Word: exam
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Councillors last night criticized Healy for failing to hire more Cantabrigians. Although applicants who lived in Cambridge at least a year prior to the June, 1994 police exam received preference in hiring, residency is not required to be a police officer in Cambridge...
...city manager said hiring both Cantabrigians and minorities is often difficult. "I thought instead of criticism I would get some praise" for increasing the number of bilingual officers, Healy said. "I wish they were all Cambridge residents but that is not how the civil-service exam works...
...narration proceeds at a leisurely pace, as Marler recounts one non-earth-shaking episode after another: a failed date, a concert, his studies. The climax of the play is the day of his exam; Marler cleverly intertwines his own anxiety with a radio documentary about Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, finding inspiration in Kennedy's growing resolve. We even get to hear some of what Marler said during his exam, recited while a passage from The Four Seasons is played...
...play begins with Marler ambling on stage and announcing casually that he is going to talk about his recent life. His preoccupation has been his impending oral exam in English, which would test all of his knowledge about literature. The strain of this make-or-break test induced constant nausea and what he calls "social phobia," a fear of performing in social situations. Things were only made worse by roommate Oswald, an anti-social computer programmer with a bad habit of urinating in a glass jar in various parts of the apartment. Oswald is both comic relief and a warning...
These witty asides constitute the main entertainment of Posthumous Improvisations precisely because there is no dramatic tension in the events being described; we are never absorbed by Marler's struggles. We know that he will pass his exam in the end. Oswald simply disappears, depriving us of any deeper insight into his problems, or at least the pleasure of a final confrontation...