Tuesday, February 08, 2000
Birthday party turns into 'Saga'
BY JIM KNIPPENBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Whoa, you gotta love this: Seventy guests troop off to a birthday party and instead of giving gifts, they get them. Plenty nifty ones, at that.
Referring here to Virginia Thornton Curry, prominent Hyde Park philanthropist (one of those quiet ones who gives it away but never attaches her name), who celebrated her 90th last week at the Cincinnati Country Club. And, get this, gave every guest a copy of Saga, a 160-page book she wrote over the past 18 months with the help of neighbor and friend Sally Helton. (Sally and husband Bill threw the party).
The book, witty, sassy, spunky, sharp, is about her 90 years and the century she saw roll by — two world wars, the Great Depression, a car in every garage, two chickens in every pot.
Oh yeah, and computers. At age 88, she said she was too old to learn. But she did. Today she's some kind of megabyte queen. That kind of spunk.
And this kind of sass, when talking about the only job she ever held: “I was a street walker and got $100 a year.” She was covering women's news for The Enquirer, Post and the late Times-Star and walked between papers to turn in stories.
This is what people at Thursday's party are reading now. Actually, a lot of them started with peeks at the book at the party, but it was way too polite a crowd to sit there reading.
(So now we're wondering, along with other guests, if there'll be a sequel on, say, her 180th birthday. Heaven knows, she looks to have another 90 in her.)
BLASTED: Well, ouch.
Seems the long-suffering Bungles are taking another hit — sacked by the New York based Sport Magazine.
Turns out writer Brandon Grunner did a story titled “7 Teams No One Wants to Play For.” Guess who shows up in the No. 2 position? Right you are.
In reality, the Bengals are No. 1 because the top spot isn't a team. It's “anywhere in Canada.”
A blistering piece, this, Grunner identifies the Bengals as “the winner of the Toilet Bowl, honoring the worst NFL team of the 1990s,” then goes on to call them the NFL's Siberia and, worse, retell the Ryan McNeil story — the one where he wouldn't sign with Cleveland unless they guaranteed he wouldn't be traded here.
To fix the sorry mess, Grunner suggests they add “big” to the name, like other Cincinnati sports stars — Big O as in Oscar Robertson, Big Red Machine as in Reds.
Whatever.
ROLL 'EM: And this for people wondering what the heck all the cameras and lights were doing in Jeff Ruby's on a recent Saturday: A Roberta Flack video, that's what.
Flack wasn't there: “It was two models having crab cakes, crab claws and shrimp, talking about the upcoming Roberta Flack concert,” manager J.C. Corbett says. “It's going to be a two-minute video on BET, Lifetime and CNN.”
Why Ruby's? “A couple of reasons. They wanted a busy, festive atmosphere, and we have that. They also wanted a place that looked like an upscale New York restaurant, and that's what we're modeled on.”
Flack may not have been there for the video, but she is expected there before or after her Feb. 18 concert at the Aronoff.
Knip's Eye View appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Have an item to report? Call Jim Knippenberg at 768-8513; fax: 768-8330.
KNIPPENBERG ARCHIVE
