Word: cocktailing
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...Midland City, U.S.A. As Kurt Vonnegut explains on the opening page, Hoover is "on the brink of going insane." He has many reasons of the traditional kind: his wife went mad and killed herself by swallowing Drano; his hostile son is a homosexual who plays piano in a cocktail lounge; and his mistress, of whom he wants to know "what life is all about," suggests that the site across from their motel room would be a good place for him to buy her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. More important than any of this, though, is the fact...
...speech at the Midland City Festival of the Arts, and he hitchhikes to Midland City. He arrives on the wrong side of town and wades through a polluted creek that leaves his feet sealed in a coating of liquid plastic. Defiantly nacreous-footed, he wanders on into the motel cocktail lounge where Dwayne Hoover, after several drinks, staggers up to him and cries: "Give me the message! The message, please." Kilgore Trout thrusts forth one of his 117 unsuccessful novels, whose message is, "You are the only creature in the entire universe who has a free will ... Everybody else...
Then came Portnoy's Complaint, the public flowering of the Henny Youngman Roth, the brilliant cocktail-party mimic, hilarious storyteller and improviser of ingenious bits. His university degrees were set aside for the lessons learned on Newark's front stoops, where wisecracks and putdowns were the comic antitoxins against WASP sting and the guilt that could result from calling chicken soup consomm...
...Jesuit while they both sat in the yoga lotus position on prayer mats. Others were clad in Indian robes, sandals, and sported swami beards. In Berkeley, TIME'S Lois Armstrong found that the priests could also adapt easily to the Californian way of life. For their weekly cocktail party at the Jesuit School of Theology, they donned sports shirts and slacks. Brought up in a Lutheran parsonage, she was delighted to find the Jesuits "open, talkative, thoughtful, critical, probing, interesting to a man−and not at all secretive...
...born nine days before Christmas, so his mother named him Noël. That festive holiday spirit swirled around Noël Coward and his works throughout his life. His plays, musicals, and revues were marvelous parties. To the tinkle of cocktail glasses, he arched the languid magic wand of his cigarette holder and summoned up clever, dashing men and svelte, seductive women who danced divinely, sang bittersweetly and tottered into the tinseled dawn. None of it was remotely real, but it was often great fun, and that suited Coward perfectly to the very day the party ended last week...