Word: medford
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...mean lady, a monster, or absolute family nemesis. The quintet: Bye Bye Birdie, Five Finger Exercise, Gypsy, Toys in the Attic, Once Upon a Mattress. Interviewing some of the stage mothers involved, the Trib also learned that any actress can forgive herself for playing an unsympathetic role. As Kay Medford, the all-possessive Mom of Bye Bye Birdie, saw it: "I've never been a mother, so I wouldn't know what mothers are supposed to be like." Added Ethel Merman, offstage mother of two, who plays the self-serving, star-making mother of Gypsy Rose...
...between oohs, they do not grow oppressive. If Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera, as the love interest, never quite make love interesting, they often brighten it with glints of hate and vary it with an amusing roadblock to the altar-Dick's mother. Zestfully played by Kay Medford, she is a murderously possessive mamma forever jabbering of self-sacrifice, threatening suicide and pleading for a minimum in funerals: "Just wait till Mother's Day, wrap me in a flag, and dump me in the river." With contrasting skill, Paul Lynde plays a teen-ager's father...