Word: small-town
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There was a small-town winner for the very big, $111 million prize in the Powerball lottery held by 14 states and the District of Columbia. Less than four hours before the drawing, Leslie C. Robins, a 30-year-old English teacher, bought the winning ticket for his fiance at a grocery store in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. After learning that they had beaten odds of 55 million to 1, the couple fled to Florida to escape the media...
...late. With rare exceptions (notably ABC's Roseanne), sitcom clans are stitched together with baling wire and bad jokes. Serious family dramas (Family, A Year in the Life) have all but disappeared from prime time, and the few recent offerings have been too distracted by other matters -- skewering small-town life in Picket Fences; cheerleading for the rights of autistic children in Life Goes On -- to pay much attention to the way families really interrelate. In this context, Laurel Avenue, an HBO mini-series airing in two 90-minute segments this month, is almost a breakthrough...
...fact the place is not so much a museum as a kind of genial time capsule about a small-town boy who made good. A snapshot of two-year-old Danny clutching a toy football, a small boy's grimace of determination on his face. A letter he wrote to his uncle when he was 12 explaining why he lost a nine- hole Jaycee golf tournament ("A 14-year-old kid who shot a 49 he ((sic)) beat me on the 17th"). A photo of an awestruck Dan as a college student shaking hands with Ronald Reagan (not unlike...
...loved to hate. But last week old sins were forgiven. Senate minority leader Robert Dole, sensing he had Clinton cornered for the first time, hurriedly flew to Burlington Wednesday to attend one of Jeffords' quiet, $20- a-head, appetizer-and-Chablis fund raisers that are typical of Vermont's small-town politics. What wasn't typical was that more than a dozen reporters and seven television crews attended too, in the hope of seeing Dole close the deal...
...film is more than just a clever satire of media overkill. Ritchie assembles a vivid, sharply drawn gallery of small-town characters: Beau Bridges as Wanda's unwilling co-conspirator, a hardhat burdened with a messy past and a loony wife (Swoosie Kurtz); Elizabeth Ruscio as the rival mom, no less competitive but not as imaginative; and Matt Frewer as Wanda's drudge of a lawyer. All that and a bouncy country score by Lucy Simon too. True or not, it's positively terrific...