Word: trees
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...border in Liberia, which was then in the midst of a civil war. Freetown, which sits amid lush rice paddies and rolling green hills, was established in 1787 as a home for freed slaves. The British cut off the slaves' shackles on a block in front of a cottonwood tree that still stands today. But the country is no paradise: the U.N. ranked it the least-developed nation on earth in 1997. The average life expectancy is 34 years...
...found the scene harrowing. "The situation is totally chaotic," he says. "Much of the city is under the control of 15- and 16-year-old kids who will shoot at anything." Barnes filed his story from Freetown on a borrowed satellite phone from under the cover of a palm tree as a muggy quiet settled over the city. His dispatches, and his courage, provided the outside world with its first glimpse of Sierra Leone's nightmare in more than a week, since the last journalists fled...
...course, some people are naturally conservative; they avoid taking a position whenever possible. They just don't want to go out on a limb when they don't know the genus of the tree. For these people, the vague generality must be partially junked and replaced by the artful equivocation, or the art of talking around the point...
...youth and glamorous career. The ex-wife is a near saintly mother, though, requiring only a bravely endured onslaught of cancer to complete canonization. Her ailment also brings the warring women together in mutual admiration, shuts the kids up and gets everyone gathered, trembling chins up, around the tree for their first and last Christmas as an inspiringly functional extended family. Under Chris Columbus' direction, they make a pretty but utterly misleading picture in which cheap sentiment is used to supply easy, false resolutions to agonizing issues. It doesn't help to tell lies, even saving ones, about such matters...
...couple of disposable up-tempo numbers (Mary Phagan getting wooed by a suitor on the trolley) and turn gooey in big ballads like All the Wasted Time, sung by Lucille and Leo in jail. Prince's staging is elegant but rather quiet, the set dominated by a giant oak tree from which Leo will eventually hang. No one wants a glitzed-up tragedy, but when a show called Parade has three of them, and each takes place at the back of the stage mostly hidden by the onlooking crowd, you can't even go home humming the sets...