Word: alva
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...Opera Is Too Dangerous." Outside the store, Gimbel was, in his own words, "a simple man." Wife Alva, to whom Gimbel was married for 54 years, once tried to get him interested in opera. Their first night at the Met, a pair of opera glasses fell out of a box above them and hit Gimbel on the foot. "If that had been my head, I would have been killed," he said. "Opera is too dangerous." Instead he settled for gin rummy, frequent trips to nearby race tracks with such intimates as Toymaker Louis Marx, and daily sessions at the Biltmore...
...doll and a piece of a rotten banana." Brazenly recounting her hardships to a neighborhood lad, Willie on screen (Mary Badham, the perky tomboy of To Kill a Mockingbird) is still affecting as she sashays through a world of half-truths and childish fantasy in her dead sister Alva's tattered finery...
What condemns This Properly is a plot tacked on by three zealous screen writers, to whom the Williams original "suggested" a long, lurid flashback starring Natalie Wood as Alva. During her tenure as main dish at her mother's boarding house for railroad men, Natalie catches her breath occasionally to indicate that she is not long for this whirl. Meanwhile, Kate Reid plays Mama as a sleazy old bagful of Southern comforts who snaps like a lizard whenever Alva mentions striking out alone to taste the high life of Noo Awlyuns...
...Casino, and Kay Francis movies at the Delta Brilliant Theater. Added excitement turns up, though, in the person of Robert Redford, exuding chin-out charm as a railroad troubleshooter who comes to town with enough pink dismissal slips to put most of Mama's boarders on relief. Ultimately, Alva follows her lover-man to the Big City where she tries both streetwalking and light housekeeping with Redford before fleeing into a rainstorm one wretched night to catch a fatal cold. Sister Willie, in a teary epilogue, attributes Alva's off-screen death to "lung affection...
...average congregation. Moreover, the up-tempo rhythms of modern jazz chafe against the stately language of the Roman Missal or the Book of Common Prayer. Yet many churchmen are hopeful that the gap is being closed. "Jazz today is a valid form of musical expression," says the Rev. Alva Cox, who has promoted liturgical jazz on the National Council of Churches' television series Look Up and Live. "Our conviction is that, far from being a musical form simply for entertainment, it can be a prayerful way of expressing Christian faith and Christian truth...