THE BACKWARD BRIDE

Champagne for jaded appetites in social satire- a witty sophisticated caricature of modern intellectuals and their nemesis, a simple (?) Sicilian beauty. This brilliantly impossible adventure begins when Uncle Glorgio, Sicily's most successful bandit, takes his favorite nephew, Aquila, and that progressive young man's beautiful bride, Anisette, on a wedding trip to London to visit Aqulla's mental mentor, Prof. Lissom, champion of free love, birth control and the intellectual liberation of women. Anisette is a trifle confused in her terminology as to birth control and self control but she has no trouble figuring out what the professor is really after. However, finding Aquila more attached to sophistry than sex, Anistta tries the old recipe of handing back the gander his own sauce and seemingly puts into practice some of her husband's favorite preaching -- first under the attempted tutelage of Li, then progressing to an existentialist Frenchman in Paris. These high handed methods to the tune of equally high comedy produce a natural conversion in Aquila from philosophical theory to more physical practices when he catches up to his yet unravished bride in time to learn the simpler joys of life. Opera bouffe presented with the lucid of a truly skillful satirist. Return engagement for the author of .