Word: throatful
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Promises, it seems, are made to be broken. The event might be called Three Men in a Hearse. Randall is decades too old for his role and tries to compensate with Shirley Temple cuteness. Klugman, who has had throat surgery, speaks in a rasp that is always painful and only sometimes comprehensible from the seventh row. The play, which George Abbott adapted from John Cecil Holm's work Hobby Horses, was written for the more indulgent audiences of 58 years ago. Perhaps its cheery view of compulsive gambling, drinking until passing out, male dominance and spousal abuse seemed innocuous then...
...plot is dreary and predictable in its basics: neurasthenic young woman falls apart. That is, in fact, what happens; Ann Rogers crumbles and collapses. Why does this matter? Why does author Harrison's novel (her second, after the much praised Thicker Than Water) grab the reader by the throat? Is it the hook of that voyeuristic first scene in the taxi? Are we waiting for something like that striptease to happen again...
...worth millions of dollars to treat such a hopeless case. To them, I say this: offer to pay for the care, too. They should save their abundant crocodile tears for the less glamorous, but all-too-common case of an uninsured youngster who must fear a simple sore throat or broken limb...
...they rebuild homes wrecked by Hurricane Andrew. By night they drink, fight, smoke crack and sometimes kill. In the squalid roadside camps they call home, shotguns and 9-mm pistols abound, as do the tools of their trade: roofing knives. In one case a roofer's throat was cut so deeply he was nearly decapitated. In another a roofer shot and stabbed a drifter 100 times. Soldiers who patrolled the area say they saw a roofer bite off another man's ear, then spit...
Instead they reach back to the earlier and more authentic anxieties of Alberto Giacometti. Some depict vomiting heads, which, as Rothenberg puts it in her catalog interview with Auping, were "divorce images," conveying "a sense of something threatening, like a stick in the throat . . . the whole choked-up mess of separating from someone you care for and a child being involved." Her combined face-hand images, like Red Head, 1980-81, are particularly strong, perhaps because they so vividly combine a sign for openness and approach (the human countenance) with one for rejection or warding off (the open palm thrusting...