Word: aunts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reveals she thinks she has had an affair with her sister, Harriet (Tanya C. Krohn '97), who is variously identified as Victoria's daughter, Arabella, as well as the ship captain's daughter, Lidia. The son, Teddy (Chris F. Terrio '97) has his first sexual encounter with his Aunt Harriet/Sister Arabella/Lidia, charges his father for sexual services and battles for his manhood with his mother. Presiding over all this is the dotty Captain (Eric E. Amblad '98) who wears a rubber dildo on his head and whose utter incompetence is responsible for the fatal crash of the ship...
That's pretty much the message of How to Make an American Quilt, as received by Finn (Winona Ryder), a graduate student who spends a small-town summer with her grandmother and aunt (Ellen Burstyn and Anne Bancroft), working on her thesis and getting her head together. As things work out, she seems to devote most of her time to gathering instructive reminiscences from them and the rest of the ladies in their quilting bee. They are neither so genteel nor stridently feminist as you might fear...
...which often accompanies current enthusiasm for "family values"--is ironic. The insular coziness of Ozzie and Harriet's home is less like our natural habitat than, say, the more diffuse social integration of Andy Griffith's Mayberry. Andy's son Opie is motherless, but he has a dutiful great-aunt to watch over him--and, anyway, can barely sit on the front porch without seeing a family friend...
Alas, the plot committee takes over. An aunt and uncle reveal that Julia's long-gone mother is not dead but teaching school in Oregon. A reunion follows, not a word of which is believable, including the mother's rueful assertions that she deserted Julia's father for a lover, and later watched Julia's college graduation from a back row. This slack stuff is soap opera, and even a writer as gifted as Hegi can't dress it up as anything else...
AREN'T WE REALLY TALKING ABOUT QUALITY of life vs. quantity of life? My aunt is in her 80s, I am in my 50s. She dances; I run--on estrogen. JILL SWEITZER Orinda, California...