Word: mae
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Burt Reynolds plays the beleaguered sheriff who has tolerated the Chicken Ranch, in part because he loves Mona, the madam (Dolly Parton). One has never seen him so glumly tentative in a role. Parton plays Mona as if Mae West had been cryonically preserved but someone didn't quite finish the job of unfreezing her while restoring her to life. What is mostly missing is a sense of comic authority. Parton has interpolated a couple of her plaintive country songs, which do not fit the brassy Broadway banalities of Carol Hall's basic score. On the other hand...
...childhood into sequences of adult problems-familial, professional, financial, emotional-that would not seem particularly exotic in most neighborhoods. While the stars' typical romantic lives are a matter of overheated legend, the actual events of their marital and extramarital flights are as trite as Everyperson's. Even Mae West managed to sound like an average lovesick adolescent when she attested to the uniqueness of the feeling between her and one of her numerous musclemen: "... a love so complete that it embraced not only our bodies but our minds and spirits-a perfect union of the mental, physical...
...race as well as sexuality. Blue Rhonda, Hortensia and Catherine alternate in the role of protagonist, but the book lacks on central character with whom a reader can identify. This results in a more distanced, although no less sensitive book. Perhaps Southern Discomfort has less warmth than Rita Mae Brown's earlier efforts, but it is certainly a fun read...
...When I first started, I was just drinking on weekends." Vine Mae says. "Then I started drinking every day. It got so I wouldn't want to go out-side because I was hung over, but I'd have to get off reservation to the bars. I don't know how my kids survived." Though she has given up habitual drinking since, she still describes herself--and all but one of her friends--as alcoholic...
Although Vine Mae chose to remain on the reservation despite the dearth of jobs, many of Fools Crow's other granddaughters leave every fall in search of employment in off-reservation cities Barbara Rock. Fools Crow's 29-year-old grand daughter, has chosen this option, she lives and works off-reservation most of the year, as she has since she ran away from a reservation-based Catholic boarding school at 14. Most summers, though, when the one-room log cabin behind her grandparents' house is habitable, she returns, as do many of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren living...