Word: conventions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...persistent is the plight of small children in Home Truths that the reader may fairly guess at some trauma glimpsed or experienced during the author's childhood in Montreal. In Orphans' Progress, for example, two wretched little girls are locked up in a French-Canadian convent school. Eight-year-old Mildred and twelve-year-old Cathie are bathed every two weeks, the one wearing a rubber apron and the other a muslin shift so they cannot see their own bodies. The state of Mildred's thumb tells it all: "Sucked white, (it) was taped to the palm of her hand...
...Though the general pattern of spiritual life remains, convents have adopted new practices since 1977. Nuns in tropical climates, for example, need not wear the customary woolen habit. Daily hours may be shifted to local needs, and a prioress no longer has absolute sway over her convent. Beyond that, however, in rare cases nuns have abandoned the habit altogether. Also, sisters are occasionally leaving the cloister for personal missions like visiting a sick parent, and, with special permission, for more mundane matters like schooling. A prioress in Barcelona even appeared on a TV talk show. "These are the exceptions that...
Progressive sisters are now praying and writing the Vatican to plead for a modernized constitution. The prioress at the convent in the Roxbury section of Boston, Sister Therese, clasps her hands and smiles with confidence as she speaks in hushed tones of the traditionalist campaign. "All we know is that what they are asking is impossible. We're living...
...front pages. It also accomplished its purpose in giving Reagan and Mulroney an irresistible opportunity to engage in the kind of personal politicking at which both excel. (While the men negotiated, Nancy Reagan toured Quebec City with Mulroney's vivacious, Yugoslav-born wife Mila, visiting the Ursuline Convent and stopping at a downtown restaurant...
With the increase in pointedly sexual references, the play attempts to treat its issues with a greater degree of seriousness. Eddie's inability to maintain his religious faith is countered by Becky's decision to join the convent, a move that climaxes the sexual tensior that has been building all along. Ultimately, however, the play chooses not to become an issues-oriented forum, but as the upbeat "Best of Friends" duct suggests, a comic arena largely unconscious of conflict...