Word: rollers
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Opening night was riotous even by Broadway standards. Housemen and city cops had a hard time handling the shoving, yelling crowd fighting to get in. The new Roseland-a former roller-skating rink-cost $2,250,000 to build, can accommodate 5,000 people (more than twice the former capacity), and offers a purple-and-cerise tentlike décor that creates a definite harem effect. However, the emphasis is still on good dance music (next attraction: Xavier Cugat); rock-'n'-roll is banned, and Owner Brecker hopes to move on to a whole new type of clientele...
...COUNT ROLLER SKATES, by Thomas Sancton (383 pp.; Doubleday, $3.95), whizzes its screwball hero right through the mentally sound barrier. "Count Casimir Poliatoffsky" poses as a Polish nobleman and simultaneously claims to be descended from the Maya gods and the lost tribes of Israel, but he is actually half-Mexican. He once flopped as the star of a roller-skating show in Italy. Now he is a skilled grease monkey in a ship's engine room, and this uneven, offbeat first novel begins when one of the count's shipmates takes him home for dinner on a shore...
...courtship of Hilda is punctuated by Casimir's sky-scanning Delphic queries: "Are the Life-Gods and the Fate-Gods willing?" Hilda is willing, and there is scarcely a dull moment spent with the count as he 1) sees his first roller-skating show wrecked by a storm, 2) witnesses a local bigwig being shot to death by a bordello madam, 3) two-times Hilda with a carnival doxy billed as ''Phazma the Phlame Girl." 4) has his second roller-skating show filched by a double-crossing partner, 5) goes back to the sea with visions...
...from the field. Said one Houston newsman: "The whole town is on the verge of being overrun by derricks." Oil rigs are creeping within 100 yds. of the residences and businesses off Houston's primary north-south thoroughfare, South Main Street. One derrick stands 75 yds. from the roller coaster at Playland Park: another is within No. 7-iron distance (125 yds.) of the South Main Golf Center driving range. Two more wells have been drilled in the path of a proposed $20 million freeway, which probably will be rerouted. Worried Harris County officials have urged the Texas Railroad...
Oasis on the Riviera. Dominique, the heroine, is a law student, but essentially a kind of sophisticated Gallic equivalent of a rock-'n'-roller. She smokes incessantly, drinks Scotch methodically and goes to bebop dances at a nightclub called the "Kentucky."' Much of the time she is "bored passionately," and her casual, completely physical love affair with Bertrand, a fellow student, rarely takes the edge off that boredom. Then Bertrand introduces her to his uncle Luc and Dominique decides hopefully: "He's just the kind that seduces little girls like...