Word: parlor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Running Man. The funeral service is over. The pretty young widow (Lee Remick) stares at her desolate parlor. All at once she buries her face in her hands and gives way to gentle sobs. The last of the mourners leaves. As the door slams, she lifts her face out of her hands, and the audience sees that the pretty young widow is not sobbing at all-she is laughing...
...Corpse in the Parlor. With funerals growing smaller, the undertakers have done what any good businessman would do-made up for it somewhere else. The result has been the slumber room and its attendant abuses...
Before the development of intravenous embalming in mid-19th century (probably by Thomas H. Holmes, who made $400,000 embalming Civil War dead), the dead man laid out in the parlor was a corpse, and there was no doubt about it. But embalming made it possible to mitigate many of the grimmer aspects of death. The resulting display of the deceased has become the focus of a range of gimmickry and hard-selling that has raised the average bill from $350 in 1935 to about $1,400 (including plot) today, and brought on a storm of criticism...
...more common folk, the viewing of the often ravaged body was only a melancholy and intimate gesture of farewell, conducted in the privacy of parlor or bedroom. Today, thanks to the embalmer's art, the availability of insurance money, and the undertaker's emotional blackmail, it is too often a kind of public spectacle...
Pike recommends that the family's pastor accompany them to the funeral parlor to help them resist whatever pressures may be brought toward overspending...