“Call me Rosalie,” Rita Hayworth breathed passionately to Orson Welles.
    “Call me Rosalie! Call me Rosalie!” I chided.
    “Call me Rosely. Call me Rosely,” little Howie echoed.
    It invariably sent her wailing to her room, and was the only really effective weapon we had against her. We had no idea why it worked, only that it always did. That she was fourteen and all befuddled by her biology and emotions was way beyond our comprehension.
    As were most adult movies to me at the time. Typical was the image of the beautiful woman, shot and on the floor, framed from cockroach point of view, pleading with the hero who towered over her in the distance, and was just walking away, refusing to help her, leaving her to die alone.  I just couldn’t understand it. How could he do that? It just wasn’t right.
    Just that one scene stuck in my mind, while the rest of the movie and its identity was lost to me, except something about shattering glass...
    It would be more than a decade before I discovered that the anti-sister venom and that haunting scene belonged to the same movie. Moreover, my memory had Welles descending stairs as Rita lay at the top, but there were no stairs, just the illusion of them created by the shadow of the turnstile on the walls. Oddest of all however—these days at least—is that it is the scene immediately preceding the one my mind had clung to so determinedly—the shoot-out in the mirror maze—that the experts tell us is supposed to be the unforgettable moment from The Lady from Shanghai. Not for me.

    It seemed like I was clever but I wasn't. I was stupid, that's what I was. Maybe if I lived long enough I would forget her. Maybe I'd die trying.
    That man who unbelievably walked away was Orson Welles, in the movie that finally gave him the fame he had long before earned but been denied when he made Citizen Kane, was also the creator of radio’s finest hour—his extraordinary dramatisation of H. G.’s War of the Worlds, that had everybody looking to the skies in terror. And prophetically so, for although the Martians never existed, all of the greatest potential dangers of the future would come at us from that direction. We are looking still.
    We have sent our messages into deep space, and now live in simultaneous joy and horror of the possibility that one day there might be a reply.