Who: John Cleese
What: Reading and talk in conjunction with paperback release of So, Anyway . . . (Three Rivers Press, September 2015, $16)
Where: NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Pl., 212-992-8484
When: Saturday, November 14, $65.75 – $125, 6:30
Why: “I made my first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurse’s room, at St. Peter’s Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on September 13, 1948. I was eight and five-sixths. My audience was a pack of nine-year-olds, who were jeering at me and baying, ‘Chee-eese! Chee-eese!’ I kept climbing the steps, despite the feelings of humiliation and fear. But above all, I was bewildered. How had I managed to attract so much attention? What had I done to provoke this aggression? And . . . how on earth did they know my family surname had once been Cheese?” So begins So, Anyway . . ., the memoir of one of the funniest men in the history of the world, Monty Python and Fawlty Towers legend John Cleese. On November 14, the star and writer of A Fish Called Wanda and cinematic portrayer of the Black Knight, Tim the Enchanter, Deadly Dirk, Nearly Headless Nick, King Harold, Q, and many other roles, will be climbing the steps of NYU’s Skirball Center on November 14, to talk about his wild and wacky life and career and all that attention and aggression. The four-time-married, self-described “writer, actor & tall person,” who is also a bit of a silly walker, is visiting Boston, Chicago, and New York celebrating the release of the paperback edition of the book. VIP tickets ($125) come with a signed copy of So, Anyway . . . and a photo opp with Mr. Cleese. Be sure to join in the chants of “Chee-eese! Chee-eese!”
Over the last several decades, the U.S. health care system has grown increasingly impersonal because of technological advancement, the pharmaceutical boom, and the privatization of public hospitals. But two old-time doctors at Mount Sinai Heart are keeping the human touch alive, and not just for nostalgia’s sake. Muffie Meyer’s sweet-natured, important documentary, Making Rounds, follows Dr. Valentin Fuster, the director of Mount Sinai Heart, and Dr. Herschel Sklaroff, clinical professor of medicine, cardiology, as they lead residents from room to room in the Cardiac Care Unit at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital, diagnosing patients with a refreshing lack of reliance on technology. “We both have the philosophy that the number one objective in medicine is the patient,” Dr. Fuster explains. “We both believe that most of what you learn about a particular patient is at the bedside, not with machines.” Dr. Sklaroff adds, “Dr. Fuster and I make rounds the old-fashioned way. The first thing that we do is go to the patient and hold his hand. With that touch you establish rapport instantly. We were trained to go to the bedside and talk to the patients, and take the perfect history, do the perfect physical, from which one ought to be able to make a diagnosis or come close to a diagnosis, maybe ninety percent of the time.” They display a warm, caring bedside manner as they talk, touch, listen, and teach, examining a sixty-seven-year-old woman with coronary heart disease, a twenty-two-year-old single mother who needs a heart transplant, and a fifty-one-year-old man with cardiomyopathy who resists treatment.
Award-winning French actor-director Mathieu Amalric is celebrating his fiftieth birthday with an exciting invasion of New York City, where he is being honored in a pair of terrific companion film series and will also star in a theatrical production. FIAF’s CinéSalon tribute runs on Tuesday nights through December 15, beginning November 3 with a screening of his 2014 film 
