Word: morrisonism
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Rules are rules in Tennessee. When it came time to elect the mayor in Morrison, a hamlet of 547 people, no one wanted to run, but the county election commission insisted that an election be held anyway. No candidate emerged, but that was no problem: 43 out of 49 Morrison voters who showed up simply wrote the name of incumbent Mayor Harris Jacobs Jr. on the blank ballots. "We're not really backward or illiterate," explains Jacobs, a supervisor at an Air Force test facility who has served by default since 1969. "This is a nice little town with...
...main reason: the exercise in democracy costs $400, a hefty sum for Morrison where the yearly budget of $18,000 operates the street lights, paves streets, and runs a public library and volunteer fire department. The only paid municipal employee is a part-time city recorder who earns $50 a month. The citizens never have to fight city hall because there is not much city hall to fight. They think that is just fine...
Kevin O'Morrison displays an intuitive grasp of all this, and his Ladyhouse Blues is suffused with a contagious humanity. Mood, rather than action, dominates the evening, and the play is anchored with palpable authority...
...sparse plot, downright anemic; yet O'Morrison fleshes it out with the wondrous detail of bygone commonplaces. In this household, light comes from kerosene, refrigeration from an iceman, fruits and vegetables are preserved and the tele phone and vacuum cleaner are wild rumors. It is a simpler world but not a qui eter one. The women fuss and explode over trifles, then sing together in tranquilizing harmony...
...Morrison's limber dialogue reveals character by indirection. One daughter (Laurie Kennedy), ill with tuberculosis, has been barred from seeing her husband and child. Another (Jobeth Williams) is held in waning esteem by her New York socialite husband and is downing one glass too many. The youngest (Christine Estabrook), a girl of vim and verve, has fallen in love with a Greek, a fate the rest of this Irish brood regard as scarcely preferable to acquiring head lice...