Word: bongos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...undergraduate hangouts were closed early on police orders. On top of that, Jade Beach, traditionally the scene of wholesale woo after dark, was declared off limits. Worst of all, the girls were in dismayingly short supply, outnumbered 10 to 1 by the boys. Any small diversion-someone playing a bongo drum, a girl dancing the limbo-attracted hundreds of listless onlookers. Joseph Penar, a bearded student from Illinois State Normal University, shinnied up a coconut palm one day, for lack of something better to do. "When I got to the top," he reported, "I looked down and saw 300 kids...
Though his menu lists such exotic items as Bongo Bongo Soup, Javanese Sate and Bah-Mee, they are really American versions (or inventions) for American palates. "Take a Tahitian pudding made with arrowroot," says the Trader. "It's so tough you can throw it and use it as a handball. Or take a squab. In the average Chinese restaurant, that little fella comes out with his dead eyes staring you in the face. When the customer sees that naked head and the beak and the eyes, he wants no part of it. We chop the neck off it, barbecue...
...even that sort of absurdity is fading. The beats are gone, man, gone. The bongo drums in Denver's Exodus lie unused and uncared-for. In San Francisco, where it all started, even the Co-Existence Bagel Shop has been closed since autumn. And in Chicago, when a newspaper wanted a "typical" picture of two beats in a coffeehouse, reporters had to comb the city for hours before they found two sad, sandaled shades and dragged them to the Oxford to be shot...
...secondary love-affair, between Bongo and a middle-aged American singer (Sylvia Sims), manages to show the shallowness of show business in general and the absurdity of this particular film. Miss Sims unwittingly gets Bongo drunk and later acts as both his mother and seducer; at the same time she wrenches his contract from the evil Harvey, plans a grand tour of the United States, and finally shouts at the unfortunate agent: "You get out of here or I'll have you thrown...
...good to see that people are still concerned about mass values, and no doubt Val Guest (who directed the movie) and Wolf Mankowitz (who wrote it) are serious in attempting to deal with an unquestionably important problem. But in Expresso Bongo they are caught in the same mire as their main characters...