Brady to speak at youth benefit

Patriots QB Tom Brady will be the honorary guest speaker for City Year's annual Starry Starry Night benefit, the nonprofit youth organization confirmed yesterday. Brady was at a New York auto show over the weekend to cohost a radio show for Sirius NFL Radio with host Steve Cohen.The three-time Super Bowl champ will speak about teamwork and leadership at the May 25 event that will take place on Boston Common. Previous guest speakers have included former president Bill Clinton and Tim Russert of NBC's ''Meet the Press."

Helping charities finish strong

And Brady's teammate Tedy Bruschi attended a rooftop party overlooking the finish line of yesterday's Boston Marathon to raise money and awareness for Train to End Stroke, part of the American Heart Association, which had a team in the 26.2-mile race. The Pats linebacker suffered a stroke but was able to return to his playing form last season. . . . Speaking of the Marathon, the Red Sox players' wives running for charity finished with impressive times: Kathryn Nixon, 3:37:16; Dawn Timlin, 3:52;08; and Shonda Schilling with 4:28:09, according to the Boston Marathon website.

A lady of the keyboard

If Terry Francona doesn't watch out, his daughter Jamie just might join the media. The sixth-grade student at Brookline's Edith C. Baker School has such a facility with words that she won the 2006 Will McDonough Writing Contest. Her essay, ''Miracle," is about watching Keith Foulke record the final out of the 2004 World Series. It begins this way: ''There was nothing to be heard but sand being kicked by players' cleats, soda being slurped up through bendy straws, and the faint sounds of people fidgeting from the anxiety. Tension filled the stands around me. Were they going to win?" (Winners were chosen by editors and writers at the Globe, whose parent company holds a 17 percent stake in the Sox.)

Actor Rees to get honorary degree

Williamstown Theatre Festival director Roger Rees, a veteran TV and film actor, will be Williams College's baccalaureate speaker on June 3. He will receive an honorary doctor of fine arts degree at the college's commencement the next day. With dozens of film credits, Rees had recurring roles on both ''The West Wing" and as Robin Colcord on ''Cheers." . . . New York Senator Charles Schumer had dinner with his family at Anthony's Pier 4 Sunday night. . . . ''Two Horses Fighting in a Stormy Landscape," an oil painting by Eugene Delacroix that was never presented publicly -- even during the French Romantic artist's lifetime-- has been acquired by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in the Berkshires. It will be unveiled in a special exhibition, ''Delacroix and the Horse," in June, according to an institute press release. The painting is the first Delacroix to be owned by the Clark, which has 22 prints and drawings by the artist. Terms of the purchase were not released.

Ted Kennedy tells Vanity Fair he'll probably come back as ''a punching bag" in his next life. But if he could choose, the senator said, he'd opt to be one of the Three Tenors. In the Q&A on the magazine's back page, Kennedy says he loves ''driving down Route 6 on my way home to Hyannis Port" -- apparently he isn't frustrated by Cape traffic -- and calls his happiest moments those Thanksgivings ''when our family gathers on Cape Cod." Predictably, perhaps, the thing he'd most like to change is the outcome of the 1980 election. ''I'd have won," he says. Kennedy also lists Doris Kearns Goodwin among his favorite authors and calls his 60-foot wooden sailboat his greatest extravagance.

When the smoke cleared at Rockefeller Center in New York City, the Dunaway Restaurant's executive chef Mary Dumont had bested two others of Food & Wine magazine's ''Best New Chefs 2006." Dumont, whose restaurant is at Strawberry Banke in Portsmouth, N.H., was in a cookoff the other morning on the ''Today" show with Pino Maffeo of Boston's Restaurant L and Christopher Lee of Striped Bass in Philly. As judged by morning guy Matt Lauer, chef Tom Colicchio, and others, Dumont edged her fellow Food & Wine honorees in a format borrowed from Bravo's ''Top Chef." . . . And on May 4, celeb chef extraordinaire Wolfgang Puck will return to Boston for the opening of his Gourmet Express in Logan Airport's new food court in Terminal C.

Names can be reached at names@globe.com or at 617-929-8253.