[ad_1]
Mayor Eric Adams on Monday said he was too busy trying to get a handle on safety in New York City’s transit system to care about Will Smith smacking Chris Rock — or to weigh in on Kyrie Irving slapping around COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
During an unrelated press conference, Adams was asked for his thoughts on the scene-stealing moment of Sunday’s 94th Academy Awards when Smith, who later won the Oscar for Best Actor, slapped Rock in the face while on stage in retaliation for the comedian’s “G.I. Jane” joke about the actor’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
“I was in the subway station last night. I don’t have time for TV,” Adams replied sternly at a childcare center in Queens.
On Sunday evening, Smith, 53, walked up to the stage and delivered an open-handed whack in the head to Rock, 57, after the stand-up legend cracked a joke that implied Pinkett Smith, 50, looked like the shaved-head Demi Moore in the 1997 movie “G.I. Jane.” Smith — who initially laughed at Rock’s joke while his wife rolled her eyes — walked back to his seat then screamed twice at Rock, “Keep my wife’s name out of your f–king mouth.”
“Wow, dude, it was a ‘G.I. Jane’ joke,” a stunned Rock replied before quipping, “That was, uh, the greatest night in the history of television.”
Pinkett Smith has alopecia, and in recent years has been vocal about her experiences with the hair loss the condition causes.
Adams’ event also came the morning after Irving — a 30-year-old, seven-time NBA All-Star — claimed he was “fighting for freedom” by not getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
“The point of this season for me was never to just take a stance. It was really to make sure that I’m standing on what I believe in, in freedom,” Irving said Sunday after his first game of the season at Barclays Center, a 119-110 loss to the Hornets.
“Freedom, I don’t think that’s a word that gets defined enough in our society, about the freedom to make choices with your life without someone telling you what the f–k to do and whether that carries over to nuances of our society that politicians control, the government controls, or things people who are in power — the powers that may be,” Irving added.
“I’m standing for freedom, so that’s in all facets of my life. There’s nobody that’s enslaving me. I don’t want anyone telling me what to do with my life, and that’s just the way I am, and if I get tarnished in terms of my image and people slandering my name continually because those aren’t things that I forget.”
During the Monday morning news conference, Adams was peeved by reporters’ questions about the response to his decision to grant exemptions to the city’s private-sector vaccine mandate to local pro athletes and performers — a move that prompted backlash from municipal unions and everyday private-sector workers.
Asked if he was considering re-hiring the 1,400 city government workers who were recently fired for refusing to be inoculated against the virus given the exception made for wealthy professional baseball and basketball players, Adams bristled that the line of questioning continued days after the Thursday announcement, labeling the matter “over” in a lengthy response.
“I really want to manage the expectations of the media. I spent two days talking about this, I answered every question that was given to me. What is not going to happen under my administration is the continuation of questions over and over again. We’re in this universe where Eric Adams’ name and Kyrie Irving may get a lot of clicks, that’s fine. You do your job, I do my job,” the mayor said.
“I’m not engaging in continuing questions on the same things over and over again. The Kyrie story, the performers’ stories, the athletes’ stories, that over. … I have a city to run, not staying in one place, stretching out stories. If you need a creative way to write the story, you have to do that without my participation.”
“I answered every question on this topic. There is no more questions for Eric Adams to answer,” he added, referring to himself in the third person.
“I have a city to run, not a sports team.”
Also Monday, Adams promised to at some point discuss the vaccine mandate that remains in place for municipal workers with a firefighter union leader, who said Saturday he wants to speak with the mayor on the matter.
“I meet with everyone. Everyone knows me,” Adams told reporters. “I meet with ex-gang bangers, marchers, protestors. I meet with everyone. I look forward to meeting with anyone, including our unions.”
After Adams last week unveiled the exemption to the private worker vaccine requirement that allows Irving as well as unvaccinated Mets and Yankees to take their home fields next month, lawyers told The Post that scores of workers who got fired for refusing to comply with the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates are lining up to sue.
An unvaccinated 43-year-old Harlem resident Elissa Embree who was sent home last week from preseason orientation for her job as a waitress at the Mets’ Citi Field told The Post in a front-page story that Adams’ exempting rich athletes but not her from the city’s vaccination rules was “major slap in the face.”
[ad_2]