Word: salesman
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Many Americans seem to feel dismay over the whole breakup and are irritated by changes that are mainly small but still inconvenient. Says retired Salesman Jack Reiss, 83, of Harrisburg, Pa.: "I don't know why they broke up Ma Bell, but I wish they would put it back together." Concurs Larry Mixon, district manager for Southern Bell in Florida: "Human beings don't like change. They have a problem adjusting...
...Listen to me, like me, buy me"; the salesman's top-of-the-line product is always himself. This was one message in Death of a Salesman, which was more interested in romanticizing failure than in demonstrating whether Willy Loman was ever very good at his trade. David Mamet is no romantic. In his monstrously entertaining Glengarry Glen Ross, which opened on Broadway last week after earlier spins at the National Theater in London and the Goodman in Chicago, he shows his peddlers caught in the entrepreneurial act. One pitchman recounts a conquest he made by sitting, silent...
...deal. This month the agency is holding a contest among its four salesmen: Roma (Joe Mantegna), the slick master of sympathetic patter; Aaronow (Mike Nussbaum), an aging nebbish trudging on the treadmill of anxiety; Moss (James Tolkan), bullet-headed and bull-tempered; and Levene (Robert Prosky), a salesman on a long losing streak, who can beam like a bishop at good news and just as quickly turn to wheedling for his job. Running herd on these macho individualists is the consummate organization man, Williamson (J.T. Walsh). What is this, an MTM sitcom gone bilious? No, more like The Front Page...
...lowlifes comes the odd flowery word used for screwball effect: "inured," "imperceptibly," "supercilious." The rest of their rhetoric is a litany of abuse, invective and those four-letter words that describe things people do every day in the privacy of their bedrooms and bathrooms. It may be that no salesman, not even these salesmen, would traffic so doggedly in obscenity. But to say this is to assume that Mamet's ear-to-the-gutter dialogue is naturalistic. It is not. This is street slang refined and extended into the surreal, the baroque, the abrasive, the lyrical. And as spoken...
...Nelson, 33, who has a doctorate in astronomy, will buckle himself into a manned maneuvering unit (MMU), the jet-powered Buck Rogers contraption that enabled astronauts to make the historic, untethered space walk on Challenger's February flight. Mission Specialist James van Hoften, 39, a onetime hot-tub salesman with a Ph.D. in hydraulic engineering, will act as an emergency backup...