Word: diner
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...setting is again the Baltimore, Md., of Levinson's youth, source of Diner, Tin Men and Avalon. This time his alter ego is a smart, sweet-souled teenager named Ben (Ben Foster) who, having lived all his life in a Jewish enclave, is astonished to discover that most of the world is not, after all, Jewish. That's particularly true of Sylvia (the uncannily cool, wise and beautiful Rebekah Johnson), who is one of the token blacks in his newly integrated school. Their relationship is handled with great delicacy; this is a friendship that yearns to be, deserves...
Liberty Heights is the fourth in Barry Levinson's "trilogy" about his hometown of Baltimore, Md. After Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987) and Avalon (1990), he felt he had finished with tales about growing up in the city's Jewish neighborhood in the 1950s. But then an ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY review of his 1998 movie, Sphere, referred to Dustin Hoffman as a "noodgey and menschlike" Jewish psychologist. The racial stereotyping annoyed Levinson ("Nobody would say Mel Gibson was playing a Catholic industrialist in Ransom"), but it also got him thinking about his youth again. Rather than fume, he sat down...
...Where Eliot's vastness is oppressive, Mather's seems refreshing. The hall's horizontal expansiveness is divided into different sections, allowing a diner to digest (no pun intended) the immense space of the dining hall in manageable increments. As in Quincy, there is a rectangular central eating area that is flanked on both sides by more intimate commensal spaces. Rather than resolutely delineating spatial boundaries using flanks of columns as Quincy does, Mather separates the private side spaces from the main area with boundaries that are themselves dining spaces (alternating brick walls and tables), seamlessly moving from one dining space...
...miniscule square footage of the service area does not stifle the diner with its smallness but embraces him with its grandma's kitchen-like intimacy, achieved through glowing white walls muted with warm lights and dotted with cabinets grandma would love. The service area also avoids the typically antiseptic flavor of the serving area by refraining serving food on warmed platters that students can gather around like a family sharing in a buffet-style dinner...
...guess summer was always a good season for me, tooolong days turning into short months at William Lawrence Camp in New Hampshire, and then in high school years, long nights at the local diner or movies. Throw in a week-long family vacation to Cape Cod or Vermont somewhere along the line, and you've got yourself a solid little season there. But summerowell, summer never really did it for me, either. September was always just a few months away...