4 MUSIC Soul Survivor >>Saturday-night fervor
meets Sunday-morning redemption on Mavis Staples’s
You Are Not Alone. At 71, she remains a source of
powerful consolation in trying times. —Richard Gehr
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Entertainment
Stories From the Road,
Songs From the Soul, and
Sketches From a Mad Mind
Gould plays a truck driver who
picks up a hitchhiking—and very
pregnant—girl named Mary (Olesya
Rulin). She ends up in the care of Dar-nella (Gray), a faded Vegas showgirl
still plugging away at a New Mexico
1 MOVIE
Expecting Mary
ILLUSTRATION BY GLUEKIT; PHOTO CREDITS ON PAGE 91
This warm little film—about a
16-year-old runaway who finds
sheltering love at a trailer park—
makes fine use of a veteran cast
including Elliott Gould, Linda Gray,
Lainie Kazan, Cloris Leachman,
Della Reese, Cybill Shepherd,
Fred Willard—and Kiss frontman
Gene Simmons.
casino. Soon Darnella’s trailer-park pals adopt Mary as their own.
The film was shot in 18 days. “We
worked odd hours and until 3 a.m,”
says Gray. “I couldn’t wait to get up
each day.” Adds Gould: “It was a
labor of love.” —Bill Newcott
back-page fold-ins—has flourished
at the publication since 1955. In a
new biography, written by Mary-Lou
Weisman and illustrated by the artist,
Jaffee paints scenes of growing up
in the Depression-era South and his
mother’s native Lithuania, where he
sought solace from bullies by reading
American comics. —Charlie Clark
Al Jaffee’s Mad Life
Mad magazine has always offered
an alternative look at the American
dream. That may be why 89-year-old
Al Jaffee—the self-styled “artist, writer,
raconteur, arrested adolescent, and
defiant alien” behind the satire mag’s
2 BOOK
On the Road
Reporting from America’s heartland
in the 1960s and ’70s, the late Charles
Kuralt devised a clever strategy to get
his filmed “On the Road” reports—
now collected in a series of DVD sets
from Acorn Media—back to New
York. Kuralt and his cameraman, Izzy
Bleckman, would go to a local airport,
find a flight to LaGuardia, and ask a
passenger to take the film with them.
“They’d say, ‘Sure!’ ” says Bleckman.
“And we never lost a roll of film.” —B. N.
3 DVD
BONUS
ENTERTAINMENT
Read Movies for Grownups© reviews at aarp.org/entertainment.
Hear clips from Charles Kuralt’s Onthe Road at aarp.org/kuralt.
