Word: shower
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lacked navigational equipment for transatlantic flight. At Gander, 35 of the hostages were released, for reasons as diverse as the one offered by a man who said his wife was about to have a baby, or that of a woman who said she would otherwise miss a bridal shower. At some of their stops, the skyjackers off loaded bundles of propaganda pamphlets with precise instructions that they were to be dropped from the air on various cities. Soon the pink sheets were fluttering down on Montreal, Chicago, New York, London and Paris...
Scurvy, scrofula and scabies were common among the poor. Bathing was rare: one Quaker lady noted in her diary in 1799 that she withstood a shower bath "better than I expected, not having been wett all over at once, for 28 years past." Body lice were omnipresent, as was the disease they carried-typhus fever. Frequent births and poor obstetrics accounted for the high mortality in mothers; the death rate among black women served by midwives was lower than among whites served by physicians. Mental illness was seen as the work of the devil: the village idiot was either derided...
...hardly unorthodox subject is a middle-class American family from the Middle West. Make that upper-middle-class: the Jarretts live in Lake Forest, Ill., and father happens to be a tax lawyer. Mother runs a spick-and-span home (she is death on water spots in the shower) and plays golf and bridge on the side. Conrad, 17, is the sort of bright boy who ends up on the swimming team: clean and no-sweat even in his sports...
pursuing Paul Newman in electric wheelchairs; surprising Burt in his shower; bringing poor comfort to the studio head, now stricken by a heart attack and laid up in the hospital; or sweet-talking - silently, of course - an extravagantly campy sex bomb (Bernadette Peters) into joining the cause. Under scrutiny this premise may not be quite enough. Silent Movie could have used the sort of unifyingly insane notion that made Brooks' The Producers memorable: make a success by mounting the most miserable failure you can find...
Then Cambridge. The Charles a muddy sink with built-in garbage disposal. Walden Pond a kiddie matinee. Faucet water flat and stale as month-old Fritos. And even then, no shower attachment in the house. Sisters, mothers, water brothers, no place to go once a laughing river seduces you and runs away...