Word: spinsters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Finally, for the pressured reader in search of humor, A Summons to Memphis provides it. The comedy is situational, two spinster sisters preventing their octagenerian father from remarrying; descriptive, this same eccentric duo frequenting nightclubs, dressed in sequined, clingy, front-and-back plunging fashions; and double-edged, undercut by a gently cynical realism. The comic sensibility is particular to Taylor's novel, but the truths revealed are universal...
...will wind up in broken homes. As Boomers married in the 1970s, the national divorce rate doubled. For the youngest age group, the divorce rate tripled in a decade. Many women--up to 10% of all female Baby Boomers--are choosing never to marry at all. Indeed, the word spinster has lost its stigma and largely vanished from the vocabulary...
...home. Tyler's sympathies highlight, in particular, the eccentric habits of white middle America: middle-class, middle-aged individuals suspended between "Tips From the Beauty Stars" security measures and childish rebellion. When the glib young Julian, Macon's editor, sails into Macon's sister Rose's life, setting her spinster sensibilities spinning with soap opera fantasies, the rest of the family is threatened by the stranger's intentions to make himself at home...
More than a tale of attitudes and events, however, the movie is also the tale of individuals: of the elderly professorial gentlemen who finds romance, of the neurotic, domineering female who forcibly selects her partners, and of the homely, near-sighted spinster who reads gossip magazines while waiting in vain to be propositioned. What happens between events in this film is often more intriguing than the action itself...
...BLOOD in the humor department is matched by new blood on stage. A few towering, er, figures are familiar from previous years--Adam Isaacs as Maxine the Mermaid, Christopher Charron at the Queen's dimwitted spinster sister Auntie Emenem, Michael Allio as the belle Constance Lee Whining, and Calnek at the Captain. The years appear to have taught them some important skills how to project a falsetto voice past the first three rows, how to act during a kickline when you're stuck in a mermaid's tail, and how to keep a straight face when your wig flies...