Virginia Cherrill Is Gone, and Academy Forgot Her

Watching the Academy Awards on television this year was particularly sad for me (“An English Glam Slam,” Calendar, March 25). For the past few years, I would pick up the phone during commercials and banter with my godmother, Virginia Cherrill, about the show. She was a great fan of Billy Crystal and always had amusing anecdotes about Hollywood history to share. She passed away last November--I’d hoped to at least see her remembered in the “obituary film clips” but, alas, no Virginia. For those who produced the show, Virginia Cherrill played the blind flower girl in Chaplin’s “City Lights”--she was also Cary Grant’s first wife!

I missed her--both in life and in remembrance. How could the academy have forgotten? Were they blind?

LESLIE A. WESTBROOK

Summerland

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I guess the AIDS epidemic is over. There mustn’t be any need to worry about my neighbors and friends who are sick with HIV or who might become ill because of their HIV infection. What else could explain Monday night’s phenomenon?

Was there a red-ribbon bandit on the loose in Hollywood? Did the Shrine Auditorium change its dress code? Did all the high-minded and so-called caring icons of Tinseltown disappear overnight? Or was the lack of red ribbons at the Oscars a fickle change for a supposedly socially conscious community to seem more glamorous and subsequently more shallow?

I must admit I wasn’t counting red ribbons, so I might have actually missed one, but if they didn’t go extinct this year they definitely went on the endangered species list. My only question is, why?

DAMON SCINA

San Francisco