Word: gracing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Advocate Fiction Reading--Grace Mojtabai and Jonathan Strong, 21 South...
...middle class life, Grand Rapids, is nothing but a collection of hokey cliches. In the first five minutes, we see sledding kids, skating kids, kids watching TV, kids delivering the newspaper, daddies shoveling the sidewalk, mommy driving the car. Then comes religion--the snowy church, icons on the wall, grace before dinner, and discussions of sin among the men. The images peak as the kids are packed off on a church trip to California. Kids and church, church and kids...
...subject or setting for a musical, but My Old Friends manages to sandwich a wedge of pathos between large slices of jollity. The characters encountered at the Gold en Days, a retirement hotel, are spunky individualists eager to savor the last drops of life. True, there is a lady (Grace Carney) who stays glued to the TV set, but that gives her life the dimension of constant fantasy. True, there is someone who dies (offstage), a tie salesman (Robert Weil), but only after he achieves his desire to leave something behind by completing a bench in the craft shop...
...they forsake their heritage, they seek a substitute culture from America. Blue jeans (preferably American-made, even at $40 a pair) grace the derriere of virtually every French tennager. Far more American university t-shirts are seen in French villages than in American towns. American TV shows, very popular in France, give French teenagers new ideas about how to act and what to think. One day as I walked down the village's main street, a 10-year-old boy flashed me the thumbs-up sign and groaned, "Ayyyyyyyyy," a perfect imitation of his new hero, "the Fonz." American culture...
...doctrine ("Birds cannot actually fly; they are merely prodigious leapers!") collide with the grim fantasies spawned by anxiety ("Perhaps there will be an earthquake and we won't have to take exams"). One sits at a chair and looks out the window. Cambridge does not even have the grace to be covered with snow ("What if Harry Levin actually wrote the plays of Shakespeare?"). Sulphur-laden ice spreads like cancer over the Charles and Roast Beef Specials cost 60c ("If the Atlantic rose a few inches, Boston would be devastated and there wouldn't be any exams...