Word: gossipers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Instead Dunne chose to spiral around the Blue Tyler myth in great, windy loops of speculation, reminiscence, industry gossip and dear-reader throat clearing, delivered by a self-absorbed and only fitfully interesting narrator named Jack Broderick. He's a middle-aged screenwriter whose wife has just died, so he's at loose ends. There is almost no action or dialogue in present time. What the author offers is Broderick, onstage alone, scratching his head and relating what he has learned from a phone call or an old police report. Blue had a husband named Teddy who got stoned...
...seems, every journalist over 30 wants to mine that life for meaning. Or at least gossip. In Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Viking; $22.95), Paul Alexander, who has written books on Andy Warhol and Sylvia Plath, argues that Dean was a homosexual whose romances with starlets were so much unfelt publicity. Alexander scavenges for tatty, tattly tidbits, like the story about the night Dean and a pal picked up a one-legged girl at a bar and ... well, the curious may turn to page 203 for the punch line. And to page 286 for a photograph of a naked young...
Holding everything together is Belinda, played by Francesca Delbanco, the mother hen and company gossip. Delbanco's exaggerated facial expression seem slightly overdone it the first act, but serve her well in the second as the action moves to pantomime. Her clever miming allowed the audience to catch every word--and say it aloud for her. By the third act, Belinda is trying to lead the company out of the woods, improvising for the mentally and verbally challenged. Delbanco's gives a perfectly outrageous delivery of Belinda's efforts, summing up an entire scene by announcing loudly to the audience...
...want to recite them to anyone who'll listen. The slightly obsessive narrators of these stories make them particularly suited to out-loud readings (most of them were probably created for National Public Radio). Sedaris has a masterful ear for popular culture talk--arm-chair psychology, tabloid gossip, etc. He is particularly sensitive to that time-frame known in contemporary chit-chat as "right now"--as in "I'm really interested in underwater birthing right now," or "Right now I'm trying a lot of herbal teas," or "I 'm concentrating on me right now, just me!" "Right now" captures...
...great subject of Bayreuth gossip now is, Who will replace Wolfgang? For the time being, no one; he shows that he is still more than capable of running a one-man show. He says the next boss may not be a Wagner at all, but he will probably choose his second wife, Gudrun, 50, formerly a festival secretary. That solution would follow tradition. When the composer died, his wife Cosima succeeded him for 23 years, then handed control to her son Siegfried. After he died in 1930, his widow Winifred continued in his place until after the war, when, publicly...