"What is your greatest regret?"/"Almost succumbing to the pills over Marlon Brando—an overweight knight errant wearing a crown, and nothing else."

 Rita Moreno answers the Proust questionnaire (at Vanity Fair).

"Can’t you just wait a while and leave it alone?" says Rita Moreno, defending Lin-Manuel Miranda who is criticized for not casting dark-skinned Hispanic people in his new movie.

So now Rita Moreno is trending on Twitter, with endless denouncements.

 

I love Rita Moreno but this is the opposite of it. We have had a century of movie roles being reserved for the lightest skinned Latino, Black & Asian ppl. This is not breaking new ground & there is nothing for dark skinned ppl to be waiting for https://t.co/fAw9w1qn9g

— DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES (@BreeNewsome) June 16, 2021

A sampling of anti-Moreno tweets: "'Can’t you just wait a while…' EXCUSE ME?? Rita Moreno really just told dark skin Latinos to sit there and wait. Let the light skin ones go first. IM SICK"/"Rita Moreno opened her mouth and my abuelita spoke through her. Disappointed, but not actually surprised. Because having HER, of all people, dismiss the colorism problem in the latine community basically shows how deep it runs"/"I love Rita Moreno. Yes, Lin-Manuel has done whole lot. It doesn’t mean he couldn’t do better with representation for Afro Latinos. Why does the fair skinned always say wait your turn to darker skinned people?"/"Rita Moreno *this* close to changing her name to Rita Blanquita"/"Rita Moreno inadvertently giving 'West Side Story' (2021) bad PR for its bad casting months before its release."

"That man threw chairs – it was wonderful!"

Said Rita Moreno about Marlon Brando, who got mad when she had sex with Elvis.

Brando, "the king of movies," was "one of the most sexual men on Earth" — much better at sex than Elvis, according to Moreno.

Ancient celebrity gossip from the 86-year-old actress. Why are we talking about her? She's the star of "One Day at a Time," which is a new Netflix show — based on the old TV show that was on from 1975-1984.

"When I got the part, I thought, 'Dear God,' because she sings, 'island of tropic diseases'..."

"... and I thought, 'I can't say that about my beautiful little island'... island of tropic diseases? Whew!"

Rita Moreno won an Oscar for playing Anita in "West Side Story," but she felt bad about having to trash Puerto Rico — you ugly island.

There were other issues, too. Co-directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins wanted a big contrast between the warring gangs, the Sharks and the Jets.

"So the white kids had to have their hair bleached and have extra-pale makeup," Moreno recalls, "and we had to wear all one-color makeup, almost the color of mud — and it felt like it. We all had to have accents — many of us who were Hispanic did not have them. I asked the makeup artist, 'Why do we have to be one color? Because Hispanics are many different colors.'"....

During the filming of West Side Story, she created her own Puerto Rican character with an amusing, exaggerated accent: Googie Gomez. "One day I hiccupped her," Moreno says, before singing, a la Googie: "'I had a drean, a drean about chu, bebe.'"

Here that is on YouTube, from "The Ritz," which as a Broadway show won Rita Moreno a Tony. Of course, Moreno had to fight off the accusations that she herself, with this Googie Gomez character, was trading in offensive ethnic stereotypes. Her answer seems to be: No, because it was so funny and because it was an exaggeration of a particular type of person that people recognize. Make sure you understand how to distinguish and an actual offensive ethnic stereotypes.