Word: shapiros
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...door opened, slammed again, and before them stood their third roommate, Shapiro. Shapiro was wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, a denim jacket and top hat. He walked over to Bell, grabbed a handful of speed, threw it down, and said, "Ah glorious speed. Ah the glory of Merle. When you're running down my country boy you're fucking with the fightin' side of me. Haggard is the quintessential philosopher of our times. He has much more to say to me than Hegel. He celebrates the virtues of rural life, of homosexuality in prisons, of staying off welfare...
There was Shapiro, New York jewboy, prepared at Groton after getting thrown out of Outward Bound in his thirteenth summer--for taking a penknife on his solo. Shapiro once went out with woman whose sole saving grace was here last name, which was DuPont. DuPont. Shapiro rolled it around on his tongue, and it always came out--hydro-carbon effluents--nah, it came out money. Money to travel. Money to write. Money to never have to worry about money again. And she loved him, in her insipid, lobotomized little way, or so they imagined. He went out to dinner with...
There was an awestruck silence; Mrs. DuPont looked as if she'd never even seen anybody puke, Shapiro grinned weakly, very weakly, and said, "It's all right sir--the white wine came up with the fish." When he came back from the restroom after cleaning up as best he could, he found...-nobody. The bill was paid; DuPont had even left a tip. The patriarch came, saw, and spirited away his little family as fast as possible. The young man had vomited on his wife. There was a little note left on a silver tray. It read simply...
...human nature like a beggar come in from the cold of the inarticulate actual world. And if something as grand as life once went beggaring to Shakespeare, then it's hardly surprising that so many playwrights and actors have also looked to him for inspiration. John Guare and Mel Shapiro found that the Two Gentlemen of Verona were still around in 1971, only they happened to be a black and Puerto Rican, just as West Side Story had flushed Romeo and Juliet out of Manhattan slums a decade earlier. Shakespeare's influence barely surfaces until the end of West Side...
Given that Shakespeare's delicate handling of indelicate subjects has burgeoned into blatant indelicacy these days, burlesque has surely become the right accent for romance. Guare and Shapiro's Two Gentlemen of Verona revels in the vulgarity of sex and the naivety of love; it treats the profounder pretensions of lovers and politicians and wealth with sarcasm. It teaches no lessons and believes in happy endings. It declaims old poetry and drives new music hard at you. It requires relaxed yet precise coordination which the production in Harvard Yard, directed by John Bard Manulis, pulls off with only minor hitches...