The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 35

mm Names Faces C2 Literary Life C3 Ann Landers C4 Book Review C5 Classified C7 Learning C8 TV-Radio C8-9 Comics ClO-lf THE BOSTON GLOBE WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1996 Mary Ann Glendon: Writing her own party line Recruited by the Vatican, rebuffed by Bush, the Harvard Law prof defies definition ByDickLehr GLOBE STAFF June of last year, the Vatican turned to Harvard an odd (and unholy) alliance if ever there was one. The telephone rang in the office of law professor Mary Ann Glendon, and it was the Vatican, asking: Would Glendon lead the Holy See's delegation to the international women's conference in Beijing? "I'll have to ask my can only be taken as surprises if your starting point is a line drawing of a capital-C conservative, based on her work for the Vatican, the assignment that placed her for the first time before a wider audience. It's a string of surprises that begins as Glendon strides into an office filled with books and explains she has morning treats to go with coffee. "Would you like one of Alan Dershowitz's bagels?" she offers, and her words hang in the air. Later she even jokes about how she and her liberal colleague across the hall used to share a fax machine until she began receiving reams of confidential material from the Vatican while he was getting a stream of confidential memos from 0.

J. Simpson's defense team. But no matter how ordinary she makes it, the bagel moment, involving two unlikely floor-mates, does indeed capture this oft-repeated truth: Mary Ann Glendon cannot be pigeonholed. During the 1960 presidential election, the first in which Glendon, then 22, could vote, she eagerly cast her ballot for John F. Kennedy.

For most of her life, dean," Glendon recalls replying, smiling now at the token nod to protocol, for Harvard officials quickly granted her the chance to become the first woman to head a papal delegation. Indeed, such a calling might seem the culmination of any conservative Catholic's life, and Glendon's scholarly work surely satisfied the Church. But things are more complicated than they seem. Glendon, 58, may be a f. devout Roman Catholic, but she defies other labeling.

She admires both Robert 'H. Bork and Thurgood Marshall. She opposes abortion, supports welfare and is an advocate of civil rights and public school desegregation. Formerly a registered Democrat, she is now an independent who both parties have sold out to big business. In her six books and countless she's been a Democrat all of which seems incongruous for someone now tagged such a conservative.

But then a certain duality runs through this scholar's life. Glendon was raised in the small town of Dalton in western Massachusetts. Her mother's family, the Pomeroys, fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, and her grandfa 4 Glendon with Pope John Paul II. She represented the Vatican at the international women's conference. articles, she's agitated all sides, drawing the ire of feminists and the complaint from conservatives that she's "mushy." Strikingly blond and unfailingly gracious, dressed in a dark-blue suit highlighted by a r.

silk scarf, Glendon is now welcoming a visitor into, the heady halls of Harvard. In the hours of interviews that follow, and in her and through interviews with others, ther Theodore Pomeroy was chairman of the town's Republican committee. Her father, Martin Glendon, was a reporter for the Berkshire Eagle and later chaired the local board of selectmen, the first Irish-Catholic Democrat to win that job. "A big part of who I am is I'm half Irish and half Yankee," Glendon says. She considers herself a "true hybrid" who relishes both traditions.

That said, she adds, "It never oc-GLENDON, Page C4 GLOBE STAFF PHOTO TOM HERDE 'The conservative foundations are not happy with the social and economic preoccupations I have, and the liberal foundations just hate my prolife her rich life begins to unfold, revealing what MARY ANN GLENDON Dunaway learns lessons well, goes to head of 'Class' ByEdSiegel GLOBE STAFF A I ove over, barking dogs and jingle cats. Get ready to "Deck the waiting until later in the run because Faye Dunaway has gone from promising to stellar. At one point in the play, Maria Callas tells one of her students that she has to find her own voice, not imitate others. Dunaway has found her voice, and the result is not only a bravura performance, but the best production of the play that has yet been mounted. Gone is the comical, thick Greek accent that had nothing to do with how Callas talked and certainly nothing to do with the way Dunaway did.

In its place is a more subtle accent that doesn't force Dunaway into an unnatural singsong that takes her. into higher registers where her voice doesn't belong. Now that that load has been lightened, Dunaway is free to really strut her stuff. Her body language has gone from stiff, almost supplicant, to rounded and poised. She STAGE, Page C6 I Halls With Rubber." That's just one of 14 snappy tunes you 11 find When a hot new show comes to town the tendency is to get tickets for early in the run.

There's a sense of cocktail-party power and hipness to be Stage Review yeah, I saw it. Frank ly, I don't know what the hype's all about." "Master Class" is an advertisement for on "A Rubber Band Christmas," a CD recorded by local musicianengi- neers Jeff St. Pierre and Phil Antoniades. Their instruments: rubber bands and a few other office supplies such as a ruler and stapler. "If the barking dogs can go gold, so can we," says Antoniades, who spent five hours in a studio with St Pierre plucking those elastic strings.

The sound suggests a skeletal jug band that pings its way into your brain. "You want it to bother people, Antoniades says. "That's the key!" Selections include "Rudolph the Rubber Nosed Reindeer" and "Feliz Rubberdad." But Weaving Dickinson's words into three dimensions the joke doesn't stop with car ols. An ode to Jimi Hen-drix closes the By Christine Temin GLOBE STAFF So far they've sold 1,200 copies in two weeks ($5.99 each, or $3.99 each in If ft If If It I v. a 10-pack; available at Newbury Comics, or call 1-888-RUBBER-8).

ble form. Horn had grappled with Dickinson's deceptively simple writing for years, getting nowhere, until finally she went to Iceland with just one book Dickinson's poems -and no other distractions. "It was Dickinson and me," she writes in the show's catalog, which, in addition to being a document, is a handsome artist's book with haunting photographs of Dickin-PERSPECTIVES, Pag C6 i With those numbers, they WELLESLEY Emily Dickinson was the inspiration for New York artist Roni Horn's "Earths Grow Perspectives Thick," an installation currently at Wellesley College's Davis Museum, which is as spare and rich as one of Dickinson's poems, and which gives thfcm tangi may decide to stretch the idea into a classic rock CD. PAUL ROBICHEAU PHOTO BILL JACOBSON 1 Ron! Horn's "When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes No. 886," aluminum ban penetfbted by the poet's words..