Word: peachum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Threepenny Opera, the most enduring example of Brecht's epic theater, Brecht shows how closely the capitalist business interests relate to the criminal element. The entrepreneur, J.J. Peachum (Ernest Kearns), trafficks in sentiment. He outfits an army of "the poorest of the poor" with begging clothes and districts of operation. Aware of the efforts required to soften a man's heart to the point where he will part with his money, he believes, "no one can make his own misery sound convincing;" he has built an empire on this statement...
...film and television; of cancer; in Guadalajara, Mexico. Janney made his debut as a two-year-old vaudevillian in his home town of Ogden, Utah, portrayed the all-American boy Richard Parker in The Parker Family on both radio and television, and was also noted for roles like Mr. Peachum in the 1956 off-Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera...
...Peachum still has higher things on his mind: existential dread, for instance. "When they brought the news to me that another bunch at Oxford had scrapped Causality, I stretched out with an icebag on my head. Then it was all random. Certainty was a gone goose, and the soul with it. The soul was a clinker, cold as the meteorites that fell on Toulouse, Knyahinya and, if memory served, Pultusk and Mocs. Man has no purpose...
...idealist is thus readied for the fleshy pleasures, and the stage is set for one of the author's most durable themes: libertinism and its comic consequences. Columbine matures as a perennial nymph, but she pales beside Snooky von Sickle, the brewery heiress of Wagnerian dimensions with whom Peachum shares many a back seat and shadowy glade. Yet love has its mysteries: when Peachum recalls having made unkind comments about Columbine's "doorbells," he feels a pang of remorse that is followed immediately by a twinge of desire. Peachum's entanglements are due to varying intentions...
...might make that exclamation about the novel itself. First the riches. The book is full of De Vries' happy wordplay, metaphysical Wiffle Balls, witty oxymorons (Peachum describes himself as a "self-pitying stoic") and perversely amusing ironies (a house burns down because of faulty wiring in a smoke detector). There are also the author's ticklish ways with the jargon of three generations, throwaway lines ("A writer is Like his pencil. He must be worn down to be kept sharp"), and a dandy piece of burlesque when Peachum tries to undress Officer d'Amboise in her patrol...