Word: motherly
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...also suspect that the portrait of his mother is partly fanciful. She has the melodramatic sulfur of the mad mom in one of David Sedaris' "memoir" stories, the domineering vindictiveness of a shrew-mother from 40s movies. In fact, she's played in the film by none other than Ann Savage, the virulent megabitch Vera in Edgar G. Ulmer's cheapo noir classic Detour. That was 62 years ago, and now, at 86, she is the icy Queen Maddin, standing in for all the city's overbearing women. (As narrator, he says, "Never underestimate the tenacity of a Winnipeg mother...
...believe, because its recollections are stirred so powerfully here, that Guy and his family lived at 800 Ellis Avenue, with the ground floor a beauty parlor run by his mother and his aunt Lil, and the Maddin residence perched on the floor above. He says that a vent from the salon led directly into his bedroom, "bringing me every bit of gossip that roiled up from that gynocracy ... the smells of female vanity and desperation...
...That home life, where father Charlie was off managing the Winnipeg Maroons hockey team and mother was clearly in charge, was so formative to Maddin that he's often recreated it in his films. Here, he decides "to vivisect his own childhood" by renting the old homestead for a month, casting actors as his three siblings and shooting scenes he remembers or imagines from his youth. Savage continues to impersonate his mother; his girlfriend's dog appears as Guy's long-dead pet chihuahua; and since, just before shooting starts, the woman who rented the place to Maddin decides...
...volunteered with the missionaries of Charity for a month in the summer of 2001. Mother Teresa's letters reveal not a "darkness" but a vulnerability. I can only imagine the mental and spiritual fortitude that a lifelong commitment to oppressed people would demand. Each letter Teresa wrote was an attempt to sustain her spirit as she battled the effects of extreme poverty. Zachary Davis, Modesto, California...
...Great saints have great struggles: that is what makes them great. Mother Teresa and those like her do not run on adrenaline, they run on obedience to God. Our modern pagan society searches continually for personal meaning, which usually translates to emotional significance. The Way of the Cross is to renounce emotions for actions. We judge ourselves on our feelings. God judges us on our actions. The marvel is not that Teresa understood herself (whatever that may mean) but that she kept going when all the ordinary human blandishments and self-deceptions were removed. Jim Douglas, Sydney...