Word: bric
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...seven of the tales in Fast Lanes, however, sort through the bric-a-brac of unmade lives: "It was September of 1974, most of us would leave town in a few weeks, and I had been recently pregnant. Some of us were going to Belize to survive an earthquake. Some of us were going to California . . . My lover, the carpenter, was going to Nicaragua on a house-building deal that would never materialize. We'd had passport photos taken together; he would use his passport in the company of someone else and I would lose mine somewhere in Arizona...
...Every character with a sexual life is dressed in some variation of off-white -- and looks cool, stylish and slightly soiled. Two ornate sofas are shrouded with crumpled, much used sheets: this is a world of ceaseless, unsatisfying copulation. Although the sides of the stage are heaped with the bric-a-brac of elegance -- candelabra, statuary, flowers -- the characters seem more at home with simple louvered screens, behind which they peep and eavesdrop. The dialogue is fittingly brittle and epigrammatic. "When it comes to marriage," a much traveled woman says, "one man is as good as the next; and even...
...Rhinemaidens frolic in Victorian bloomers. Fricka ascends to Valhalla by means of a balloon gondola. The Valkyries ride off to war aboard carrousel horses suspended in midair. Wotan puts Brunnhilde to sleep in what appears to be a cluttered attic, full of ungodly bric-a-brac, and she awakens in a starry mausoleum. Siegfried slays the dragon Fafner by chopping at a gigantic crab's claw and then pushing over a flimsy set of painted flats. The forest bird who guides the hero to Brunnhilde is a taxidermist's specimen, carried aloft on a stick by a highly visible soprano...
...Chicago should have such a choice. The incumbent, Charlotte Townsend, 61, is a no-nonsense woman who cut her teeth on the board of the village library. Paul Laub, 41, who has amassed a million or so as Carmel's czar of schlock, purveying T shirts and other bric-a-brac, made his name fighting city hall over issues like illegally washing his sidewalk. A college-trained tenor and restaurant worker named Tim Grady, 27, an echo of the Woodstock generation who has no use for cars, wants to turn Carmel's main street into a horse path. Finally there...
These population shifts change all the bric-a-brac of life. A car in Los Angeles carries a custom license plate that says SIE SIE LI, meaning, in Chinese, "thank you." Graffiti sprayed in a nearby park send their obscure signals in Farsi. A suburban supermarket specializes in such Vietnamese delicacies as pork snouts and pickled banana buds. The Spanish-language soap opera Tu o Nadie gets the top ratings among independent stations every night...