Today,
parents
can buy their kids stun guns for self protection -- you know,
Tasers.
We weren't so lucky. We just had stuff like brass knuckles and bicycle
chains. Nancy admits Danny is showing off her brass
knuckles (right), but nobody's saying where she got them from in the
first place. Some
mysteries remain.
Thornton Wilder (1897 – 1975) wrote
Our
Town, a popular play (and later film) set in fictional
Grover's
Corner, New Hampshire.
Our
Town
employs a choric narrator called the "Stage Manager" and a minimalist
set to underscore the universality of human experience. (Wilder himself
would play the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in
summer stock productions.) The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize.
His play
The Skin of
Our Teeth
debuted in 1943 with Fredric March and Tallulah Bankhead in the lead
roles. Again, the themes are familiar--war, pestilence, economic
depression, fire. Ignoring the limits of time and space, just four
characters and three acts are used to review the history of
mankind. If this kind of intellectualism is too much for you,
check out the non-fictional life of
Tallulah
Bankhead.
("At 15, Tallulah Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest
&
convinced her family to let her move to New York ". . . definitely a
mistake.)
(Adapted from "
Thornton
WIlder" in the
Wikipedia,
the encyclopedia that's not written by snobs.)
--end Skin of our Teeth & Nancy
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