Word: paragoning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During the course of his search, Anson learns that Exeter was not quite the paragon of race-blind meritocracy it claimed to be. The often searing voices of Eddie's friends reveal the difficulties of leaving the gritty sidewalks of Harlem for the green quadrangles of Exeter. One black woman asserts that blacks were at Exeter as a kind of minstrel show to give sheltered white students a sense of diversity: "By God, their kids are going to be well- rounded. They're going to have Rossignol skis and Lange boots and a black roommate for 'an experience...
Number four: I don't much like to talk about the time I met Angela Lansbury. It was the summer of '83; I had just watched this paragon of the American theater complete yet another tour de force, in the revival of unreasable). A friend of mine happened to be in the show, and as I searched around backstage for his dressing room, I came across her room...
...ROOM, hot-shot novelist Don DeLillo turns insanity into a laughing matter. "Nothing original in that," you say, "it's been done hundreds of times since Hamlet." But DeLillo, the paragon of paranoid lit, has packed his literary loonybin with so much intelligence and dramatic punch that madness starts to look like an appealing state of affairs...
...plays Ellen Brewer, a college professor who shares a house with her separated daughter and her five-year-old grandson. Her opening lines, directed to the audience, are pleasantly sardonic: "Let me tell you how much I love being called Grandma . . ." But this grandma turns quickly into a cloying paragon of hip, enlightened '80s attitudes. When her mother (Elaine Stritch) sneaks into the closet for a smoke, Ellen admonishes, "You've read the Surgeon % General's report." When the family dog is about to have puppies, Ellen argues that her young grandson ought to be allowed to watch the event...
...should not play footloose with the truth. "The famous Miss Hogg" was named Ima by her father not out of cruelty but in honor of his deceased brother, who had earlier published an epic poem of the Civil War, The Fate of Marvin. The heroine was Ima, a paragon of womanhood, equally disposed to nurse the wounded soldiers of North and South. Miss Hogg did not "grow up scowling" but was a good-humored woman of gracious mien and poise, who because of her untiring benefactions to the people in education, mental health and the arts became known...