“A” list

JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:21:47 GMT

Mary Ann Sorrentino on the right to choose
Long-time abortion rights advocate Mary Ann Sorrentino didn’t write The A Word to change anyone’s pro-life stance.

Long-time abortion rights advocate Mary Ann Sorrentino didn’t write The A Word to change anyone’s pro-life stance — though she does point out the about-face, in the opposite direction, that both Reagan and the elder Bush made on the issue when they rose to national prominence. Instead she creates an impassioned plea to that 66 percent (or more) of Americans who have repeatedly voted to retain a woman’s right to make decisions about what happens to her own body.

Sorrentino lines up her facts, relates a few “war stories,” ties together the current pieces of the debate — including stem cell research — and repeatedly reminds her readers of why we can’t return to “the bad old days” before 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision. Sorrentino was director of Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island from 1977-87, years when the abortion issue was front and center in the lives of Rhode Islanders as well as the nation. She not only kept the women’s clinic open and secure at a time when just 20 of the country’s 200 Planned Parenthood affiliates were willing to do so, but she was a tireless speaker, outspoken lobbyist, and lively debater on all aspects of women’s reproductive freedom and women’s rights.

Anyone who has lived in Rhode Island for the past 25 years will most likely re¬member that the Diocese of Providence excommunicated Sorrentino from the Catholic Church in 1985 (and threatened to prevent her daughter from being confirmed). Less well-known perhaps is that the Canon Law Society of America overturned that ruling in 1987. When Sorrentino left Planned Parenthood, she took to the airwaves as a talk show host on several local radio stations until 2000. She continues to write newspaper columns for the Standard Times in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and for the Providence Phoenix.

With so much personal history invested in this issue, Sorrentino as an author might have found it hard to pack everything she wanted to say into a 224-page paperback. Though the organization of the book leads to some repetition, the chapters are like the points in any debate, in which the strongest arguments are re-stated, re-shaped, and presented in different contexts.

Bored? Not with these games

JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 19:25:22 GMT

Role-playing, railroad-building, and good ol’ spelling
One way of channeling family competitiveness at holiday gatherings is to bring out a board game and gently coerce people to play it.

One way of channeling family competitiveness at holiday gatherings is to bring out a board game and gently coerce people to play it. Though personality traits may pop out in sharper focus, game-induced conflicts almost always devolve into laughter and not arm-wrestling and the shyer members of the clan often blossom in these game situations. Our holiday-time games of choice have been Scrabble — the box even contains historic score sheets from well-remembered matches; Trivial Pursuit (various versions); and Pictionary, in which the clue-sketching can bring on wild hilarity.

Two-person games — from a pocket version of the word-game Boggle to a hand-drawn board for Nine Men’s Morris (also called mill) played with pennies and nickels — have whiled away many an hour in airports and train stations. A 5000-year-old game called Ur has engaged bored nephews for days at a time. And one of the nephews introduced me to Set, a worthy successor to Scan, both of which lay out cards to match, one through memorization and one through deductive logic.

On anyone’s list of the classics are Chess, Checkers, Clue, Life, Risk, Sorry, and Monopoly. The number-one seller worldwide is still the 70-year-old Monopoly, which is licensed in 81 countries and published in 27 languages, including Croatian and Thai. In English, it has been released in more than 100 themed variations, from cartoon characters like SpongeBob, the Simpsons and Family Guy, to dozens of sports-themed editions, many for specific teams, such as the Red Sox, the Patriots, and the Celtics. The longest Monopoly game ever played was 1680 hours long (70 straight days . . . or did they put money and properties in envelopes and come back to it months later, as we often did?)

The Hasbro website (www.hasbro.com/monopoly/) has a fascinating history of the game and lots of “fun facts,” such as the following: Monopoly had a strong following in Cuba until Castro ordered all the sets destroyed. Escape maps, compasses, and files were smuggled into German POW camps in Monopoly games. Parker Brothers once sent an armored car with one million dollars of Monopoly money to a marathon game in Pittsburgh that had run out of funds.

The Hasbro link to Scrabble (www.hasbro.com/scrabble/) has a detailed history of that game, which was first manufactured in an old schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut, in the late 1940s. Sales were limping along in the early ’50s, when the president of Macy’s, so the story goes, discovered it while on vacation and immediately ordered the game for his store. Since then, demand for the game has never slowed.