Word: goodmans
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...Mary Goodman is next, an exotic-dancer type from the UK, all leather and studs. The audience’s patience soon wears thin with this gorgeous waif, and they cheer louder for her male dancers than for her. Enough distractions. It’s time for the main attraction, but only after an excruciating 20 minute wait that has as its highlight the surprise appearance of one of the 25 finalists who didn’t make the band on the TV show. When the curtain finally drops, and O-Town appears in all their glory, the screaming...
Nothing in Allegra Goodman's previous fiction--two volumes of short stories and the highly praised novel Kaaterskill Falls (1998)--has quite prepared readers for the sustained comic exuberance of Paradise Park (Dial; 360 pages; $24.95). Her earlier work certainly wasn't grim, but it tended toward the polished and well mannered and resonant, a la 19th century British fiction. Not this time. Like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth before her, Goodman has achieved a breakthrough book by discovering and recording a thoroughly uninhibited narrative voice. Bellow found Augie March, and Roth hit upon Alexander Portnoy. Goodman gives the world...
...Goodman eventually allows her heroine, a 1970s flower child who grows considerably crimped and brown around the edges during the roughly 20 years covered in the novel, a measure of maturity and self-awareness. And not a moment too soon, because Sharon sometimes threatens to become as wearisome to readers as she does to her sequential lovers and acquaintances. But whenever Sharon's narcissistic bromides start to become predictable, the author manages to find a new way of conveying her character's addled but nevertheless good instincts. Sharon admires, for example, the poetry of Keats but stumbles a little...
...sure, some good has come as a result of the soul searching. In Hoyt, Kans., where three students were arrested last month after they allegedly planned to bomb Royal Valley High School, student-council president Tara Goodman, 18, says the barriers that once divided students from teachers have vanished. In Oxnard, Calif., where cops killed a Hueneme High School student who was holding a classmate hostage in January, principals throughout the district now have two-way radios to be used if the phone lines go dead. Those will come in handy during any kind of disaster...
...Today there are two: Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond, which are seven and five years old, respectively. New comedy hits--Will & Grace, Malcolm in the Middle--have been rare. Last fall's one debatable success, CBS's Yes, Dear, was scheduled between established hits. Familiar names (Michael Richards, John Goodman) landed in familiar situations and met familiar ends. Says ABC president Stu Bloomberg: "It's not that all sitcoms are crappy, but after 40 years of this form, audiences are looking for an additional type of storytelling...