Word: parlorized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sound funny, but it is--humor being relative. Later, they play the instruments in a music store so loudly that they catch on fire. They take over the stage in a nightclub and tell dirty jokes until a chair-throwing brawl breaks out. They wander through a massage parlor surprising patrons and playing their siren recordings. They even blow up their car by mistake...
With bestsellers on the New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power) and the Mafia (Honor Thy Father) to his credit, Author Gay Talese felt ready to tackle a really big subject for his next book. In 1971 he noticed a massage parlor near one of his favorite bars on Manhattan's East Side. Instead of saying "There goes the neighborhood," he decided that something was up, perhaps nothing less than "the redefinition of morality in America." An indefatigable reporter, Talese plunged into the world of commercial sex, not just patronizing massage parlors but also managing two of them...
...summer, I wait for the ugly melody of the construction worker's yell at dawn. The faces stare back at me--a tired traffic cop; the bag lady, waking from a night's sleep in front of a burnt-out marquee; the sleazy bum waiting for Caesar's massage parlor to open its doors to all his lust. By the end of the summer I told time by these people. Their habits were so fixed that I knew I was late to work if the doors to Adam and Eve's sex palace were already open...
...with stories of suspicious clicks on their telephone lines, or of their own conversations being inadvertently played back to them by bumbling snoops. Some politicians and newsmen jokingly complained that they had been slighted by not having their phones tapped. The Guardian suggested a new variation on an old parlor game: "Tap. Tap. Who's there...
...overnight. Big money went out with Charles Van Doren and the scandals of the '50s; there has not been a game that really tested one's knowledge since Art Fleming's Jeopardy!, a cult favorite, was canceled by NBC in 1975. Aside from two skill-testing parlor games, Family Feud and The $20,000 Pyramid, all the current shows celebrate the theater of cruelty and the entertainment values of Las Vegas. Masochistic contestants meet fourth-rate Hollywood celebrities in a neon-lit orgy of product plugola, group hysteria and psychological mayhem...