Word: babar
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...trek, the elephant who looks like an unbaked cookie sighs, "Truly it is not easy to bring up a family." And truly it is this hard wisdom that lies at the heart of Babar classics. In his poignant introduction, Maurice Sendak, doyen of children's literature, notes that the first three books in Babar's Anniversary Album (Random House; $12.95) were written by a young, dying father who supplied Babar and the other sensitive pachyderms with a philosophy as warm as their habitat. Jean de Brunhoff's son Laurent wrote the last three works with no falling...
...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...
...Babar the other night, Troise came cautiously to the phone and said yes, they were trying to give the club a decent burial. "Don't use my address, O.K.?" There was a good deal of commotion in the background, and the caller asked Troise whether the noise was creative ferment. Well, as a matter of fact, Troise admitted, he and a friend were trying to mobilize the nation's pets to solve the energy crisis. "Put the little beggars on treadmills." Did the movement have a slogan? "Sure: 'It's not enough to be cute...