Word: melodrama
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...gets too messy, too close. Like Tomas, she wears a wry smile for life's ironies -- the smile that knows and discounts all. Both need an outsider, in this summer of 1968, to show them what they are missing, and to escort them to the front lines of political melodrama...
...rights movement, of Lyndon Johnson's generous social vision, of the liberals' hope to keep government on its trajectory), it prepared the way for other beginnings: the women's movement, the environmental movement, the complex reverberant life that the '60s would have in the American mind long after the melodrama was over and those previously on fire went to tend their gardens...
Sudden, colossal vacancies: Lyndon Johnson capitulated and removed himself from the melodrama. The nation had barely absorbed that event when, five days later, Martin Luther King Jr. leaned over the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in a black neighborhood of Memphis and was hit in the neck by a rifle bullet. He was pronounced dead an hour later...
January 1987. The Reagan Administration is in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. National attention is focused on former National Security Council Aide Oliver North as a central figure in the political melodrama. But North isn't talking. The White House is on edge; no one knows what secrets North holds or whom he may implicate in the scandal. In this atmosphere of high anxiety, North's attorney, Brendan Sullivan, meets with Reagan's special counselor on Iranscam, David Abshire. Sullivan's objective: a presidential pardon for his client...
Faithfull's voice is eerie, raggedy, shattered. She sounds like Lotte Lenya serenading from a sidecar, but she is completely lacking in either melodrama or self-pity. Songs like Penthouse Serenade and Boulevard of Broken Dreams ("And gigolo and gigolette/ Wake up to find their eyes are wet/ With tears that tell of broken dreams") are the sort of fey selections reliably included on subscription-only albums by chanteuses who play hotel lounges in off- season. Faithfull, however, endows them with real gutter sophistication -- the Boulevard of Broken Dreams never sounded like a mean street before -- and that...