Word: matriarchal
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...funniest scenes in Gurney's The Dining Room depicts a pathetically senile matriarch who interrupts Thanksgiving dinner at her own table to announce that it is time for her to get up and go home. Says Gurney's uncle, Buffalo Physician Ramsdell Gurney: "My mother did exactly what Peter had her do in that play. To see her portrayed that way saddened me, but the audience thought it was terribly amusing." The most striking parallel in Gurney's plays to his life is the marriage between the young lovers' parents in The Middle Ages: four years...
...fiction poetry and memories, Wrinkle is not the only one she speaks of in freely parental terms. Her fictional characters from a vast family network, many of them reappearing at different stages in their careers, introducing ever widening and ever crisscrossing circles of acquaintances. L 'Engle talks like the matriarch of a vast clan or more precisely their grandmother: she speculates on their moral and psychological growth and debates when and whom they will marry...
...victim of a weak national economy and a line of strong women. The latter included his grandmother, an un challenged matriarch of Morrisonville, Va.; his wife, an orphanage-hardened shopgirl; and especially his mother, who had a "passion for improving the male of the species, which in my case took the form of forcing me to 'make something of my self.' " She had him, at a tender age, delivering newspapers, flogging the Saturday Evening Post and, in preparation for a career in show business, taking banjo lessons...
...religion. Bush will say no more. It is too personal. He has become intrigued with Reagan's unfailing kindness and courtesy, which he believes lie at the heart of the President's continued popularity. Bush is reminded of his mother Dorothy, 81, the Bush clan's matriarch, who is also known for her generous nature. Reagan, insists Bush, understands better than most people in public life that a leader does not have to brutalize a person or strip him of dignity to get a point across...
...Hurt) after tucking sons Duncan and Walt into bed. Helen provides a steady and more serious influence throughout, and Roberta Muldoon (John Lithgow), the tight end-turned-transsexual effectively becomes the best friend a Garp could ever have. Even the puzzling Jenny Fields (Glenn Close), mother of Garp and matriarch of a fanatical feminist movement, displays a commitment to her son which contributes to the film's encouraging spirit...