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traditional expectations that girls shouldn’t go to school ivory wedding veils , by offering universal primary education.The religious landscape has also changed dramatically, with Pentacostalism eclipsing Anglicanism as the country’s primary faith, though there is far more diversity now.said Moses Mukasa, 30, who was born in Uganda and now lives in Victoria, B.and works for Watoto, an NGO that focuses on helping children.Despite the many steps forward, there remain challenges in almost every area.The Uganda AIDS Indicator Survey released this spring suggests Uganda is one of only two African countries the other being Chad that are seeing a rise in AIDS rates.the average number of children per woman is around 6.the fourth highest rate in the world.The longer lifespan coinciding with still-high fertility rates has put pressure on healthcare system.representative bodies, says Derek Peterson, professor of history and director of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan.stability has come also at a cost, he said.There are representative bodies that are increasingly now restive in relation to the ruling party, but the full expression of democratic politics hasn’t come to Uganda in a way one might’ve hoped.There are concerns about an anti-gay law the government is trying to pass, which would make homosexuality illegal.Watoto has also been working to help rehabilitate child soldiers captured and trained by the Lord’s Resistance Army, said Mr.Mukasa, who still has four of five sisters in Uganda as well as his mother.They also help babies orphaned by their mothers, many of whom die from complications during childbirth.Despite the rocky path, Ugandans are proud to be independent, taking successes like the country’s gold medal win in men’s marathon at the London Olympics this summer as a symbol of successful autonomy.We see this is good, this is something that happens as a result of what we went through.Viewers in England have fallen into swoons over Parade’s End, a new five-part television adaptation by Tom Stoppard set in the decade of 1908 through to the end of the Great War.That Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the tortured Tory husband of Ford Madox Ford’s novels doesn’t hurt, but beyond the day dresses and military costumes wedding dress petticoat , it’s the central themes of sex, suffragettes and duty that have been of interest to viewers, and writers such as Julian Barnes, who recently praised Ford’s modern novel in an essay for the Guardian.In the absence of a new season of Downton Abbey or access to Parade’s End, my recent costume melodramas have instead included The Forsyte Saga, available on Netflix Canada.it stars Rupert Graves, Ioan Griffudd, Damian Lewis (who just won an Emmy for Homeland), Gina McKee and a whole lot of crushed velvet.In lieu of a Pemberley or Downton’s Downton there is Robin Hill, their classic Arts and Crafts pile, and an exploration of the moral codes of the Edwardian, then early modern era.Some of its original popularity surely had to do with the fact that it aired during the last frenzy of property obsession and materialism before the economic downtown, which are also Galsworthy’s themes in the books.Glossing over the Boer War and the death of Queen Victoria, The Forsyte Saga seems an uncanny parallel of the Manolos and martini obsession of Sex and the City-era Manhattan.But Downton Abbey’s new season recently began airing in the U.and in an exclusive Grazia magazine interview this week costumer Caroline McCall (spoiler ahead!more than any other single costume in the series so far.Judging by the retweeted links to the article alone, fans can’t get enough of this sort of tidbit, thanks to the current craze for lavish period dramas that fetishize the past (and lately, the Edwardian and early Jazz Age in particular).Rebecca Sullivan, a professor in the University of Calgary’s faculty of communications who specializes in feminist film, media and cultural studies.poque, and then cycles of Edwardian culture.Sullivan cracks sarcastically.Oh man, wouldn’t it be great if I could be sexually harassed at work while I wear a girdle and a bullet bra!In these serial aesthetic entertainments bridal petticoat , the viewer stand-in is generally a plucky heroine who bristles at the societal restrictions of the era.Sullivan explains of not only historical television but film and novels.One that is prettier, easier and one without consequences.It imprints contemporary values onto an imagined past to suggest that problems are easily solved.usually from a bourgeois, if not elite, privileged perspective.That escapism treats the past as uncomplicated.it ain’t gonna happen.a disconnected otherworldliness that allows you not to feel grounded in social, political, economic conflicts and inequalities.Another theory is that as we inch into the teens, the late Edwardian era is long enough ago to be exotic, but still near enough so as to be rec
e which include theaters wedding veils , galleries, castles, stately homes and pubs generates 4.billion pounds a year in total spending by overseas tourists.And while a royal birth isn t a typical economic event, things have a way of morphing in the social media age.The royals have come a long way since 1948, when Prince Charles birth was announced by a footman who tacked a note to the railing outside Buckingham Palace.William s engagement was announced on Twitter and on the monarchy website which allows the royals to speak directly to the public.Between direct access and media excess, just about anything that touches the Windsors gets a maximum amount of attention.The royals are marketplace movers in a way that goes way beyond commemorative china.When the Duchess of Cambridge wore a sapphire blue wrap dress to announce her engagement, designer Daniella Helayel found herself swamped with international attention and buyers within minutes.But it didn t end there.Style bloggers now hunt down what the duchess is wearing with astonishing speed.and was available to anyone with a speedy modem.Ditto her coats, shoes and bags.Kate has made a point of choosing brands that are both accessible and British and retail experts expect that trend to continue with her royal offspring.New moms and dads will want not only the baby Windsor s onesie, but also the baby carriage, the rattle and the teddy bear -followed by the royal tricycle, the scooter and on.Maclaran says it s not so much as a royal baby bounce but a steady drive toward the cash register that just keeps going as the little one grows up.And they re bound to have more!The royals have also done marketers a favor by exhibiting extreme tolerance in allowing the public to create stuff in their image.Unlike the International Olympic Committee, which guards its trademark interlocked rings with formidable force, Windsor Inc.pretty much lets the people poke fun at them.The royal wedding, for example, spawned artist Lydia Keith s barf bags an idea she carried over to the royal birth with a Shake, Rattle Rule royal morning sickness sick bag, which comes in baby blue and soft pink.Allowing jokes and laughing along allows the public to bond with Britain s royal family, Maclaran said.The irreverent thing is what makes us love them, she said.That s good for Ray Duffy, the managing director of Mask-arade, the Southam-based company that makes paper masks which are pictures of the royals with holes for the eyes.Duffy s on overdrive printing masks of Kate and William for the street parties that will follow the announcement of the royal birth.Normally, the company has 2 wedding gloves ,000 masks on hand but now they are whipping up 20,000 each of Kate and William.Historian Hugo Vickers stresses that even if the royals are nicknamed the firm in Britain this is their blessed event and any economic boost is secondary.Charles is the current heir, and his son William is second-in-line.The new baby boy or girl will be third in line to the throne, bumping Prince Harry to number four.It will focus the eyes of the world on Britain, Vickers said.Everyone is excited by a baby.And everyone is really excited by a royal baby.And everyone is very, very excited when the baby is the heir to the throne.Shakespeare set Measure for Measure in Vienna.Well, he namechecks the place twice.Martha Henry’s Stratford production places us in that ambiguously liberated city, just after the Second World War: Harry Lime time.It works, creating a climate of cankered bureaucracy and sexual unease, not to say disease, befitting a story in which a lax ruler takes leave of absence, bequeathing his powers to a notoriously puritanical deputy and then returning incognito to see how he gets on.You couldn’t hope to find better acting, direction or indeed writing than in the two scenes in which the newly empowered Angelo faces the novice nun Isabella who’s come to plead for the life of her brother Claudio, condemned to death for impregnating his girlfriend, and finds himself, for the first time in his life, falling in lust.Tom Rooney gives a magnificent, searching performance of a man obsessed with law and morality, and convinced that they’re the same thing.As his self-image crumbles he finds himself literally grasping at things: clutching at books, papers, finally and violently at Isabella herself, all of them slipping through his fingers.This production is as full of props as Romeo and Juliet is empty of them wholesale hair accessories , but both excel at seizing on the text’s suggestions and making them real.Rooney’s is a quiet performance, very logical and measured, until it collapses, violently, into a new kind of fanaticism, desire and self-hatred mixed.is how he puts it; and it may be the way Isabella talks that first attracts him; they’re both great legalistic arguers, and the severe habit that envelops Carmen Grant’s convent trainee (most Isabellas give themselves more leeway when they go a-calling) gives him little else to go on.She matches him as a logician, cool at first, then goaded into moral passion, feeling her own strength.sends her into shock; left alone, she reaches for the phone on his desk (she’s a prop person, too) before realizing she has no one to call.sounds, for once, right: for her, anyway.The tremendous force of these scenes, and of Isabella’s subsequent one with Claudio (Christopher Prentice, passionate and perplexed), has its downside; it throws into even sharper relief than usual the drop in dramatic pressure when the disguised Duke emerges from the shadows to take over the action and steer it from disaster.He does it in rapid prose that suggests the playwright as well as the character is improvising his way out of an impossible situation.For one thing, he reveals discreditable things about Angelo that take the shine off what we had taken to be the corruption of a saint.The Duke himself seems in this production to have a past.He makes his first, pre-abdication entrance, through the door of a cage that’s an impressive permanent featu.
ognizably modern.speaks to another era of technology and communication that’s unfolding now.There are parallels to concerns of identity, not unlike the spate of American Westerns set in the late 1800s, which were enormously popular in the 1950s and capitalized on righteous patriotic sentiment.And in the wake of the fairytale Charles and Diana wedding, Britain was primed to be swept up in the fictional aristocratic life between the wars of Brideshead Revisited, which aired in 1981.So it’s zeitgeist, then?For every argument of cultural relevance, you could argue budgetary considerations: Those Westerns were cheap and easy to make (just head to the middle of nowhere with a bagful of 10-gallon hats, some chaps and a few horses).all those footmen and parlour maids!Although the latter is admittedly still cheaper to costume than Elizabeth I’s Tudor England milieu.When I spoke with Downton-loving designer Anna Sui last fall, we digressed into a conversation about why that period, along with Sui’s beloved 1930s, continues to have such appeal.she said of the high-society screwball comedies and backstage musicals .
