“Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never a convenient time for any of them!” wrote Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell.

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Critics of older women having babies are having quite a good time with Great Britain’s oldest pregnant woman – one Elizabeth Adeney – who at 67 come July, will become a statistic unwelcome to many. 

Ms. Adeney is a childless divorcee who has a business in Lidgate near Newmarket. She traveled to the Ukraine for IVF treatment and plans to give birth at a clinic in Cambridge next month. The British press and public boast many who are outraged that she will be nearing 80 when her child becomes a teenager.

“I feel half my age,” says a vivacious Ms. Adeney. “I feel 39 and fitter than women who are a third my age.” Ms. Adeney is fit, swims regularly and does not smoke.  But reporter Sarah Knapton quotes Professor Severino Antinori who says the coming child will suffer psychological problems. (He helped another British woman, Patricia Rashbrook, at age 62 give birth three years ago. While respecting these women’s freedom of choice, he still doesn’t approve.) And, generally, the NHS does not recommend fertility treatments for women over 40. One consideration is that when the child reaches his or her 20s, the mother would be verging on elderly and perhaps need care. So is this fair to the young person?

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The theater, booming in these recession times, is bracing itself for what happens when Mayor Bloomberg’s new traffic rules at the end of this month prevent cars in certain areas of Times Square.        

Older citizens, who make up the theater crowd, are complaining about being unable to enter certain theaters directly from taxis and private cars. Everybody in New York isn’t limber, alert and able to walk. And what about the hotels affected; tourists with luggage? Will they be expected to walk in and carry?

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But it’s still fun to be a theater fan these days because business is booming and there is so much of interest going on. Sardi’s last week unveiled a new caricature. It’s of “Exit the King’s” Geoffrey Rush, just in time to meld with his Tony nomination.


Geoffrey Rush/Image: Wikipedia

If you can’t place the talented Mr. Rush, he is the Australian who won an Oscar for “Shine” back in 1997. He has been nominated twice since then.

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I went to the City University of New York Grad School of Journalism salute to Barbara Walters the other night. She was presented CUNY’s Lifetime Achievement Award.


Barbara Walters © Getty Images

This was an inspiring night with only one small quibble. The mayor of New York, emcee Elizabeth Vargas of ABC, Miss Walters and the students who were also being honored all rose up to speak in The New York Times’s new adjunct downstairs assembly room. Every one of them spoke standing in the dark. Whoever runs this perfectly charmless Times room never heard of a spotlight, a key light or even a lightbulb, I guess. Amazing dereliction.

Sometimes in public gatherings, you hear people murmuring or yelling, “Louder; we can’t hear you!” In this case, it should have been, “Light! Let there be light! We can’t see you!” But none of the media high rollers who were sponsoring – the Basses, the Lauders, the Marrons, the Rattners, Barry Diller, Pete Peterson, David Westin or Mort Zuckerman said a single word.

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Speaking of the saintly Times! David Carr is one of media’s chief and most perspicacious observers and I want to recommend to those worried about the future of The New York Times, a column David wrote on Monday, May 18. He covered this very subject.

He turns out to be both reassuring about the fate of this important newspaper in America’s future and he cites and examines the opposites – chiefly, how Web advertising so far seems unable to come up to Web needs when a site is publishing reams of content.

In other words, how can those putting the Times – or anything else – on the Web give everything away for free to the reader with inadequate revenue to keep it all going? This is the big, unholy question for our moment.