Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 21

pqauajBMajpqajpi gfe Arizona Bailg to Tucson, Monday, October 11, 1993 Page Three A sadly brief, but glorious career in TV; '-rrw T- S. Knight-Ridder Newspapers T' it he reason I agreed to be in ah episode of a TV situation comedy was that the role was perfecf for me. You want to choose your roles care1 fully, as an actor. You want to look for roles in which you can display 'the range, the depth, the infinitely subtle nuances of your acting talent. "It's just one word," the director said.

"You say, "I'll do it," I said. A role like that comes along once in a lifetime. The TV Dave Barry "Once you break through the mystique of age and that view of the aged as objects of care and as problems for society, you can look at the reality of the new years of human life open to us." A 111 I I Betty Friedan Author, "Fountain of Age" Activist Betty Friedan, 72, has turned her attention to revamping society's view of aging Friedan tackles aging with vitality show which might even still be on the air as you read this is called "Davtf's World." It's loosely based on a book and some columns I wrote. I use the term "loosely" very loosely. There's no' way they could just take my columns and turn them directly into a TV series every episode would last four and end with all the major characters being killed by an exploding toilet.

Soi' they have professional writers supplying dramatic elements that are missing from my writing, such as plots, characters-and jokes that do not involve the term "toad mucus." (Lest you think I have "sold out" as an artist, let me stress that I have retained total creative control over the show, in the sense that, when they send me a check, I can legally spend it however I want.) I worked hard on "Howdy," memorizing it in just days. Depending on the scene, I could deliver the line with various emotional subtexts, including happiness (' sorrow anger and dental problems Then, just before I flew to Los AngeV les for the fuming, the director called. tq tell me that they had changed my In my new role, I played a man in 'an-J appliance store who tries to buy the air conditioner, but gets into a bidding- war for it with characters who based, loosely, on me and my wife, played by Harry Anderson and DeLane' Matthews. (Harry Anderson plays me: Only taller.) In my new role, I had to say 17 words, not ONE of which was I was still memorizing my part when 1 got to the studio. It was swarming with people camera people, light people, sound people, bagel people, cream-cheese people, people whose sole function this is a coveted union job; passed down from father to son is to go "SSHHH!" You, the actor, have to say your lines with all these people constantly staring at you, PLUS the director and the writers keep changing the script.

The actors will do a scene, and the director will say, "OK, that was perfect, but this time, Bob, instead of saying 'What's for you say, "Wait a minute! Ben zene is actually a And su it with a Norwegian accent. Also, we think maybe your character should have no arms." My lines didn't change much, but as- we got ready to film my scene, I was creasingly nervous. I was supposed ta See BARRY, Page 4B 111 daughter and her two sons, her voice catches, and she removes her glasses and blinks her welling eyes. Betty Friedan, feminist leader and mother of the women's movement, may be less feisty and more mellow these days, but let no one assume that the grit is gone. Or for that matter, that Betty Friedan, at 1 72, has given up trying to revolutionize society.

"Now I am in uncharted territory," she says. "It isn't that I have stopped being a feminist, but women as a special separate interest group are not my concern anymore." Her current concern is how to dispel what she calls "the mystique of age," or society's view of aging as simply a time of depletion and loss. "Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth," she writes in "The Fountain of Age," published last month by Simon Schuster. The book, which took 10 years to research and write, challenges the stereotypes of older people much in the way that "The Feminine Mystique," her seminal 1963 study of women, challenged prevailing views and in the words of Alvin Toffler, the reality of the new years of human life open to us," she says. She speaks during a conversation that begins in her cheerful 1820 house and later continues a few blocks away at the American Hotel over grilled brook trout and a Bloody Mary and, finally, winds up during a 3'2 hour drive to New York.

At the turn of the century, she says, life expectancy was 45 years for men and 46 for women, whereas now it is 70 years for men and 78 years for women. "This is the one species that has now had more years after reproduction than before this new third to half of life that we didn't have before, this period of life in its own terms when everything is different," she says. She worries that people who are in denial about old age, who feel threatened as they see it looming and go on telling themselves that they are still young, will miss its enormous potential. "It's a different stage of life, and if you are going to pretend it's youth, you are going to miss it," she says. "You are going to miss the surprises, the possibilities and the evolution See FRIEDAN, Page 4B "pulled the trigger on history." Her years of research into human aging have convinced her that continued human and intellectual development is not only possible in the last third of life but also can actually be the defining aspect of those years.

Friedan has spent the last six years sending cartons of notes and drafts back and forth to the West Coast, where she teaches in the winter at the University of Southern California. She is also a distinguished visiting professor at New York University. While gerontologists tend to focus on how to deal with the problems of age arising from economic and physical decline, Betty Friedan is once again probing beyond problems for causes. Just as she spent years trying to fathom what lay behind housewife malaise, she has now put the same fierce intelligence and energy into asking whether the older years need be as dispiriting as they are generally thought to be. "Once you break through the mystique of age and that view of the aged as objects of care and as problems for society, you can look at By Deirdre Carmody 1993 The New Yorto Times SAG HARBOR, N.Y.

Betty Friedan arrives. But hardly with the frenzy and the fanfare that greeted her arrival at our first interview 23 years ago. On that day, surrounded by cheering women warriors in a Des Plaines, 111., hotel, she sounded the call to arms for a general strike by women to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote. Now, on this sleepy summery day, she simply lurches into her driveway in an old maroon Dodge. She seems smaller now, less formidable.

But then again, older warriors usually do. She is thinner, too, thanks to the recent loss of 25 pounds in the course of recovering from two bouts of surgery for heart valve replacements in the spring. But it is the brown eyes that fascinate during the rest of the afternoon. The gaze behind the large dark-rimmed glasses is more pensive than it used to be. But it is also by turns direct, flinty, indignant, and engagingly merry.

Later, during lunch, while describing the supportiveness of her Egyptian dig unearthing sacred cat city By Mimi Mann The Associated Press AGAZIG, Egypt Archaeologists are racing against urban sprawl to uncover 'the many lives of Bubastis, the city of MM.wiuni.1 mm 'mm iuuumniiiii. i jmh i mi iw i 1 tit v. l- i. I I 1 Bakr's team from Zagazig University has been digging in Tell Basta since 1977. They have found evidence not only of the glory surrounding the cat city but also humble relics such as dishes and jewelry made of mud that offer valuable insights into the life of ordinary Egyptians.

The search has uncovered so many items-that Bakr plans to display them in a new museum at the university. It will be Egypt's only museum devoted to a single archaeological site. Bastet was among the earliest and mosC important of Egypt's deities. At first a war goddess, she mellowed with the ages and eventually became more of a friendly protector. Bastet was pictured either with a cat's or a lion's head.

Bubastis is best known for its cat cemeteries, where for religious reasons thousands of mummified cats were tenderly wrapped and placed in underground The cemeteries were largely destroyed before Bakr's team started its work, although they occasionally find statues of Bastet that were buried with the cat mummies. Similar bronze figures, depicting majestic cats with long legs and powerful muscles, can be founjC in museums around the world. Ancient Egyptians were the first to domesticate the cat According to tomb paintings, the cat was not only a household companion but also served as a bird-hunter on boating trips through the marshes. As the worship of animals particularly cats came to dominate religious beliefs, Bubastis was the site of ancient Egypt's largest religious festival, where pilgrims drank wine and engaged in sex orgies. Egyptian Antiquities Organization who heads the dig at Tell Basta.

Bubastis was rebuilt repeatedly over the centuries, one layer on top of another. For the excavator, Bakr said, the work is like "slicing through a cake." The earliest relics predate Cheops, the Pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in Giza 4,600 years ago. The city was abandoned several hundred years after the arrival of Christianity in the 1st century. As the worship of animals particularly cats came to dominate religious beliefs, Bubastis became the site of ancient Egypt's largest religious festival. Ancient chroniclers wrote that up to 700,000 pilgrims spent days in Bubastis, drinking wine and engaging in sex orgies to honor Bastet.

The city became important at the end of the New Kingdom in 1070 B.C., and for a while it was Egypt's capital. The cat cult brought in vast wealth. Bubastis lay on the major trade route connecting Egypt's military capital of Memphis, south of modem Cairo, to the Sinai Peninsula and on to Asia. the sacred cats that is one of ancient Egypt's most important legacies. For more than a century, excavators have made remarkable finds as they unearth the city named for the cat goddess Bastet: the ruins of the grand temple, sleek cat statues, and cemeteries holding thousands of mummified cats.

The toppled statues, columns and granite blocks on the grounds of the grand temple to Bastet retain a mystical aura. Infertile Muslim village women pcu. water over the statues of the creator god Ptah and Pharaoh Ramses II as they pray to become pregnant Three thousand years of history are told in the ruins, which are threatened by the rapid development of Zagazig, a city 50 miles north of Cairo. A highway runs through the main dig site, which archaeologists call Tell Basta. Its perimeter is being squeezed by encroaching apartment buildings and small businesses.

A series of amazing finds over the past 1 Vi years including a cache of 150 gold items points to the urgency of the archaeologists' task. "It's rare to find a whole city. That's why what we're doing is so important," said Ibrahim Bakr, former chairman of the Th Associated Press Archaeologist Ibrahim Bakr checks a recent find at Zagazlg dig.