Word: fain
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Land Mine. The stories-or rather, the collage of perceptions-are told by a woman whose last name is Fain and whose first name may be Jennifer (one friend, at least, calls her Jen). Success seems to have fallen on her from a great height. She traipses obligingly but glumly through a succession of jobs usually thought to be desirable: newspaper reporter, foundation consultant, college teacher, congressional staff worker. She is clearly getting somewhere; where, exactly, and whether it is a place worth being are answers that elude her. "Things," she muses, "have changed very much, several times, since...
...Fain or no Fain, the author of that sentence is Renata Adler. Who else could hide a land mine under well-tended prose with quite as much apparent innocence? It takes a second or two to realize that intellectuals have been exempted from the frantic metamorphoses demanded by modern life. Why? The answer comes in bits and pieces: anyone who accepts (or demands) the label intellectual is automatically too dumb to deserve it. To prove the point, Adler puts her heroine through a year of teaching, "by mistake," at a Manhattan college, surrounded by "feather bedding illiterates" and "reactionary pedants...
Boston has twenty or so resident modern companies, some no more than a few students from so-and-so's class, others dedicated troupes led by strong choreographers. The most original tend to be Betty Fain (October 9-10), Deborah Chassler (December 3-5) and New England Dinosaur (watch for them next spring and in the me time check out avant-garde music events at the Dinosur Annex...
Enterprising as many of the economy measures are, they lack the simplicity of the Fain family's approach. Said Ed Fain, an Atlanta supermarket executive: "My wife is giving me one egg instead of two, one sausage patty in stead of two and adding mushroom sauce to make me think that I'm getting a lot." That way, one can save calories as well as cash...
...Harry Fain, a Los Angeles specialist in family law, estimates that 25% of the fathers he represents gain custody of their children. Judge William Hogoboom of the family law department in the Los Angeles Superior Court reports that men are winning custody in 8% to 10% of all cases handled in his court, a substantial increase over a few years ago. The result, says Lewis Ohleyer, domestic relations commissioner for the San Francisco Superior Court, is that "we are actually choosing who would be the best baby sitter." More and more women now prefer to give up their children...