Arts 15 Entertainment r 1 5% OFF All Take-Outs over $25 Monday - Thursday only. One coupon per customer. After 3:00 p.m. Not good with any other offer. Expires 6/30/02. I L .1 ;Buy One Dinner Get The; : . Second Dinner 1/2 Off! : 1 of equal or lesser value 1 1 I Monday - Thursday Dine In Only. One Coupon Per Table. Not Good With Any Other Offer. Expires 6/30/02. I ir LUNCH SPECIALS $ 495 Special to the Jewish News I West Bloomfield 4189 ORCHARD LAKE AT PONTIAC TRAIL IN WEST BLOOMFIELD (248) 865-0000 Open 7 Days a Week for Lunch & Dinner THE GALLERY RESTAURANT I Enjoy gracious dining amid a beautiful atmosphere of casual elegance BREAKFAST • LUNCH • DINNER 41 I OPEN 7 DAYS: MON.- SAT. 7 a.m.- 9:30 p.m. SUN. 8 a.m.- 9 p.m. West Bloomfield Plaza • 6638 Telegraph Road and Maple • 248-851-0313 0000624550 Exceptional videotaping for: Weddings, Anniversaries, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, Seminars, Speeches, Award Banquets 6/21 2002 78 After years as second banana, Scott Cohen gets a starring role in new Showtime series. GERRI MILLER Don't Forget... The Sheik caters all occasions It Taking it To The Street f you watch TV; you'll probably recognize his face from minis- eries like The 10th Kingdom and his recurring roles on NYPD Blue, Gilmore Girls and The Practice. His name may not be quite as famil- iar, but that could change soon. Scott Cohen will be visible weekly starting this summer in the new Showtime series Street Time, a gritty drama about the federal parole system that premieres 10 p.m. Sunday, June 23. For Cohen, whose resume of charac- ters range on the nice-to-nasty scale from likable teacher Max Medina on Gilmore Girls to rogue cop Harry Denby on NYPD Blue, his new char- acter, parole officer James Liberti, is harder to classify. "He's troubled, not quite prepared to handle the things that come his way," says Cohen. "He has a gambling problem. He has a family, a wife and three kids, and it's really difficult for him to do this job. 'And at the same time, he came from a world [where] his father was a criminal and he wants to break out of that. He wants to do good, but he's having a hard time breaking out. He's conflicted." Another kind of conflict plays out in the adversarial relationship between Liberti and a recently sprung parolee drug dealer portrayed by Rob Morrow. "We have children that go to the same school. We live in the same area. The idea is that it is two sides of the same coin, that I could be him, and he could be me," says Cohen, relishing the on-screen drama and career oppor- tunity, even if it does come with a catch: Street Time shoots in Toronto. "It's hard. My family is in New York," explains the Bronx-born actor, who rents an apartment in Canada during production. Nevertheless, Cohen feels "blessed and lucky" to be working steadily, since he has certainly paid his dues. The son of a jazz musician, Jack Gerri Miller is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer. Cohen, he originally planned to be a pianist but shifted his aspirations to theater while at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Returning to New York City, he honed his skills on stage while working variously as a substitute teacher, a wait- er, a messenger and a toy demonstrator. Paying His Dues Following his first screen appearance in a short film called Many Wonders, Cohen made his feature debut in Jacob's Ladder in 1990 but returns to the stage whenever he can, most recently in a play written by his wife, Anastasia Traina. He has acted in several productions at the Williamstown Theater Festival over the years and appeared with West Wing's John Spencer in Glimmer eT Shine at the Manhattan Theatre Club. "I'd like to direct a play," says Cohen, who considers theater his first love. However, he's grateful for the screen exposure in films like the recent Kissing Jessica Stein and miniseries like Perfect Murder, Pe7fect Town and The 10th Kingdom, a fantasy he names as his favorite. He has starred opposite Camryn Manheim twice, in the TV movie Kiss My Act as her love interest and on The Practice as an assistant D.A. friend who betrayed her. His resume also includes the crime dramas Oz, Feds, Law Order and NY Undercover. But — Stein's Josh Myers aside — he's played few Jewish characters. "Nobody thinks I look Jewish. Everybody thinks I look Italian," says Cohen, whose current character and such roles as Gene Gotti in the 1996 Gotti TV movie underscore that notion. "I used to get really frustrated with it because I'm a Jew and know how to do these characters. But they want curly hair, bespectacled. I look more like an Italian gangster from the Lower East Side," he says, noting that while he was not raised in a religious home and did- n't have a bar mitzvah, he "grew up culturally Jewish. I continue that."