Information is power

By SKIP MENDLER

Here are some seemingly unrelated phenomena that have crossed my path in the past few days.

Coach Ken Carter. A fictional, but statistically accurate Venezuelan peasant girl. The No Child Left Behind Act. The Selective Service System. And a typo in a Medicare guide.

I say “seemingly unrelated” because there is a common thread that links each phenomenon.

So there he was, motivational speaker and former high school basketball coach Ken Carter (portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson in the movie “Coach Carter”), giving the keynote speech for the American Association of School Librarians conference. My wife’s a school librarian, and my daughter and I get to tag along to library conferences with her.

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Veronica’s Room has a mirror in it...

This summer, the director Lori Schneider-Wendt was looking for two actresses who would bear a plausible resemblance to one another, for the Sullivan County Dramatic Workshop’s production of “Veronica’s Room.”

Lori cast the ingenue lead first. A young actor, Rebecca Robbins, with whom she had worked in the Workshop production of “Deathtrap,” also an Ira Levin thriller, was a perfect choice for the young co-ed who would become trapped in the eponymous room of intrigue and terror.

When I read for the part of the older woman, Lori was thrilled by the slight resemblance between Rebecca and me. It was plausible enough, she thought, to bring just the right measure of doubt to the mystery of Veronica’s Room.

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