by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Golden Door star and Suffolk Street resident hunk Vincenzo Amato on a private tour of Tenement Museum (with museum official)

fter three years on the PTA scene, I assumed, quite correctly, that I would be the least glamorous person in the room at the Tenement Museum’s special invitation-only cocktail party and museum tour before the premiere of immigrant film Golden Door at the Tribeca Film Festival. And what was left of my former indie film scene confidence shrunk the instant I spotted the impossibly handsome Italian Vincenzo Amato surrounded by impossibly, let’s just say it—thin—red lipsticked women under Cleopatra bangs.

As I waited on the periphery to butt in on the conversation Amato was having with the vice president of Miramax publicity to ask a question or two for this column, I realized with horror that the shirt I’d chosen as most-flattering-of-the-moment had a not-so-tiny spinach juice stain on the sleeve.

Let me say again that Golden Door star Vincenzo Amato is gorgeous, a living Harlequin heartthrob, because no heterosexual woman alive could ignore him. A woman talking to him for a minute even licked her lips to her gal friend when he turned to meet someone new.

“Hi, I’ll just join in,” I finally said clumsily to Vincenzo. I told him I’d heard he lived on the Lower East Side, working for many years as a sculptor. He did a great job looking interested in my questions about his two crafts.

His attention deadened as soon as the film’s dynamic, Italian director Emanuele Crialese walked through the door. They patted each other heartily on the back, and Vincent changed languages, with me left standing there. The museum PR director smiled awkwardly.

Fortunately, it was quickly time for the special tour with museum founder and president Ruth J. Abram. I followed the players up the stairs, to a room where Sicilian immigrants once lived. I could almost sniff the pasta and sauce.

The A Listers left by limo to Pace University for the Festival. I took the J train and beat them by five minutes, in time to watch the flashes go off.

If I’m honest, the first very-European minutes confused me, but after ten minutes onwards I was greatly absorbed by the journey of one family from Sicily to Ellis Island. The at-sea scenes were phenomenal, and had me imagining what my maternal grandmother may have experienced when she was, 14, traveling by herself, a runaway from an arranged marriage to an elderly man with money. On the M22 ride home, I kept thinking that, for some reason, I never found out my other grandparents’ reaching-the-shores stories.

I decided I would. Maybe as soon as I bought myself a decent shirt.

Golden Door is playing at the Angelika Film Center now. Goldendoor-movie.com