Word: bellas
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...push for national and international recognition has inevitably made local reporting something of a stepchild. Events far from home are sometimes covered with more energy and objectivity than those in the Times's own backyard. Last year, for instance, the Times made headlines nationwide when its premier profile writer, Bella Stumbo, quoted Washington Mayor Marion Barry making disparaging remarks about Jesse Jackson and threatening to cut off his political enemies "at the kneecaps." Yet a year earlier the paper was slow to run stories on Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's questionable financial dealings...
Speaking to an audience of more than 120 spectators, Caucus founder Bella Abzug said she started the group because there were too few women involved in politics. "We wanted to open political channels and structures to women and minorities," she said...
...Neil Simon's wonderful Lost in Yonkers, which opened on Broadway last week, a mildly retarded 35-year-old woman sits her family down to tell them her plan to marry a similarly handicapped usher whom she has met a few times at a local movie theater. Poor Bella cannot get the words organized and turns to her nephews, who know the secret and awkwardly help. Her sister sits in polite confusion. Her brother, a petty gangster, impatiently tries to bolt. The clan's matriarch -- the mother whose approval is what the retarded woman most wants and will never...
...scene ought to be agony. Yet each time Bella rearranges the seating, dictates the flow of conversation or interrupts her tongue-tied tale to say, "This is not the way I pictured it," her frustration gets a mounting laugh. At the climax, her staccato pleadings fuse into an aria of justified rage and saintly forgiveness toward the limits imposed on her by life and by her loved ones. Abruptly, spectators who were crying with laughter are simply crying, without any sense of being manipulated. The ability to find humor in unlikely places, then shift emotional gears with no machinery showing...
...cast members are persuasive individually but not yet as a family, although that may come with time onstage. As the matriarch, Irene Worth, 74, lives up to her legendary reputation. But the play belongs to Mercedes Ruehl as Bella. With unrelenting energy, she veers from Gracie Allenesque comic illogic to mistrustful tantrums and wistful dreams. Simon and Ruehl have conceived her as forever adolescent, fated to be poised all her life on the edge of expectation but unable to cross over. If Simon's terrain is the border country between laughter and tears, Bella...