Word: virginal
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VIRGO-The Virgin, Aug. 23-Sept...
...Beheaded Virgin. Geel's enlightened approach to mental care is the product of a 1,300-year-old religious legend. Ac cording to the story, an Irish Christian princess named Dympna fled from her widowed pagan father when he ordered her to marry him. He pursued her across the sea to Geel, where, insane with incestuous lust, he beheaded her. He instantly recovered his sanity, thereby es tablishing Dympna's reputation as a virgin martyr with powers to cure the mad. The date of her canonization is uncertain, but in the 13th century a chapel in Geel...
...shopping and recreational facilities but sufficient business and industry to provide jobs for everybody-thus preventing it from becoming a mere bedroom for an existing city. A new town can be a satellite city, close to an already developed metropolitan area, or a wholly new urban center erected on virgin land in much the same way that Chandigarh, Canberra and Brasilia were built. For social and economic as well as political reasons, U.S. planners say that the towns should provide a population mix of wealthy, middle class and poor, of black and white and of commuters and resident workers...
Inevitably a virgin is seduced (twice in fact it's so funny) and a teetotalling bar-smasher gets roaring drunk, but this particular show extends its faithfulness to formula a bit too far. Individual lines like "you boys couldn't flatten out a wrinkled postage stamp" ring a little hollow. I wondered during the first act whether the show would stoop to the Beach Party level of repartee with one character emphatically commenting "You can say that again," and his buddy really saying it again. It was there all right, a little dressed up, but dismally there all the same...
Those two hits themselves are significant: they are obviously part of their time and yet, in other ways, out of it. The era is supposed to belong to the politically active and the sexually liberated young; how could anyone hope to succeed with a picture about a male-virgin college graduate whose only politic problem was turning off Mrs. Robinson? This is an age dominated by science, which prides itself on being free of superstition; who would have thought that a story that takes the devil seriously could become a smash? Yet Rosemary's Baby was not only a bestseller...