Women We Love

It is the day after my birthday, Sunday Calendar (July 17), and I’m wondering: “Will it surprise me?”

Arnold Schwarzenegger has a new movie out, so we get an interview with its director, James Cameron. (No matter how much I liked “Terminator 2,” some of us could care less what the boys of summer are doing now.)

There’s the cover story on artist Bruce Nauman. Looks interesting, but I ignore it.

Give me something I want to read, please!

Here we go. Not one, but four stories. I’ve hit a birthday jackpot.

Thanks for the fine interviews with actresses Vanessa Williams. Susan Sarandon and Julie Walters and the female rock group 7 Year Bitch.

Their words transcended the superficial and mundane. Each actress spoke of her children in the highest light. Each expressed deep care for loved ones and issues outside the business of their work.

I felt a better birthday chant coming on:

“Let’s smash some stereotypes.

“Let’s activate some social change.

“Let’s love our children. And our men.

“Let’s rock ‘n roll!”

JEANINE D’ELIA

Granada Hills

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I appreciate your article on Vanessa Williams and the mention in the lead paragraph of my old high school, Horace Greeley, in Chappaqua, N.Y. (“Untangling the Web,” by Patrick Pacheco, July 17):

I was graduated from the school in 1958, and I have many fond memories of my years there. I am especially proud of the fact that Williams is the first black Miss America. In my 13 years in the Chappaqua school system, we had no black students, and it was impossible for some minorities to buy a house in the community. Now it is a model of ethnic and racial diversity.

Williams and her family have returned there so that they can take advantage of the outstanding education system and a beautiful natural habitat.

JAMES L. BILTCHIK

Los Angeles

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Thank you for Gene Seymour’s insightful interview with Susan Sarandon (“She’s Her Own Best Counsel,” July 17). I have long been in awe of her craft and considered her beauty without equal. I applaud her (and Tim Robbins’) decisions to place their family, politics and personal lives before the demands of Hollywood.

The fact that Sarandon is not a slave to her craft is especially heartening in the light of the recent suicide of “Savannah,” the actress who apparently became a helot to the lure of stardom in Tinseltown and whose story was chronicled in that same day’s Metro section.

Margaret Fuller said: “Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot and pruning knife.”

Susan Sarandon apparently has found a bountiful spring to nourish her life, and it doesn’t require standing before a lens.

KURT MURINE

Laguna Niguel