Word: neighbors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...your hackles up, California. We are here to discuss that choke-thy- neighbor word, water. Here being a quintessentially innocuous looking and provocative setting, the Los Angeles water intercept on Lee Vining Creek in the eastern Sierras. On a brilliant winter afternoon, knee-deep snow covers the intake pond behind a small concrete dam, and a Steller's jay swoops among the evergreens. Mount Dana, lacking only an Ansel Adams moon, is lit up crisply against a cloudless sky. And in the background (the sticking point), there is the sound of rushing water...
...admission. A few days before Nunn would lead the charge against John Tower on the Senate floor, the 50-year-old chairman of the Armed Services Committee sat in his office under the influence of two diet Cokes and finally confessed that he once stole some eggs from a neighbor who kept chickens...
When she tried to get on line with our neighbor, a near riot ensued. The attackers demanded that my roommate get to end of the line. She acquiesced. When they finally calmed down, one of them suggested that she might obtain a good spot on the line in exchange for certain sexual favors...
Well, satire was never meant to ingratiate, and The 'Burbs is unsparing in its cauterizing of provincialism. One neighbor (played by Bruce Dern with wonderfully psychotic poise and a barbed-wire halo of gray hair) responds to every real or imagined threat to his property values as if he were commanding a platoon in Nam -- with trusty telescope, walkie-talkie and a K ration of animal crackers. Another friend (Rick Ducommun) is your basic bully-wimp who goads Ray into all manner of illicit snooping. And Ray is the mild soul caught in the middle; with no special convictions...
...reminisces -- about being treated as dumb in high school, about the embarrassing things her son did as a schoolboy, about early married days when love was young and romance was in the air. Mostly, though, she complains. About her stodgy husband's indifference, her grownup daughter's condescension, her neighbor's one-upmanship, and the cumulative tedium of a life in the kitchen of her tastefully conventional house in Liverpool...