Word: nursemaid
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...play opens with Frederic's (remarkable tenor Joel Derfner) 21st birthday, marking the official end of his legal apprenticeship to a band of pirates. His nursemaid, Ruth, (a clear and comic Diana Graham) had mistaken his father's request of "pilot" for "pirate" training and, now that Frederic is free, he seeks to destroy piracy...
...when World War II broke out. In a remarkable, elegiac novel that surely is mostly memoir, he walks the poisoned ground. His narrator, Maciek, is the son of a prosperous Jewish doctor. Maciek's mother died in childbirth, but a large, protective family surrounds him: grandparents, servants, neighbors, a nursemaid named Zosia and a beautiful aunt, Tania. But solidity melts away as the war and the Jew hunting begin. Maciek's father is evacuated by Russian troops. Tania becomes the mistress of a German officer. She and Maciek resettle as Roman Catholics in a nearby town, then flee to Warsaw...
...glamorous, Dark Victory-style degeneration. Any illness can be ugly, and so can the response to it. Amid a sickroom's strained bonhomie, Willy (Campbell Scott) tiptoes away to wash off the light kiss of an infected friend. But others find the option of heroic devotion. David, now nursemaid to the ailing Sean, covers up when Sean's boss calls, and diapers the incontinent patient. Because David is also standing a potential deathwatch on his future, his caring grace is spectacular. This is what love...
...throw tantrums over the slightest inconvenience or reject a glass of water because it was too warm. And to those who claimed to know her best, she was a vivacious and vulnerable woman who became so debilitated by insecurity and drug abuse that she could barely function without a nursemaid. When Savitch's end finally came in a freak car accident in 1983, one close friend had already finished mourning: the Jessica she had once known had died years before...
...this book is also a postscript to Andrei's memoirs. I was their initiator and, later, typist, editor and nursemaid. I had to do everything as the nursemaid -- to make sure the manuscript survived and became a book and reached its readers -- and to tell that story alone would call for another volume of memoirs or perhaps a mystery book; but the time for that has not come...