Word: soaping
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...networks have passed up Producer Norman Lear's new idea, too. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is a soap opera with a difference. In the first two episodes, Housewife Mary, the thirtyish, pigtailed and sex-starved heroine, receives a number of rude shocks. No sooner has she seen her boyish but impotent husband Tom off to work at the Fernwood auto plant and settled down to watch the soaps than her sister, Cathy, drops by. "Say," observes Cathy, "your floors have waxy yellow buildup." A stunned Mary replies: "But the can says it's a lovely even glow." Cathy...
...million soap followers, the fast and funny scenario may sound too good to be true. The average soap has a torturously slow plot so full of digression that weeks can go by before the heroine is forced to decide whether to paint her nails pink or red. Sex and violence only simmer; it can take years for marriage and divorce merely to be broached...
Finally, Ann Marcus, a veteran soap writer, came up with a script that met all Lear's requirements. He then persuaded a reluctant Louise Lasser, Woody Allen's ex-wife and co-star in Bananas, to play Mary. "I was a little afraid of the material at first," says Lasser, whose lethargic portrayal of the permanently stunned Mary is a comic turn on its own. Before long, she fell in love with what she calls "the Frankenstein soap...
...private property of the individual," says Postal Service Lawyer Jack T. DiLorenzo. "But we do have some control." Yes, indeed. That control began shortly after the 1896 start of rural free delivery. By 1899 Postmaster General Charles Smith was already grousing that "tomato cans, cigar boxes, drainage pipes upended, soap boxes and even sections of discarded stovepipes were used as mailboxes." There followed three quarters of a century of regulation and regularization. Now the owner of a rural mailbox must place it at a height convenient to the carrier, and the box he buys must be of a type approved...
...consciousness-raisin. No doubt it is possible to write an "objective" examination of such a topic--interview various people, authorities, social critics, etc., pro and con--but it probably wouldn't be nearly as interesting or nearly as revealing. What Ephron found her group degenerating into was "a running soap opera, with new episodes on the same theme every week"--Episode 13 of the Barbara is Uninhibited and Peter is a Drag Show, Episode 19 of the Will Joanna Ever Get Dave to Share the Household Duties Show; Claire and Herbie in the Claire has Sexual Boredom but Loves...