Word: wimp
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...when something about Anita Bryant came on the news. We all regarded Anita as somewhat off the wall, but not out of any deeply felt views on homosexuality. At school, the words "gay" and "fag" were used only as insults to students so awkward or unpopular that the term "wimp" would not do. Homosexuality was spotlighted only once: when the women's studies class invited a lesbian to speak and half the parents called up to complain...
...REST of the cast members deliver uniformly fine and funny performances. Charles Grodin, as Pat's plastic husband Vance, has perfected his wimp's smile and slouch; he's made a career of portraying obnoxious sissies. Ned Beatty is appropriately sleazy as Vance's boss, the advertising king who wants to hide the secret of Pat's shrinking because it could cause a "crisis of confidence in American consumerism...
While all the characters in Ormsby's script are stereotypes, he has endowed each of them with unusual depth. Only Makepeace's Clifford is awkward at times. He must be the wimp and the hero at once, a difficult role for any actor, and a task just beyond Makepeace's grasp. But Baldwin and Matt Dillon, as big bully Melvin Moody, are superb in roles no less difficult. As for the adults, Martin Mull and John Houseman appear fleetingly, and Ruth Gordon sticks to her tried-and-true role as a sex-hungry...
Looking like a skinny William Shatner, Heard's Jack appears as unlikely to start the Beat Generation as the real Kerouac must have. Torn between the genteel sobriety of California suburbia and literary fame as a New York author, Kerouac compromised and died an alcoholic wimp in Florida. We last see him warming in the sun, a camp blanket tossed across his kness as if he were a suburban Ezra Pound who had anticipated his usefulness or outlived his youthfulness and was only good for gardening, pushing down daisies...
...journalistic axiom that disasters come in threes has proved painfully true for the proud Boston Globe (daily circ 482,000), which has found itself embroiled in triple trouble-all of its own making First, an editorial writer put a joke headline, MUSH FROM THE WIMP, on a piece about President Carter's anti-inflation speech. The headline somehow slipped into 140,000 copies before it was caught and changed to something less irreverent...