Word: peoria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Pryor's hostility toward white society can be traced back to Peoria, 111., where he grew up. He likes to say that his grandmother was the madam of a whore house and that from the beginning he saw white men debasing black women. He may be telling the truth, but no one in Peoria remembers, and the street where his grandmother lived has been blasted away by urban renewal. What is certainly true is that Pryor, now 36, grew up in a poor and broken family. By 14 he had quit school and started work as a janitor...
...teacher in Peoria had encouraged him to become a performer, and when he returned from Germany he started a routine there at a little club. In 1963 he went to New York City and cabarets in Greenwich Village. He wanted to be like Bill Cosby, the first black comedian to achieve national success. As he remembers, he said to himself: "Goddamn it. This nigger's doin' what I'm fixin' to do. I want to be the only nigger. Ain't no room for two niggers...
...walked off the stage. What had happened was that he realized he was not Cosby, the smooth, controlled comic of the cerebrum. He was, if anyone, Lenny Bruce, the angry, violent screamer from the acid gut. Pryor changed his act, bringing it back in spirit to Peoria's black ghetto and the mean streets all over the U.S. He started to talk in the argot of the pool shark and the hustler, a language so obscene that it is no longer obscene, with four-letter words so common that they now seem part of the verbal furniture...
Mary L. Ierulli, who will be a high school senior next fall in Peoria, Ill., hadn't really decided what she would do this summer when she got a letter from the Harvard Summer School asking her to consider coming here in June...
...Play in Peoria. They also complain that the Western press completely overlooks Third World news of importance to Third World readers-which means that, because Western news organizations dominate the international flow of information, such news often goes unreported. "If a new steel mill is built in Mexico, that fact is very newsworthy in Mexico," says Roger Tatarian, professor of journalism at the University of California's Fresno campus. "It is not necessarily of much interest in Peoria...