For over twenty years, Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale, relatives of Jaqueline Onassis, lived in an overgrown, run-down twenty-eight-room estate, Grey Gardens in East Hampton, Long Island, where they perfected their mother/daughter act—complete with song-and-dance routines. Her head mysteriously wrapped in scarves and towels, Edie punctuated her modern dances with interpretations of her life, primarily a litany of complaints against her mother. This routine seems to be old material, lines well rehearsed through repeated use, usually with Mrs. Beale as the foil. They invented a world where their house was a stage on which to transform life's disappointments and pleasures into riveting performances. The audience, in this case, were David and Albert Maysles, noted for such cinema verité works (or nonfiction features, as they prefer to call them) as Salesman and Gimme Shelter. 

—Kathy Geritz