Word: waifs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...back in 1917. His goal was to establish a refuge for homeless boys, many sent to him by state welfare agencies. Over the years a stream of tattered urchins found their way along U.S. Highway 6, which cuts through nearby Omaha, to Boys Town. In 1938, a wind-battered waif in the movie Boys Town made the place part of American folklore. Arriving at the doorstep with an injured lad slung on his back, he announced to Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy, of course): "He ain't heavy, Father. He's m' brother...
...CLOWN AND WAIF. This is the particular province of the U.S. musical theater. Every female superstar launched on the American stage in the past decade has been cast as a clown or a waif. Barbra Streisand made her Broadway debut as the office-girl clown, Miss Marmelstein. in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and graduated to the Fanny Brice clown in Funny Girl. Liza Minnelli enjoyed her first solid success as a waif in Flora, the Red Menace, and has now gone on to fame as Sally Bowles, the waif of waifs in the film Cabaret...
...according to one friend. Liza became one of the theater gypsies, the singers and dancers who play in Broadway choruses and wait for the big break. Her morning would often start at night and her night in the morning, a reverse cycle that she still follows. For all her waif-like air, she drew on a vast reserve of energy, a fierce instinct to keep moving no matter what happened. "Liza's got a desperate thing," says Mia Farrow, another childhood friend. "She reaches just as far and as deep as she can. There's a lot of depth...
Tommy is more likable than he sounds. He is a Chaplinesque waif who collects other waifs: an English sheep dog named Arnold that seems to be on tranquilizers; an old ham actor who may or may not have toured with Eugene O'Neill's father in The Count of Monte Cristo; a grave-eyed, peach-complexioned girl (Kathleen Dabney) who is wrestling with a cello case full of shoplifted goodies when Tommy meets her in a Bloomingdale's ladies' room. The play is episodic, rather like an urban picaresque novel. Some of the encounters and adventures...
Kosinski, 37, has lived through-and now makes use of-some of the strongest direct experience that this century has had to offer. Like the six-year-old boy in The Painted Bird, he was separated from his Jewish parents during World War II and survived as a waif in the Polish countryside. Like Chance, he suffered a physical injury that left him mute for five years. After the war he was reunited with his parents and placed in a school for the handicapped...