Word: mother-in-law
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Thus, as Wieland interpreted the Ring cycle, Valhalla would be Wall Street, the heroes Siegfried and Siegmund self-sacrificing astronauts, the temptress Gutrune a mythological call girl, the god Wotan a wheeler-dealer politician, his wife Fricka everybody's nagging mother-in-law, and the spear-carrying Valkyries teen-age Beatle fans. Richard Wagner would have adored it, insisted Wieland. After all, no one despised the old Wagnerite purists more than Grandfather, who delighted in shocking admiring visitors by greeting them at the door on all fours and yapping like a fox terrier...
Right You Are is 48 years old, and there is scarcely a grey line in the script. It is a kind of intellectual and philosophical whodunit, aimed at discovering the truth of a situation. A government clerk (Sydney Walker), his wife and his mother-in-law (Helen Hayes) have recently arrived in an Italian town. Their new neighbors are all agog because he keeps the women in separate quarters, so that they can communicate only via notes put in a lowered basket. A convocation of irate gossipmongers, including the clerk's boss, summons the mother-in-law...
...wife. He acts as he does to preserve the mother-in-law's illusion. No sooner has he left the room than the mother-in-law reappears to argue that her son-in-law is the mad one. Her daughter had been placed in an asylum, and when she returned, cured, the son-in-law would not acknowledge her as his wife. The wife remarried him under a changed name, and the mother-in-law placates the son-in-law by accepting his delusion...
Baffled by the equal credibility of both witnesses, the investigators demand to see the wife. She appears in a heavy black veil, announces that she is the mother-in-law's daughter and the son-in-law's second wife. "For myself," she says, "I am she whom you believe me to be." In one of the many meanings he intends, Pirandello says that truth is in the eye of the beholder...
Just to help the marriage work out, the Labor government announced that it would take a "substantial minority interest"-perhaps as much as 33% of the merged company. All of which should make for quite a mother-in-law...