Word: curtained
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...Romeo and Juliet with a non-Kervorkian resolution. Among Shakespeare's self-appointed co-writers was the now forgotten Nahum Tate (1652-1715), who cut and pasted his way through Coriolanus, Richard II and, most notoriously, King Lear, to whom Tate restored sanity, crown and daughter Cordelia before the curtain fell. Among Lear's last Tate speeches: "Cordelia shall be a queen./ Winds catch the sound/ And bear it on your rosy wings to heaven./ Cordelia is a queen...
...with a Squirrel, 1765. It shows his 16-year-old stepbrother Henry Pelham absorbed in reverie in front of a red curtain, his gaze slightly raised like a Guido Reni saint as he toys with a gold chain. The other end of the chain is attached to a tame flying squirrel nibbling a nut. Everything in the painting is a show of skill in illusion: the squirrel's pelt, the reflections and the thread of white highlight on the mahogany tabletop, the glass of water (to show how well he could do transparency), the boy's fresh, young skin...
...premise of "Trial by Jury" is short and sweet. A jilted lover hauls her slimy sweetheart into court for breech of promise. The prosecution panders to judge and jury, the defendant dances out of a bind, everyone sings about a wedding and the curtain calls begin...
...effectively here: that we can attend our own funerals and bask in the sanitized images of ourselves that inevitably emerge after our deaths. If we could get it through our heads that death is the end, the final and irrevocable cessation of consciousness--that there is no grand curtain call where everyone will be sorry and we will be able to revel in having "showed them"--perhaps we would not be so quick to volunteer...
...novel, The Tortilla Curtain (Viking; 355 pages; $23.95), botches a good theme: the shuddering distaste of California's patio-living Anglos for the Mexican illegals who perform the state's stoop labor. His pale hero is Delaney, a nature writer who has moved with his wife Kyra, a real estate shark, to a housing development above Topanga Canyon. Delaney is not just politically correct, he's politically exquisite, but when a Mexican man, Candido, blunders in front of his white Acura on a canyon road, his reaction is angry revulsion: the wounded wet back, to whom he gives...