When discussing the body, always go to the top. We’re talking cha-chas, ta-tas, wah-wahs, chihuahuas. L.A. loves ‘em—so we got ourselves some

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, January 2002

LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED WITH MY BREASTS TODAY. First, I spilled a latte all over them at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. The lid on my cup wasn’t tight, so when I went to take a sip, milk foam poured and then puddled on my sweater. Stooping to wipe up what I presumed would be a mess on the floor, I found that little coffee had gotten past me. For the first time ever, my breasts were too grande for my latte.

Later, I took my breasts out to lunch at the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, where they promptly attracted the attention of, well, everybody.

Here’s the link to read the rest!

He’s the original lord of lowbrow, the king of the pratfall, the last surviving link to the bedrock of American comedy—vaudeville, burlesque, slapstick. Sure, he’s ancient, but he’s juggling half a dozen new projects and still found time to sit down with Amy Wallace for an eleven-hour interview. Call it the Jerry Lewis Marathon that covered, well, just about everything that’s ever been funny

Originally appeared in GQ, August 2011

Jerry Lewis sits behind his huge desk, neatening the items that stand like sentries between us: a can of Diet Sunkist; a container of silver pens, tips up; a container of red pens, same position; a handful of green plastic surgical scalpels he uses to open mail, a dish of lemon drops. When you’ve been on the planet for almost nine decades, like Lewis has, and when you can’t throw anything out (“I’ve kept everything!”), and when you’re slightly nuts (“Did you ever see a man who can look at one eye with the other?”), you require order. At 85, Lewis employs three full-time people to help him stay organized. He loves them fiercely—and drives them bonkers.

“Have you done anything today? Why not?” Lewis likes to bellow, his voice—three parts affection, one part curmudgeon—thundering through Jerry Lewis Films, a sprawling suite in an office park about four miles from the Las Vegas strip. He looks good—a little stooped, sure, but still sharp-eyed and quick-tongued and up-tempo, his red silk shirt unbuttoned low enough to reveal the scar from his double-bypass surgery twenty-nine years ago. On his feet are red velvet slippers embroidered with those iconic faces of Comedy and Tragedy. “Can I get another orange soda?” he asks, and when it arrives twenty seconds later: “What took you so long?”

Suddenly, Lewis’s face goes blank and his hazel eyes get big as quarters. Slamming his chair back—boom!—he reaches for a trash can under his desk and expels a mouthful of soda in its general direction: a classic spit take. Except, he says, that it’s not.

“Went down the wrong pipe,” he announces, daintily dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. “I’m fine. It happens all the time, and when it does, you just have to let it.” Getting older is crammed, he says, with such losses of control. “I’m taking Lasix, which makes me pee sometimes seven, eight, eleven, twelve times,” he says. “I’ve decided to keep my fly open all day.”

For hours now, we’ve been sitting around talking about funny—what it is, how it works, how to kill a joke, how to let it breathe. Lewis has thought a lot about these things since he got his first onstage laugh, accidentally kicking out a stage light at the age of 5. That was in 1931. In the intervening years, he became and remains the reigning master of the sight gag, the clown with the rubber face whose links to the foundations of American comedy are unmatched by anyone alive. This is a man, after all, who was tight with Charlie freakin’ Chaplin, not to mention Stan Laurel and Al Jolson. This is a man who’s met nine presidents and performed for four. As we talk, photos of many of those he holds dearest, may they rest in peace, look down from his crowded walls: John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and the handsome crooner Lewis still calls “my partner” even though they broke up their act fifty-five years ago: Dean Martin.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Martin and Lewis were—along with Sinatra and Elvis—the most famous people on earth. Later, though American critics were slow to recognize it, Lewis also became one of the few comic auteurs: a filmmaker who wrote, directed, produced, choreographed, edited, and starred in many of his own films, the best of which (The Nutty Professor, The Bellboy) have become bona fide classics. Tarantino and Spielberg are avowed Lewis fans. So is Scorsese. “He makes many people uncomfortable,” the director says. “He doesn’t censor himself as a performer, a filmmaker, or a public figure—which is difficult to accept for many people. I know there have been some books about him and some recognition in the past few years, but I think Americans are still coming to terms with Jerry and his astonishing artistry. It’s as if they had to invent a new place for it, a new category.

A sculptor and a lighting artist have very different techniques but the same goal: to promote understanding by finding new ways of seeing the world.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in the New York Times, July 10, 2011

Nathalie Miebach's Antarctic Explorer

NATHALIE MIEBACH uses science to make art. A sculptor who lives in Brookline, Mass., she translates weather data and other scientific measurements into three-dimensional objects that accurately display temperature variations, barometric pressure and moon phases, among other things.

Matthew McCrory, on the other hand, uses art to benefit science. A former lighting artist at DreamWorks Animation, he now uses his skills at the Center for Advanced Molecular Imaging at Northwestern University to help researchers in Chicago see their work in 3-D.

Ms. Miebach and Mr. McCrory may appear to be engaged in very different pursuits, but their goal is the same: to promote understanding by finding new ways of seeing the world. They’ve never met, but both are invested in the idea that better visualization leads to better thinking.

“You make discoveries much quicker when you have a different way of viewing your data,” says Mr. McCrory, whose official title is lead visualization engineer. “And your brain doesn’t have to work as hard to try to figure out what things are really like.”

Both have been in the news of late. In March, Northwestern unveiled what it calls a classroom unlike any other: a room that Mr. McCrory designed and outfitted with 46-inch televisions — 25 of them, stacked five by five — that operate as a huge, high-resolution canvas upon which atoms, proteins and even whole animals can be displayed in all their three-dimensional glory.

For her part, Ms. Miebach was named one of 20 fellows who will participate in the annual TEDGlobal conference, which promotes the convergence of technology, entertainment and design.

Before she headed to Edinburgh, where this year’s conference convenes on Monday, she spent some time with me on the phone describing her work. She said her sculptures, while representations of meticulously gathered data, seek less to teach viewers explicitly about science than to make them think about how they think.

“The purpose of these pieces is not a didactic one: to explain a specific act of weather or climate change,” she says. “It really is to reveal the beauty of complexity. The work addresses broader questions than the numbers I’m translating. It forces the viewer to think about the visual vocabulary they associate with science versus art.”

That phrase “science versus art” could be an accurate summary of Mr. McCrory’s work, too. While getting his bachelor’s degree in computer science (and for some time after he graduated), he was a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, doing software development and design for visualization devices. Then he spent a year as a lighting technical director at DreamWorks, working on the movie “Shark Tale.” Then he toggled back again, working at the University of Chicago on visualizing of CAT scans and M.R.I.’s for surgeons. Then he returned to DreamWorks for a few more years, working on “Flushed Away” and “Kung Fu Panda.”

With each job change, he kept returning to a single frustration: “the trailing gap between what was coming out of Hollywood visually and what was coming out of the scientific realm.”

“The scientists at Northwestern do physics, chemistry and biology really well, but they generally don’t have a clue when it comes to making good-looking images,” he said. “A lot was getting lost in translation.”

So when he had a chance to join the university’s information technology wing to try to correct that problem, he jumped at it.

His first assignment was in the astronomy department, visualizing the evolution of binary star systems. Then he reconnected with one of the professors who’d helped recruit him, Thomas J. Meade, who was in the midst of designing the Center for Advanced Molecular Imaging, with the goal of having biologists, chemists, engineers and theoreticians work together. Mr. McCrory’s dream of creating a 3-D display for scientific data fit directly into Dr. Meade’s vision.

“I said: ‘I don’t care what it costs. We’ve got to do this,’ ” Dr. Meade said of that $350,000 project. He hasn’t been disappointed. “If we put glasses on you and display a rabbit brain on the screens,” he said, “you’re no longer looking at it, you’re walking around in it.”