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Where Kathleen Turner Volunteers on Christmas

By Amy Zimmer | December 25, 2015 2:15pm
 Famed actress Kathleen Turner helps out Citymeals on Wheels, providing food for homebound elderly.
Kathleen Turner Volunteers
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Upper East Side — Famed screen and stage star Kathleen Turner spent Christmas morning in a kitchen on East 74th Street helping cook meals that she and other volunteers then delivered to the homebound elderly in the neighborhood.

Turner is a longtime board member of Citymeals on Wheels, an organization that was on track to provide more than 7,700 meals to homebound New Yorkers and senior centers on Christmas day.

“I get back more than I give,” Turner said of her morning of volunteer work, which she did with her sister visiting from out of town.

“I do master classes all across the country, and when I teach I tell the students to schedule a service like they schedule English class, whether it’s a soup kitchen or working with blind people. Everyone’s lives are so enhanced," she said. "We just have to get out there and do it.”

Turner was impressed with fancy offerings in the day’s menu, ticking off the items in her famous deep voice: Cornish hen, roasted carrots and fingerling potatoes cooked with mushrooms, rosemary and thyme.

“A lot of love went into the meal,” chimed in Beth Shapiro, Citymeals’ executive director, who noted that the ranks of the people they serve has been swelling this year.

In the last five months alone, the nonprofit added a couple of hundred people to their roster.

“For me, that’s $1 million I need to raise,” said Shapiro, whose organization relies heavily on private donors.

Citymeals on Wheels, founded more than 30 years ago by restaurant critic Gael Greene and cookbook author and columnist James Beard, provides meals on weekends, holidays and in emergencies to more than 18,000 of the city's frail and aged, who are chronically disabled by conditions like vision loss, diabetes, arthritis and heart disease.

When Turner heard about the uptick in need, she asked if Shapiro needed her to go stomp for the organization at City Hall again, which she has done previously to help it try and secure more funding.

Turner, an Upper West Side denizen of nearly 25 years — and soon-to-be TriBeCa resident — spends every Thanksgiving volunteering with Citymeals and most Christmases, she said, though last year she was unable to spend the Christmas holiday with the group since she was on the stage in Berkeley at the time.

Many of this year's Christmas volunteers were like Turner — people who come back year after year after year.

Justin Gonzalez started out on staff as a cook with Citymeals a decade ago but left three years ago to pursue his dream working for the fire department in Emergency Medical Services.

“This was my first job helping people,” Gonzelez said. “I wouldn’t be where I am without it."

Linda Exman, who has been volunteering for about 10 years, got her start when she helped organize a holiday breakfast through the Transition Network, a group for professional women aged 50 or over, retiring or nearing retirement looking for new opportunities to channel their skills.

“I wanted something to extend beyond a breakfast,” said Exman, who worked in publishing and then founded the New York is Book Country festival. While she stopped doing the holiday breakfast part with the group years ago, she continued volunteering for Citymeals along with Marilyn Stetar, a former Mars candy company executive, from her network.  

When Turner, Shapiro, Exman and Stetar left the East 74th Street kitchen at the Carter Burden Center for the Aging to make a few of the morning’s deliveries, the first stop was to Stan Tice, a 75-year-old retired detective and former bodyguard for Cardinal Edward Egan.

He lit up when the women arrived with the food.

Tice, who has Parkinson’s disease and other ailments that have left him wheelchair-bound, had always been a social person, out and about among people.

“When something occurs and you become homebound, you miss that part of your life,” he said. “Citymeals is very good to me.”