Word: mama
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Once upon a time there was a shy little girl and her name was Beatrix. She lived with her Papa and her Mama and her brother Bertram in a grand house at No. 2 Bolton Gardens, Kensington, London, England. Beatrix was not permitted to have any friends, but she did have a dog, a doll, a pet rabbit, a governess, and her own dear little nursery room with strong shiny bars over the windows...
Barrister-Papa Potter, who looked like a Jehovah chiseled in granite, had inherited so much money that he never bothered to practice law, spent his days at his club. Mama Potter, who looked like Queen Victoria, discouraged overnight visitors by keeping her spare rooms so dusty that they were uninhabitable. Beatrix' chief diversion lay in frequent trips to picture galleries, of which she candidly detailed her impressions: Sir Joshua Reynolds was "niminy-piminy," while "Raphael had never looked at a horse." She was occasionally malicious: "Miss Ellen Terry's complexion is made of such an expensive enamel that...
...staunch Catholic and would never have married a divorced man." As Daniels points out in his book, there were other factors mitigating against a Roosevelt breakup, including F.D.R.'s "political ambition plus the mores of the sort of Wharton world in which he was born." Furthermore, Mama seemed to be onto the romance and, says Daniels, Sara Delano Roosevelt "evidently saw threat to the standards of her family and society." In a letter to her son, she defended "the old-fashioned traditions of family life" and expressed the hope that F.D.R. would realize "that...
Norman's wealthy mama smothered his emotions one cold night when he was ten by taking him into bed with her to explain the facts of life, including the detail that he is the child of her one great love, his Uncle Maurice. Too cowed by these revelations to care much for sex with either sex, too shocked by adultery to become an adult himself, he cowers at her country estate writing mystical verse. Mama runs off with Uncle Maurice to Australia, and Norman is thrown out in "the cold, frowzy, unseasoned city ether" to begin a series...
...dearly for another thousand acres and a herd of Angora goats for the production of "Capricorn semisoft cheese," which goes sour before it can be sold. He is finally carted off to a Texas retreat for the mildly deranged. He might have written his poems in peace here, but mama, newly widowed, reappears to lead him off to a last encounter-with the only blond man in a town full of Mexicans. The man robs and kills Norman-a fitting nonheroic end for an unfitted non-hero...