Word: patriarch
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...peaceful day in Botswana's Kalahari desert, where the Bushmen live, a Coca-Cola bottle fell from the sky. It must, they thought, be a gift from the gods. But this glass icon brought with it the compulsions of civilization: greed, jealousy, rancor. So the family patriarch determined to take the bottle to the end of the world and drop it off. On his journey he saw the strangest things: beasts with round legs (Jeeps), and a female with strange skins on her back (the village schoolteacher), and a squad of shiftless African guerrillas. The gods must be crazy...
Alfred Drake, Zachary Scott, Herbert Lom, Farley Granger and Ricardo Montalban have all played the role, but for 34 years Yul Brynner has been the first and only King of Siam--an Oriental patriarch who is also a gigolo in jade. He is onstage perhaps half as much as the actress who plays Anna, the Englishwoman who educates the King's children; and of the half-dozen songs that still elate the memory (Hello, Young Lovers, Getting to Know You, I Whistle a Happy Tune, etc., etc., etc.), the King sings none. It matters not. By dint of dogged charisma...
...goes as berserk as Jeremy, waving a handgun of political didacticism at the audience, turning the American homestead into a Freudian minefield. Here Jeremy is less the middle class's guilty secret than, in his sister's words, "a terminal jerk"; and Dad must expose himself as a paranoiac patriarch whose home is his castle, moated by ignorance. For the two hours preceding this pirouette into psychodrama, Home Front is fiercely sympathetic to all of its characters. Beneath Mom's lyrical ditsiness and Dad's clumsy evasions are two frightened people who care, beyond words, for their son. But because...
...villagers rebelled. They were armed with nothing but axes, sticks, scythes, eleven ancient British .303 rifles and a few muskets that had last seen use in battles against the raj. But they fought with spirited tenacity. As one patriarch remembers, "We sang songs as we fought the Communists." They demolished the government military post at nearby Khoshi and barricaded the road into Dobanday. For eight months they fought a series of bloody battles, resisting the force of gunships and armored convoys with captured machine guns, homemade grenades and Molotov cocktails...
Indeed, the Dallas convention is likely to be as much a soapbox for 1988 presidential hopefuls as a last hurrah for the reigning party patriarch. First up will be Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, who is leaving Capitol Hill at year's end to position himself for a run at the White House. Says a Baker aide: "The bottom Line for him is to walk out of the convention having shown that he has a little more fire in him than people thought." Kansas Senator Robert Dole, Gerald Ford's running mate in 1976, and New York Congressman...