Word: sadnesses
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Your Essay "The Sad Truth About Big Spenders" [Dec. 8] gets me where it hurts. Most of us are your average Joes. We like grand gestures. Big spenders are our fantasies realized. Somewhere along the line they broke out of the mold and temporarily excelled. Now they can throw their money around. Just as we would, if we too made the big time...
...sad homecoming for Diana and Gerald Green. Almost two years ago, the Scituate, Mass., couple fled to Mexico, rather than obey a state court order to resume chemotherapy for their three-year-old son Chad, who suffered from leukemia. The Greens were determined to enroll Chad in a Tijuana clinic where he could receive laetrile, the controversial drug scorned by the medical establishment but touted by some cancer patients as a miracle worker. After nine months of treatment, Chad was dead. The Greens were left childless as well as homeless, with criminal and civil contempt charges pending against them...
...should know, movies are different. What looks like a character's final tribute from a theater balcony be comes, in movie closeup, an autopsy. And Lemmon, by re-creating his stage performance, has created another, more pitiable Scottie. Lemmon still articulates a lexicon of frayed hopes through his sad-clown face, still works the crowd like an aging but adept masseur. But this Scottie is no longer a man one would care to spend an evening drinking with, or even observing. He chokes on his own gag lines; he straitjackets his son (Robby Benson) in a slapstick embrace...
...should be done (not exactly the way to win an important friend); a string snapping in Irving's piano as she launches into her concerto (she insists on changing not only pianos but the piece she has rehearsed). Besides all this, there are the predictable bits of sad personal histories, familial pressures and sexual hanky-panky with which the participants must deal...
Does the world comply? Absolutely. For all their crackpot self-indulgences, the big spenders ought to be razzed off the earth. Instead, the world takes them to its heart, which brings us back to the why. Perhaps because we find them sad, the way a huge child can be sad-frightening because of its unnatural size, but essentially sad nonetheless. It is not that the rich are any sadder than the rest of us, of course, but that they are so surprised at finding themselves sad at all. It is not that they are any more bored than the rest...