Word: allene
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Haydenville, Massachusetts, Barbara Allen and Robin Juris are providing their biological children Hannah, 7, and Cody, 3, with the rural environment lacking in their former home in Oakland, California. They inseminated each other using the sperm of casual friends and took extensive, though not uncommon, legal precautions to avoid facing a custody dispute. "In our hearts we trusted these men," says Allen, "but we also wrote up a contract." The children have met their biological fathers; that word, however, is never used. Says Allen: "They are donors. They don't have a role that would approximate the real role...
...star and mogul clients, scandal is a commodity to be both feared and savored. In the rest of the country, the Heidi story was rancid catnip for a slow news summer. But the Michael Jackson story goes deeper -- yes, and deeper than the sad public frolics of Woody Allen a year ago. For as pitiable and lunatic as Jackson's soft eccentricities make him appear in the skeptical public eye, he had surely convinced the world of his devotion to children and his empathy with them. It was as if, deprived of a normal childhood, he wanted to create...
...right but also a stand-in for all the gaudy malevolence of pop culture. "There's a social hysteria about child abuse," says Professor Melvin Guyer, a psychologist and lawyer who teaches at the University of Michigan. "It began with the McMartin Pre-School case and continued with Woody Allen. There has been a feeding frenzy, in which the ordinary presumptions of innocence are not applied. The allegations are treated as evidence." And the public reacts with wide eyes and a bit of drool at the corner of the mouth. "The public gets to be puritanical and voyeuristic...
...life. The wounds of abused children have been well documented; so have the welts of performers caught fooling around unbecomingly in the klieg light of publicity. Paul Reubens jettisoned his career as gooney kid Pee-wee Herman when he was caught masturbating in a Sarasota, Florida, theater. After Woody Allen jilted Mia Farrow for Farrow's adopted daughter, he found his reputation as a world-class filmmaker carrying the asterisk of a smirk...
Could the same fate befall Michael Jackson? "Woody Allen was Humpty Dumpty," says Guyer, "and now Michael Jackson is. They won't be put back together again. Whenever Michael Jackson pats a child's head, it will be looked at in a different way. This is reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. But we're a global village now, and the whole world is watching...