Word: ersatz
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Peter T. Gage '01 and his Hurlbut roommates left their room to buy ice cream at 12:30 yesterday morning and returned an hour later to find two ersatz Hasty Pudding punch invitations...
ELVIS IMPERSONATORS The King is dead; long live the ersatz Kings. After 20 years, the Elvis biz has never been better...
...course, this was a laugh line. Back then, plastics was the reigning symbol for everything that was ersatz in American life, for the phoniness and stifling conformity of the adult world Benjamin was being asked to join. The word itself was an epithet, as in "Plastic Pat" Nixon or these Jimi Hendrix lyrics from the song If 6 Was 9, talked-sung with a straight face and an up-the-Establishment disregard for grammar: "White collared conservative flashing down the street,/Pointing their plastic finger...
America laughed then; Mr. Maguire laughs today. Of course, if any business has come to embody everything that is ersatz about American society, it is the film industry. If you disagree, try to imagine making a mainstream movie today that is as richly and genuinely ironic, as acidly knowing, as ambiguous in its ending and as enduring in its appeal as The Graduate. One word...
...partners a stunt pilot (Daniel McDonald) but is secretly married to the marathon's slimy emcee (Gregory Harrison). The mix of nostalgia, cynicism and period artifice, however, keeps us at arm's length from the material (beware of any show in which one character calls another "Flyboy"). The ersatz-'30s numbers are pleasant but forgettable, although Debra Monk, as a marathon veteran, puts across a saucy showstopper, Everybody's Girl. Mostly, however, Steel Pier just seems tinny...