Word: odd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American Reportory Theatre's premiere of this new play is as entertaining as it is odd. Mitch has spent most of his life cheating on his employers on his wife on the IRS. But by the time his family discovers his crimes, he is saved from punishment by his comatose state. At first, wife Lily refuses to believe that her husband of thirty years is such a scum. When she can no longer escape the awful truth, she moans. "All I have left is a corpse that betrayed me." Daughter Marshal takes aim at her mother with Freud and fires...
...contentious couple is the creation of Associate Editor John Leo, who also wrote the main story, with assistance from Reporter-Researcher Val Castronovo. Says Leo: "I first got the idea for Ralph and Wanda during the Me decade's deluge of weird therapies and odd self-realization manuals. The couple provides a way of dealing quickly and lightly with a lot of ephemera." Ralph and Wanda made their debut in 1977, when Ralph heard of several new books about the challenge of middle age. (Stanley, the friend who, as part of his "midolescent" crisis, ran off in that episode...
...maintains 136 embassies around the world, 135 of them in foreign capital cities. The odd nation out: Israel. Jerusalem is the capital, but the American embassy has always been in Tel Aviv, 40 miles northwest, a safe diplomatic distance from the divisive international disputes concerning the status of the Holy City. Now, however, momentum is gathering in Congress for a politically motivated, election-year bill that would require the State Department to move its Tel Aviv embassy to Jerusalem. Last week President Ronald Reagan ventured into this tangled debate with an oblique threat to veto the measure. Said he: "Like...
...penny-ante gangsters in Mamet's American Buffalo talked of themselves as businessmen; the businessmen of Glengarry talk like gangsters. But gangsters with a weird, Damon Runyon twist. Out of the mouths of these middle-class lowlifes comes the odd flowery word used for screwball effect: "inured," "imperceptibly," "supercilious." The rest of their rhetoric is a litany of abuse, invective and those four-letter words that describe things people do every day in the privacy of their bedrooms and bathrooms. It may be that no salesman, not even these salesmen, would traffic so doggedly in obscenity...
...sometimes mistaken for Willie Nelson, works with whole branches and roots, artfully pegged and jointed together so that their knotty, straight-from-the-ground appearance is kept even as they turn into parodies of the human figure. It is like the folksy sensibility that pops two eyes on an odd-shaped root and turns it into a doll on the road side stand - only the mix of Surls 'n' burls is done under better auspices than mere quaintness...