Word: spinsters
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...drama of life, the other a drama of death. Anita Loos's Happy Birthday on NBC's Producers' Showcase (Mon. 8 p.m., E.D.T.) starred Betty Field in the role made famous on Broadway by Helen Hayes. It is the bittersweet tale of how a spinster librarian goes into a bar in pursuit of happiness and finds life and liberty there as well. Betty Field did a creditable job as the librarian in a long and unlikely drunk scene, but was hardly good enough to save a play that was sicklied o'er with the pale cast...
...such straw appeared when Prince Bernhard heard of a wondrous cure performed upon a friend's tuberculous daughter by a woman named Greet Hofmans. Spinster Hofmans (now 61) was a mild-mannered, harsh-voiced woman who was born to poverty and spent a bleak childhood nursing a sick mother. In middle age, after an unrewarding life as a social worker and factory hand, she moved to Holland's hard-bitten north, where piety and superstition often walk hand in hand. There, she said, she had a personal talk with God who offered her miraculous powers for the benefit...
Brian Moore has told an old-maid joke, if it is realized that the point of the spinster joke is human cruelty-and that none sees the point more clearly than the spinster. There are many conspirators against the old maid. The first is Belfast, "drab facades of the buildings proclaiming the virtues of trade, hard dealing and Presbyterian righteousness," with "the dour Ulster burghers walking proudly among these monuments to their mediocrity...
...Boozer." In this dreadful city is set a dreadful boarding house, whose inmates, one by one, destroy Spinster Judith as barnyard fowls peck to death a sickly hen. Her latest and last landlady is Mrs. Henry Rice, with a "bad, blackhearted, slimy voice." The landlady's son, Bernie, is an atrocious intellectual engaged in writing a great poem. His mother washes his hair for him, while he dreams of himself as Messire Bernardus Riccio, a Machiavellian figure. The landlady's brother, James Patrick Madden, is back from New York and thought to be rich; although a vulgar sort...
...Washington's American Newspaper Women's Club, the Democrats' most eligible spinster, Mary Margaret Truman, 32, got tea and congratulations from her old capital cronies over the serialized publication of her memoirs, Souvenir. A newshen asked whether Margaret and her memoir-penning father had exchanged views on each other's works. Said Margaret: "He does his writing. I do mine." Meanwhile, two Hollywood studios were wooing Margaret with propositions to play herself in film versions of her short young life and high old times...