Word: americanizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Marriage is big lately. Actually, it's unmarriage that seems to be capturing our attention. From American Beauty to the just released Bruce Willis-Michelle Pfeiffer movie, The Story of Us, the institution is being turned inside out, and it's not a pretty sight. To judge by these films, modern marriage involves a lot of broken china and busted expectations. While the current depictions of marriage may be overly pessimistic, each year half as many Americans get divorced as marry, and that's not a trifling statistic...
...remind me next year that you can never take off enough stock ahead of these 31 days unless you are a total masochist. What is it about this month that causes people to lose their senses and chop a third or even a half off the value of solid American companies, like Xerox or Raytheon or Unisys, that screwed up for a quarter? Why do people who are perfectly rational shareholders the 11 other months of the year get gripped with a frenzied groupthink that forces them to shoot first and not even bother to ask questions later...
...Washington's Kennedy Center in front of Hillary Clinton. Next year she is planning to tour in a new piece, Points of Re-Entry, about the ways women mutilate their bodies to satisfy cultural norms, from Thai women who wear heavy metal braces to elongate their necks to American teens who starve themselves to stay thin. She visited Oklahoma City after the bombing of the federal building ("Timothy McVeigh to me is a fascinating character") and spent 10 days last summer in Kosovo gathering stories about women's experiences during the war ("I came back and just cried...
...riot, but the final curtain call at this month's world premiere of A View from the Bridge, William Bolcom's operatic version of Miller's 1955 play about love and death on the Brooklyn waterfront. The Lyric Opera of Chicago bet big on Bolcom, giving his American-style grand opera a production worthy of Aida, and the horse paid off: View packs the theatrical punch of a double boilermaker...
...kind of American verismo," Bolcom says of View, using the Italian term for such popular slice-of-life operas as Puccini's La Boheme and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Sure enough, the tale of Eddie Carbone (baritone Kim Josephson), a middle-aged longshoreman who lusts after his young niece Catherine (soprano Juliana Rambaldi), has verismo stamped all over it, right down to the climactic knife fight. In this new version, adapted by Miller and co-librettist Arnold Weinstein, View has acquired a Greek chorus that comments on the unfolding disaster, though the overall effect remains faithful to the original play. Think...