Word: sylvia
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Soon his parents' loyalty was questioned. In 1951, in front of a Senate committee, Alfred invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked if he was a member of the Communist Party. His wife Sylvia, also active in progressive causes, did the same three years later in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The family found itself shunned by many of its neighbors, friends and even relatives. The FBI kept the Bernsteins under surveillance for years (Bernstein's bar mitzvah is duly described), accumulating 2,500 pages of files that pop up in the book...
...even more individualized approach to food can be found in Sylvia Thompson's Feasts and Friends (North Point Press; $21.95), a beautifully evocative memoir recounting the author's dining adventures in California and Europe. The daughter of actress Gloria Stuart, Thompson learned good cooking at home in Hollywood, where dinner guests included Groucho Marx and Robert Benchley. Traveling around Europe, cooking while in and out of love, she developed an eclectic repertoire: from Russian fish soup to French vegetable soup with white wine, from Southern "transparent pie" -- made with quince jelly -- to an opaque Dutch apple pudding. The icing...
Bram Stoker's novel The Lair of the White Worm is nothing like a great book, but its outline offers Russell plenty of fodder for his fantasies. An archaeologist unearths the skull of a giant reptile and thus unleashes a pestilence on England's Peak district, courtesy of Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe). In her worship of a humongous subterranean worm, this venomous vamp sprouts fangs, spits at crucifixes, sups on the locals and searches for a sacrificial virgin -- no mean feat, since Russell has set his story in the 1980s...
...snake has all the lines here: "Name your poison," says Lady Sylvia to a toothsome aristocrat. Russell oils the dialogue with lots of slithery images: killer vacuum-cleaner hoses and serpentine watch hands, Snakes and Ladders gameboards and pickled earthworms in aspic. With all the dream demons and succubus seductions, the movie starts to look like a man's fearful scenario of woman's seductive power. Is Russell just kidding or deadly serious? The answer is, as always, both. His campfire tale may be more camp than fire, but it shows the cinema's last angry mannerist in good humor...
...woman in front of us seemed edified, though. "I'm going home and ask Sylvia if she knows who Robert Newman is," she says, apparently undismayed by the technocratic reverend...