Word: paints
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...place dressing up a Shenandoah Valley farmer's front yard. The farmer looks around for a few minutes, then asks, "How about if I take that deer over there and pay you the difference?" The animal in question is a buck, 4 ft. high, with a brown paint job and an impressive rack of gleaming metal antlers. "That'd be fine," says Harper. He calls his sons Doug and Dale and son-in-law Russell Armentrout out of the work shed to reclaim the Virgin Mary and wrestle 300 lbs. of concrete venison onto the truck...
...five or six, and as they grew up and got more involved, Betty specialized in decorating the concrete. When Harper built the shop, which is about a 15-second commute from their red brick, one-story house, Betty got a corner, where she uses an air compressor to spray-paint the animals with automotive-grade enamel. Almost from the beginning, says Harper, "I've been saying I want to slow down. But then I order more molds." That is an expensive habit: the deer mold cost him about $700 and the pig $400 or so. It would be cheaper...
...stoic words written by Yoneko, the wife of Saeki Yuzo, who spent two sojourns there: "After returning to Japan, my husband, it seems to me, was constantly thinking he could only accomplish the task remaining to him during his life by going back to Paris in order to paint the soiled walls and loosely-fixed posters he found on the back streets." Saeki today is a culture hero in Japan, a Van Gogh-like figure who killed himself in a fit of despair over his art at the age of 30 in 1928 -- a strange freak of reputation...
This is not conscious comedy, but at times its humor surpasses anything in Ackroyd's far more appealing and sympathetic work. Yet each author provides the same service: turning the reader back to the damned youth who wrote, "Since all my Vices magnify'd are here,/ She cannot paint me worse than I appear,/ When raving in the Lunacy of ink,/ I catch the Pen and publish what I think." A ghostly presence hovers over both books, and the sound it emits is the ringing echo of the last laugh...
Rowan and Martin's TV Laugh-In domesticated chaos into snippets. It flashed absurdities, like vaudeville on amphetamines -- Goldie Hawn dancing in body paint, Tiny Tim tiptoeing through the tulips. Laugh-In gave the nation "You bet your sweet bippy!" and "Sock it to me!" a line that Republican Candidate Richard Nixon, among other celebrities, recited in three seconds of network time in September. (In deference to his dignity, Nixon was spared the customary dousing with a bucket of water.) The Rolling Stones snarled about the Street Fighting Man. Never before had an annus mirabilis transpired before the television cameras...