anger, codependency - the whole fun-pack.

A funny thing often happens when a mother first shows up with her children at Caton House, a bare-bones drug-treatment center fashioned out of an old West Philadelphia auto-supply store. "She leaves the room and her children go berserk," said Nancy Flanagan, co-director of the two-year-old program for homeless female addicts and their children. "They know what that means - she may be gone for hours, and they'll go hungry. " Mothers go to Caton House because in the nightmare world of addiction, they have finally run out of hope and out of chances.

A Jersey City, N.J., woman has pleaded guilty to hiring a hit man and attempting to pay for his services using stolen credit cards. Marissa Mark, 28, was living in Allentown in 2006 when she contacted a website called hitmanforhire to inquire about having her former boyfriend's new girlfriend killed. After negotiating with the site's operator, she agreed to pay $37,000 to have an assassin gun down a woman identified as "A.L.R.," according to federal prosecutors. The woman was a mortgage broker in California, according to the plea agreement.

A 23-year-old woman admitted Thursday that she filed more than 90 fradulent student-loan applications seeking more $1.7 million. The Browns Mills resident, who had taken only a handful of college courses, received more than $192,000 in the scheme, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman said. La'Vada Cruse entered her guilty plea in federal court in Camden on charges of mail fraud, tax evasion, and aggravated identity theft. Between 2003 and 2007, Cruse applied for loans in her name or in the names of others, including family members, officials said.

For 19 years of her adult life, Gail Pedrick was unable to walk. Having gone through so much to get back on her feet, she says she isn't going to walk away from a fight. Going on 74, Pedrick has been taking on four states, New York City, and the Delaware River Basin Commission in her quest to save her New Hope property, and those of others along the river, from the Delaware's fury. "I'm not about to quit," she said recently at her Waterloo Road house, close enough to the Delaware to look like a docked ship.

Lenny Dykstra is apparently not the only local star athlete-turned-money-investor being called out for allegedly cheating a client. Julius Erving was sued last week by a Manhattan woman who claims in a lawsuit that Doctor J swindled her out of $420,000 in a partnership that involved dirty investment manager Kenneth Starr. Mary Gilbert hired an attorney to investigate her investments after Starr pleaded guilty to running a $50 million Ponzi scheme in September. The attorney found that Gilbert, too, had been cheated.

The man accused of killing and mutilating the body of his live-in girlfriend to make room for a new woman was found guilty of first-degree murder Monday. A Philadelphia jury convicted Eric Nathaniel Johnson, 38, in the 2007 murder of Jean Jackson. Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was also found guilty of possessing a weapon and abuse of a corpse. Jackson's body was found in the corner of an empty lot on the 3000 block of Witte Street in Port Richmond on March 31, 2007.

Ever wonder what it's like to have your cage rattled in rehab? Outside of addicts, few people get to see what life is like inside these therapeutic crucibles where dark secrets are revealed, crippling fears are confronted, and destructive habits are uprooted. But if you watch the new Starting Over (11 a.m. weekdays on Channel 10), you get a pretty good notion of how it feels to submit your personality to an extreme makeover in a rehabilitation setting. This syndicated series from the makers of MTV's The Real World, that hardy pioneer of "reality" programming, puts six women in a communal house in Chicago and tapes them as they deal with each other and with a variety of tough issues: weight, booze, self-esteem, anger, codependency - the whole fun-pack.

It is unclear where or when they met or just what the nature of their relationship is. They aren't talking. But some people close to them are willing to share bits and pieces of the story. It is, they say with a shake of their heads, just another bizarre twist in a suburban saga of murder and betrayal that has taken on almost soap-opera status. "She thinks he's innocent," said a friend, who asked not to be identified. "She thinks they're going to be together. " He is Rabbi Fred J. Neulander, accused murderer and former leader of Cherry Hill's Congregation M'kor Shalom.

Hillary's Choice," Gail Sheehy's latest study of political character, confirms Sheehy's status as America's leading village explainer - which, as Gertrude Stein once pointed out, "is fine if you're a village. If not, not. " Sheehy is the journalist-turned-self-anointed psychologist who transformed the scary-sounding "crises" of academic adult-development theory (such as the midlife crisis) into the user-friendly "Passages," the name of her 1976 mega-best-seller. Sheehy's diagnosis of the first lady-slash-senatorial candidate has the compelling obviousness of good local gossip, though with the upbeat ending you'd expect from an author whose message has consistently been, "The more intense the suffering, the better the chance to grow.

On our weekly stroll around the park, he casually drops the bomb. Somewhere between discussion of Barry Bonds' batting average and a description of the carnations he has just put on my mother's grave, my father tells me he is seeing someone! An old friend of theirs. And, before I even have time to digest this information, he mumbles that he and his friend are thinking about moving in together. I'm speechless. When I recover my voice, I question him, as I would one of my kids. I know, even as I do it, that this is inappropriate, but I can't hide my concern.