Word: banana
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...Women and Wallace" goes for the theatrical jugular immediately. Minutes into the play we are led into a warm domestic scene: Wallace's mother (Sarah Matthay) calmly prepares a peanut butter and banana sandwich for little Wallace. After he excitedly snatches the lunch and trots off to the second grade, Wallace's mother jots a note and then slits her throat. As the play progresses, it becomes clear that this is the defining moment of Wallace's life. We know early on why his relationships with women will be screwed up and inevitably end in disaster...
...your lower back twists loose, and you never attend the opera again. You spend the rest of your life in search of pain relief and wind up in India, penniless, lying on a mat at the Rama Lama Back Clinic, as the Master's disciple places the sacred banana on your back--ice can do this to a person, make you much older very suddenly...
Joseph Keaton Jr. was born to a knockabout vaudeville family and quickly put on the stage. The lad toured with his family until 1917, when he entered films as second banana to Fatty Arbuckle. In 1920, Keaton left Arbuckle to make his own movies. The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all-intuitively. His body, honed by vaudeville pratfalls, was a splendid contraption. And as a director, Keaton was born fully mature. He was just 25 then, and as eager to mine...
...Keaton the end came abruptly, sadly, in the late '20s. His producer, who was also his brother-in-law, sold him out, literally, to MGM, and Keaton lost control of his films. It was a crash that led to pained obscurity--as second banana to Jimmy Durante, gag writer for Red Skelton, waxwork to Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd., cracked mirror image to Chaplin in the 1952 Limelight. Keaton died at 70 in 1966. He never got to savor the happy ending that film history had planned: the rediscovery and restoration of his films, the flabbergasted smiles of today...
...have been asked when I first felt a sense of racial identity, when I first understood that I belonged to a minority. In those early years, I had no such sense, because on Banana Kelly there was no majority. Everybody was either a Jew, an Italian, a Pole, a Greek, a Puerto Rican or, as we said in those days, a Negro. Racial epithets were hurled around and sometimes led to fistfights. But it was not "You're inferior--I'm better.'' The fighting was more like avenging an insult to your team. Among my boyhood friends were Victor Ramirez...