Word: childbirth
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Home for a while will be a handsome rented beach house at Sands Point on Long Island Sound. After she unwinds, she will have to face up to hunting for larger winter quarters. She will also be taking instruction in natural childbirth. Inescapably, she frets constantly about herself. She admits that her private world is too small. She knows from nothing about Viet Nam or black power. About all she reads regularly are her own reviews and (since she made the best-dressed list) pertinent clips culled from Women's Wear Daily...
Half a century ago, the death of mothers in childbirth was commonplace, as was the death of infants. Happily, both are a rarity today. California Sociologist Robert Fulton estimates that the average American family can go for 20 years without encountering death, which is more than ever confined to old people. And the old people are more than ever out of the way, many of them in playpen "Sunset Villages." Their absence, and the universality of the hospital, means that dying is done offstage; gone are the hushed house, the doctor's visits, the solemn faces, the deathbed scenes...
...brand new painkiller, says France's Dr. Henri Laborit, dampens the aches and pains of arthritis, burns, cancer, childbirth, neuralgia, rheumatism-just about all the ills the flesh is heir to. Such fantastic claims may sound like the spiel of a turn-of-the-century snake-oil peddler, but the medical community has learned to take Dr. Laborit at his word. When he reports on the properties of the compound which he calls Ag 246, he speaks with the authority of a researcher who has already been credited with important drug discoveries...
...further uses or undesirable side effects has been completed. But even now, says the confident Laborit, "it would seem that one could say without being too optimistic, that pain in all its forms will be called upon to disappear while the patient maintains perfectly lucid consciousness. The pains of childbirth, the pains of dentistry, the pains of cancer-all should vanish from human life...
Fonda makes frantic efforts to ring in a company lawyer, a doctor and a hyperthyroid magazine editor (Sandy Baron) to thwart the ultranatural-childbirth plot. This keeps the stage busy, but what keeps the play moving is undrying freshets of laughter, the limber comic pacing of Director Gene Saks, and the abrasive tension of the generational tug-of-war. The son-in-law's nose is keener than his intelligence. He scents corruption in every institution, but he demands a kind of impossible social purity, something akin to repealing the Industrial Revolution. The father has permitted an urgent sense...