Word: emma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gilligan is currently studying girls' development through high school at the Emma Willard School, a private girls' school in Troy, New York...
...really A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in blackface and with the priorities reversed. Its subject is the aspirations and frustrations of the black middle class. Daddy (Samuel E. Wright) is a successful lawyer, living in a Manhattan duplex with his wife Ginnie (Hattie Winston), their 13-year-old daughter Emma (Marline Allard) and their ten-year-old son Willie (Alfonso Ribeiro). Emma wants to be an attorney; Willie just gotta dance, under the eager tutorial eye of his raffish uncle Dipsey (Hinton Battle). If Dad is willing to indulge Emma's career goal, he is adamant that Willie will...
...mother and daughter are actually sisters under the skin, connected not just by kinship but by subtle parallels of emotions and experience. Aurora appears initially to be no more than that familiar figure of satire, the American Mom as American Nightmare, all coy snarls and fierce demureness, while Emma, protected only by a thin skin of perkiness, seems to be her victim. "You aren't special enough to overcome a bad marriage," Aurora snaps on the eve of Emma's wedding, voicing her own fears about what might happen if she ventured outside her perfectly tended Texas house...
...when Emma moves out, Aurora discovers that her child has no corner on inappropriate males. After Flap takes a job in Des Moines ("You can't even fail locally," cries Aurora, whose contempt for her son-in-law is her one immutable, hilarious quality), a plaintive note creeps into her obsessive phone calls to her daughter. Parent is now becoming a dependent, in need of a confidante, especially with that astronaut orbiting around...
This is a new role for Emma, but one that she is entirely up for. Her ability to cope with each new child and all of Flap's croupy vagaries suggests that somehow even a so-so family life actually makes happy her destiny. If this were an ordinary comedy, that medium-sized irony would have been enough to satisfy its creator and send the audience home happy. But Brooks has one more question in mind. Could these two find it in themselves to reverse this role reversal one more time and arrive at a balanced acceptance of each...