Word: hypochondriac
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...Waltz of the Toreadors uses two sets--one the trophy laden drawing room of General St. Pe, for urbane drawing room comedy, the other the bedroom of his nagging, hypochondriac wife, used for one climactic scene of hysterical bedroom farce. The play's conflict is between hysteria and urbanity, the passionate idealism of youth and the orderly boredom of old age. (The General says, "Life, Gaston, is one long family lunch, tiresome because it has to be performed according to a long established ritual, with initialed napkin rings, embroidered table mats, forks of different shapes and sizes and a bell...
Send Me No Flowers (by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore) is one more of those popular comedies that hang a lot of baby jests around a papa joke, and that drive a rachitic bit of plot literally to the graveyard. David Wayne is a fervent hypochondriac who, listening in on his doctor's phone call about a doomed patient, concludes it is he who is doomed and makes wheelchair preparations for dying, death and burial. When this misunderstanding is cleared up, a new misunderstanding is quickly brewed: now Nancy Olson, Wayne's pretty wife, decides that...
...fondness for his mother, and that both have wildly unstable relationships with women. But Loewe is mockingly uninterested in psychoanalysis, while Lerner believes in it strongly, has had a pride of analysts. Loewe professes not to worry about his health, while Lerner is a bit of a hypochondriac, makes a fetish of weighing himself daily; he buys a new scale wherever he goes, probably owns the largest collection this side of the Office of Weights and Measures. Loewe has hated the telephone ever since he answered it once when he was six, was told that his favorite uncle had committed...
...Edith Wharton's Ethan Frame was the Show of the Month (CBS), skillfully adapted and powerfully acted. With angular hulkiness, Sterling Hayden as Ethan, the Yankee farmer, all but invented a cubist style of acting. Caught in a nightmare marriage with a termagant hypochondriac (Clarice Blackburn), he falls in love with her winsome young cousin (Julie Harris). In the end, the lovers decide on suicide-downhill on a toboggan, crashing into a thick-trunked elm. Viewers who had not read Ethan Frome then got one of the most abrupt shocks ever delivered by television: Julie Harris, seen years later...
...variety of special European junkets (e.g., for gourmets, winebibbers, music lovers), a Los Angeles travel agency added a new item: the hypochondriac's tour. The eight-week swing through Europe will be shepherded by a staff internist from a California sanitarium. "Conversation regarding ailments and ill health will be taboo," announces the brochure. "While anyone feeling ill will request and promptly receive treatment, our physician leader will, except in private consultation, act as one of the party out to enjoy the sights." Cost for the trip, including first-class travel and physician...