Word: mama
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Armed with her new "handle" (nickname) and her newest toy, a mobile Citizen's Band radio, First Lady Betty Ford went to Texas last week on a campaign trip for Husband Jerry. "You got First Mama. There's a lot of Smokeys on my front door," said Betty, radioing from her Secret Service car with all the aplomb of a veteran trucker. (Translation: "This is the First Lady. I see plenty of policemen in front of me.") Though she probably hopes to pick up a few votes for her husband from the 11 to 12 million CB operators...
First comes Sally. "Oh, Mama, it's good to be home," she tells her elderly mother. With her withering limbs and head covered by fine gray stubble, Sally, 46, appears ancient. When she turns to peer out the window, her skull bears the surgical dent that is brain cancer's trophy. "It's just like when you look at a little baby," she says. "Someday that baby will be an old man or an old woman if they live long enough. And so, I have no fear of death." Sally may not, but hers is a Yankee...
...villain in the show is the Mama who, by devoting herself to Christianity, has sold out to the White Man. She attempts, through occasional beatings and one painfully long evangelical scene, to indoctrinate her daughters with her anti-Black attitudes. Despite the banality of Mama's lines, Cheryl Wright gives the character convincing force by her energetic portrayal. Her features contorted with evangelical fervor, she propels the play through some of its shakiest moments...
...good guy in the show is the Daddy/Boyfriend, played by Tony Chase. Although alcoholic and finally impotent against Mama's ascetic whiteness, this character elicits sympathy by his simply-felt expression of pride and physical desires. Like Wright, Chase battles his way through a dense forest of triteness to create a sense of powerful emotions held barely in check...
...incontestably correct. Among the items not to be found in standard almanacs but present here: summaries of every game played in the Little League World Series; a biography of Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck's miserly uncle; pop psychohistories of selected U.S. Presidents, including Truman ("Harry was a 'mama's boy' "); 16 pages of fact and gossip about the Academy Awards; Eartha Kitt's idea of utopia and a summary of W.C. Fields' will, which left his mistress $25,000, two bottles of perfume, a Cadillac and a dictionary...