People: Rob Ford’s tumor rare but treatable, doctor says
Toronto’s embattled mayor has a rare and difficult cancer that will require aggressive chemotherapy, his doctor said Wednesday, days after Rob Ford’s dramatic announcement that he was pulling out of a re-election campaign.
Dr. Zane Cohen, a colorectal surgeon at Mount Sinai hospital, said Ford has a malignant liposarcoma. Ford has been hospitalized for a week with a tumor in his abdomen.
The doctor said Ford’s cancer makes up only about 1 percent of all cancers but said he was optimistic about Ford’s treatment.
“This particular liposarcoma is more sensitive to chemotherapy than most sarcomas,” Cohen said.
Ford’s brother Doug Ford will now run for mayor, and Rob will seek a City Council seat representing a district in his home suburb of Etobicoke, the Fords announced last week.
Idaho-born writer wins ‘genius grant’
Among the 21 winners of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” is a playwright who promises to keep doing what he he’s been doing.
“What’s going to change about my work is ostensibly not very much,” said Samuel D. Hunter by phone from Chicago. “I just think I’m going to have so much more time and freedom to devote myself to it in this huge way.”
The 33-year-old Idaho-born Hunter, whose plays include “A Bright New Boise” and “The Whale,” knew he had won the award – along with its $625,000 prize – weeks ago but was sworn to secrecy. Still, he admitted to feeling stunned. “It still hasn’t totally settled in my mind yet,” he said. “It still feels almost like a fiction.”
The MacArthur Foundation cited Hunter for his interest in “the poetry of everyday speech and the aspirations of those seldom celebrated on the stage, from a staff of outcasts who run a newspaper for lonely, long-haul truckers to the octogenarian residents of a rest home days away from shutting down.”
His most famous work, “The Whale,” which was staged off-Broadway in 2012 by Playwrights Horizons, has at its center a writing teacher who weighs about 600 pounds and is eating himself to death.
“I’m not writing screenplays that are being made into $100 million films,” he said. “These are very small, contained, quiet plays and they don’t make a ton of money. But for the next several years, that’s not a concern.”
Hunter holds degrees in playwriting from New York University, the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and The Juilliard School. He was raised in Moscow, Idaho, and now makes his home in New York City.
He is currently rehearsing his new play “Rest” at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. It’s the second production of his play set in a retirement home, and it opens on Friday.
“So, it’s an eventful week,” he said with a laugh.
The birthday bunch
Singer Jimmie Rodgers is 81. Singer Frankie Avalon is 74. Actress Beth Grant is 65. Actress Aisha Tyler is 44. Actress Jada Pinkett Smith is 43. Actor James Marsden is 41. Comedian-actor Jason Sudeikis is 39.