Word: babar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mess around with Mother Irony, they tell one another now at the Café Babar. When the phone rings, no one wants to answer it. Although it is more than a year since Joe Troise and Bill Glanting and the others had their big idea, the caller is more than likely to be some reporter or talk-show crocodile wanting to know about the Dull Men's Club. Dullness had everyone excited there for a while, and it kept things jumping among the regulars at the café, a neighborhood beer-and-sandwich joint in San Francisco...
...able to discuss everything, enjoy everything. They have an irrational impulse to be interesting." (The quotation was so good Troise later used it in his International Dull Day proclamation last Oct. 16.) That was the kind of folderol that used to fill the air of the Cafe Babar...
...eight people instantly did. One sufferer admitted that hot tubs made his bathing trunks pucker. Someone else cried out in the night: "Help! I'm tired of being the star of the show, the life of the party. Stop me before it's too late!" The Babar plotters bought another ad, this one offering a club membership and a lavish brochure for $5. Troise, an auto mechanic in his mid-30s, composed a mimeographed, both-sides-of-one-page exhortation titled "Lavish Brochure." At one time Glanting, 30, had a little success as a stand-up comic...
Dullness had struck a chord, as home truths occasionally do, but at the Café Babar they needed new material. One of the TV networks got hold of Troise, who, improvising with some desperation, said that the club was going to create a Pantheon of Dull Heroes in-here he reached into his skull at random for the name of a small town-Carroll, Iowa...