Word: sinks
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Speiser opens with a version of Bruce's fantasy on "pissing-in-the-sink" (a single fused word for the common yet forbidden or once-forbidden act). Lenny actually only created this routine in the sixties when he'd lost the easy-going winsome style and had become a wired and often menacing showbiz kamikaze. But the piece is great, and, as Speiser runs it down, what's immediately thrust on you besides the pleasure of belly laughter is the recognition that no matter how good an actor he is, you can't naturally play a fifties audience. Since Bruce...
...instance, Speiser struts out and the first thing he says is, "O.K., I'm doing a survey. How many people here have ever pissed-in-the-sink?" And virtually everyone in this off-Broadway theater raises his or her hand! These days, at least in this circle, it's right-on to piss-in-the-sink. More likely you'd be ashamed to own up to the up-tightness signaled by a negative reply. The sense of shocked relief and release that the real Lenny's audiences felt as he ventured like a holy fool over still almost inviolable taboos...
...bathing-suit governments. Emergency measures that only a genuine government can apply are waiting to be taken. Italy, as Dante observed almost seven centuries ago in the Purgatorio, is once again "a vessel without a pilot in a loud storm." Unless serious steps are quickly taken, it may well sink before the winds and waves abate...
...declaration suggested that Spinola was willing to let sink his pet idea of a "Lusitanian Federation"-a close alliance of Portugal with semi-autonomous African territories. As the general's speech went on, however, a chill set in. In an apparent volte-face from his earlier tone, he outlined four gradual stages of decolonization, only at the end of which would the possibility of independence be broached...
...high accomplishment were, like child molesting, a forgivable crime-if Nobel-prizewinning scientists, wives of former Presidents, old poets and athletes and desiccated jazz musicians were allowed to sink into honorable obscurity five years or so after their last attestable attack of greatness-there would be no Richard Condon problem...