Word: boozer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...modern classic, Juno and the Paycock is fashioned around characters who escape the last-act curtain and become dramatic immortals like Hamlet, Tartuffe, and St. Joan. Captain Boyle, the strutting Paycock, is a Homeric boozer, braggart and whine. With a sea-rolling gait and a gravelly brogue, Melvyn Douglas makes him an amiably puckish buffoon but scarcely a Dublin Falstaff. O'Casey's Juno has a spiny tongue for her shiftless husband, but she is also an Earth Mother of Sorrows. Her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant; her son loses an arm to the British and his life...
...come from it's no disgrace to get drunk. It's an achievement." Followed by a horde of slum urchins begging sixpence ("Their standard of living has gone up with mine; they used to be content with pennies"), his florid, stocky figure heads out for the boozer before n a.m. He "gargles" whisky and porter the rest of the day, while heaving beguiling blarney to friends and freeloaders: "Do you know I'm a shareholder in the Daily Worker? But I can't afford to write for it-I write for Vogue instead." At times...
...same pep in his format. Only fresh element to appear is Rumdum, who gets thrown out of saloons in pantomime; otherwise Gleason has retreaded the old sit-bys, e.g., the Poor Soul, Reggie Van Gleason III. (Reggie also crept into Gleason's performance of Joe, the philosophical boozer, in Playhouse 90's otherwise first-rate production of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life.) Perhaps Gleason's worst mistake: replacing Art Carney and Audrey Meadows, who were actors, and could play up to Gleason's roaring diatribes and outrageous double takes, with Buddy Hackett...
...collections of short stories, seven nonfiction books, three plays and a mass of journalism-were to deal with simpler people in a simpler world. He followed his own star-snarled destiny where it led, left his stepfather's shabby Oakland home to become an oyster pirate and precocious boozer in his teens. He drank enough redeye before he was 20 to make Lost Weekend seem like a short beer...
...Cock has one friend, known only as "Arp" (from the initials on his Air Raid Precautions uniform jacket). A bomb had deprived Arp of everything -house, family, name, memory and speech. But Old Cock talks enough for two-his language flows like pig's ear in a boozer on Saturday night and is rich as hot gammon. In a country of free teeth he has only five blackened stumps ("tombstones") and possesses nothing much but a cherished tapeworm, which he "gasses" with liberal quantities of raw onion. But his friendship with Arp glows like the lavatory float of "valuable...