Word: californiaisms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...mountain (it was not a mountain, but he liked to call it that). The base was the steepest. It was, the boy thought, almost straight up for about thirty feet. There was nothing to hold onto--there was only the wet slippery clay, which three days before, in Southern California, had killed 11 people in a mudslide. The boy looked at this bank of clay, and then he began to climb. He dug out a foothold for himself, then reached up and grabbed a rock. It came loose and slid down onto the road. "If a man were to drive...
...Arrive in Monterey." He made that note. Maybe that was a place to start. But then where? For Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, is more than 3000 miles from Cambridge, more than 10,000 miles, further away than a trip to the moon in a rubber balloon. It stands a world apart. And as the boy looked back on the five days he had spent there, he only knew that they were the most unreal, or the most real, experience of his life...
...January 27, 1969. Two days before, he had been taking an English exam; now he sat cross-legged on a soft brown rug in a small cabin called Firo, looking out over the Pacific Ocean. Two days before, 11 people had been killed by a mud-slide in Southern California, a result of the worst flooding in the state in 31 years; now it was bright and sunny, and far below the surf was pounding in against the shore...
...staff members, Stewart and Sara, were friends of his friend Paul. Stewart and Sara had picked them up at the Monterey airport late Sunday afternoon and driven them the 45 miles south, along spectacular Route One, to Esalen. Route One stretches for hundreds of miles along the California coast, and it must be one of the most beautiful roads in the world--it's the road Dustin Hoffman drove on in his little red Alfa on his way to Berkeley. It winds along the coast, on cliffs that sometimes rise more than 1000 feet above the ocean. Endless time, endless...
Last fall, the show drew crowds with two people together in the Bic or the Square or Joe's Bar--a single theme, clever dialogue, and an intellectual's slap-stick. Borrowing heavily now from the Mort Sahl throw-away lines and the California humor of the Fireside Theater, the new sketches weave in third and fourth parts for stage interlopers, creating a more expansive humor. Dropping in an outsider's irrelevancies make a situation comedy less staged...