Word: moms
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Harvey Fierstein, in drag as Tracy's battleship mom (the role played by Divine in the movie), is Hairspray's showstopping centerpiece. But somewhere between his flouncy scenery chewing (with a chainsaw voice that is now painful to hear) and the familiar gags about uptight parents and butch gym teachers, Hairspray starts to lose its fizz. Making fun of the '50s and '60s has become so passe that this cartoon version gets old pretty fast. The smiley social commentary--Tracy meets the school's black kids in detention and discovers that they have rhythm--only makes the show's facetiousness...
Debby is a self-destructive New Jersey barfly who is overlooked by men--even though she is played by, and thus looks like, Uma Thurman. If you buy that, you will buy that Debby has a thick Joisey accent but Mom (Gena Rowlands) does not, that there's a neat pop-psych explanation (Dad abandoned the family) for her low self-esteem and bouts of stress-induced blindness, and that the Garden State really is the stereotyped, Camaros-and-Bruce milieu offered here by director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding). In which case, I've got a turnpike I would like...
...most part, SAHD homes are the same as other households, except that Dad--not Mom or another caregiver--oversees the home front. There are, however, a few differences. Once they get home, female partners tend to do an equal share of the housework and cooking, unlike male partners in traditional households, who leave most of those tasks to their wives. And dads' management styles can appear testosterone driven. Building inspector Larry Picarello recalls moms in the neighborhood "freaking out" when they came over and found his two boys, Forest, 10, and Luke, 8, climbing ladders and scaffolding on the site...
With two active parents and a broader view of gender roles, the children seem to benefit too. Frank conducted two studies of sahds, in 1996 and '98, and found that in a traditional household, kids would run to Mom 80% of the time if they were hurt or scared. In SAHD homes, he found, it was fifty-fifty. It has even been suggested that having a dad as the primary parent makes children smarter. Yale researcher Kyle Pruett, who followed a small group of SAHD homes over 10 years, found that children in these families had slightly above-average levels...
...China: Devastating floods Asia's Child-Sex Industry Afghanistan: Our Friend's Enemy Malaysia: Taliban-style Laws? Korea: Pyongyang Yellow Pages Japan: The 'Kamikaze Mom...