Word: mushing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Thea Vidale, for example, is a big, boisterous comic with a lot of stage presence -- or, at least, presence over a lot of the stage. Unfortunately, her ABC sitcom, Thea, is a throwback to the broad, brackish family sitcoms of the Good Times ilk: streetwise sass drenched in sentimental mush. John Mendoza, who plays a newly divorced sportswriter in NBC's The Second Half, is a mellower, and less accomplished, performer, who is also defeated by tired gag situations -- the inept single guy who can't furnish an apartment or get a date without stumbling over his feet...
Real Man's Mush...
...MALE NOVELISTS WITH A YEN to be Danielle Steel: a motorcycle will haul almost any load of sentimental mush. Robert Olmstead knows this. In his novel AMERICA BY LAND (Random House; $20), Ray Redfield, 23 and drifting, heads out on his Harley to visit his cousin Juliet in New Mexico. He doesn't know she has just sold her newborn daughter to a pair of yuppies. She doesn't know he is bleeding internally from an industrial accident. On the big bike, wounded together, they blast through Colorado and Nevada at 80 m.p.h., charming waitresses and sassing state cops, bumming...
...knock mush. Mush in small doses can be very nice. But mush-for-the-sake-of-mush can get a little absurd. Mush isn't exciting; it's squishy and fake, and it makes me a little uncomfortable. Most importantly, you can't build anything with mush...
Like pink cotton candy, mush disappears as soon as it's touched. Flowers wither, candies mold. Far better to reach for the red. Forego the sugar coating. Try for substance...