Word: pianos
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...executive has ever underestimated the power of sex to sell a show. But NBC's new sitcom Grand is a clanging symphony of suggestiveness. Set in the fictional town of Grand, Pa. -- whose chief industry, a piano factory, has fallen on hard times -- the series introduces a clutch of socially diverse - characters and stirs vigorously. Atop the class structure in this small-town version of Upstairs, Downstairs is the piano magnate Harris Weldon (John Randolph), attended by a faithful but acerbic manservant (John Neville). At the bottom is the chain-smoking Janice Pasetti (Pamela Reed), who lives in a trailer...
...each and every one a blisterer, including even The Marines' Hymn and Dixie, for Lord's sake. Jerry Lee classics are included too, of course, sounding as full of brimstone as ever. While Elvis became the perpetrator and victim of his own melodrama, Jerry Lee pumped away at his piano, howling at the devil and pining for glory. Whatever ultimate judgment awaits him at the gates, Jerry Lee's got that glory already, and a good bit of it right here in this box. (At Down Home Music, El Cerrito, Calif...
...Piano Lesson (1989). An heirloom from a slave ancestor threatens to sunder members of the Charles clan: one wants to keep it as a reminder of suffering, another would sell it to buy the farm where the family were once chattel. Playwright August Wilson was the most important American stage voice to emerge in the '80s, and this piano is the most potent symbol in American drama since Laura Wingfield's glass menagerie...
...find themselves on familiar terrain -- the bone-dry wit, terse dialogue, lyrical descriptions of nature and hovering suggestion of violence are pure McGuane. But the measured tone and relatively upbeat ending of the book are a far cry from the pyrotechnical flash of his earlier works like The Bushwacked Piano or Ninety-Two in the Shade. Not all McGuane fans have stayed for the ride. "There are readers who abandoned me over the feeling that my writing has become relatively lusterless," he observes. "But your literary style is kind of like your face -- you can't do much to change...
...other career. What was I to do? Start selling lighting fixtures and hope to rise in the corporation?" Instead, he wrote The Sporting Club, an apocalyptic satire of an exclusive Michigan hunt club, which was published in 1969 to rave reviews. Two years later came The Bushwacked Piano, a biting social broadside about a scheme to sell towers stocked with insect-eating bats to the gullible public. In 1973 McGuane upped the ante with Ninety-Two in the Shade, a dazzling novel of free- floating angst and male brinkmanship set in the Florida Keys. Ninety-Two was nominated...