Word: casket
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After a nun discovered Celestine's glass casket was empty, authorities began tailing a couple of strangers who had driven through town. Within two days police followed the pair to the remains, stashed some 40 miles away. The figure of Celestine, still wearing miter and robes, was found lying on its red velvet cushion but concealed in a plywood box crammed into a burial niche in a local cemetery. The miscreants escaped. Back in L'Aquila, the bells rang again, this time in celebration...
When the personable director of the Shady Hawkins Funeral Home, Barry-Joe Luvdwuns (Andrew Gardner), asks if anyone would like a beer-or maybe a "stiff" drink-he sets up a word-play that mentions the "grave" situation, points out that whether Denuar will be displayed in an open casket "remains to be seen," and argues for cremation as an eternal-maintenance option "with no bones about...
James Warren Jones, by contrast, was something of a weirdo. As a boy in the casket-making town of Lynn, Ind., he used to conduct elaborate funeral services for dead pets. Later, as a struggling preacher, he went from door to door, in bow tie and tweed jacket, selling imported monkeys. After briefly fleeing to South America (a shelter, he believed, from an imminent nuclear holocaust), the man who regarded himself as a reincarnation of Lenin settled in Northern California and opened some convalescent homes. Then, one humid day in the jungles of Guyana, he ordered his followers to drink...
...Hayden, a leader of S.D.S. and now a California state assemblyman, may sometimes have shared the radicals' feelings of cynicism and contempt for Bobby Kennedy, at least while Kennedy lived. But Hayden went to St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and wept at Kennedy's casket, holding a Cuban fatigue cap in his hand. The year had many legacies, but the assassinations were among the most important and were the hardest to bear. They altered history and broke something essential in the national morale -- they broke hope. "The best leaders of our time were dead," Hayden says...
...indebted to the mainstream past, the tone has a more avant-garde echo of Sam Shepard -- a border skirmish between knockabout farce and knockdown violence. Yet Playwright Lanford Wilson manages to integrate well-crafted gags, mostly for the surviving gay roommate (Lou Liberatore). He describes his friend's gaudy casket as looking "like a giant Spode soup tureen." He says to the choreographer (Joan Allen) about her boyfriend (Jonathan Hogan), "I don't know why you don't just marry him and . . . buy things." In mock self-pity he demands, "Have you ever been to a gay New Year...