Word: soaps
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Downs), the feeling starts hitting you even harder. One wonders--why is it there? Clearly people do not watch "Dallas" to muse over the fact our interrelationships are destabilized and smooth. On the other hand, it seems a strange intellectual game--a furious overcompensation--for one to watch a soap opera and then be able to find intelligent reasons for the act later in the week on the pages of our slick arbiter of taste. Either way, it jars. Somehow it smacks of elevating the form without changing the content. Who knows? Maybe Chekhov would have watched the Iowa State...
When he asked one saleswoman for shaving cream, she impertinently told him: "We don't have any. If you want a shave, go to a barber shop." His search for soap took him 65 miles away to Novorossisk, where a few bars had been spotted in stores two weeks before. By the time he arrived Novorossisk was out of soap but did have shampoo-for cars. After scouring shop shelves in both cities, all Dorofeyev could turn up for his trouble was a costly bottle of perfume named Luck and a child's toothbrush, which broke...
Footsore and filthy, Dorofeyev then discovered Krasnodar's black market. Here at last, he found a wide assortment of cosmetics, underwear, socks, razors-"everything I could not find in the shops"-but all at inflated prices. A bar of Beautiful Moscow soap that sold for 60? when available in state-run stores was going for $2.25. The service on the black market, though, proved as surly as elsewhere. Snipped the soap seller: "Everything costs what it costs. If you don like the price, don't wash." Said a defeated Dorofeyev: "I had to wash, so I paid...
...what about the soap from Krasnodar's much vaunted factory? Following a local tip that he "go to the Black Hole, Dorofeyev found a 10-ft. breach in the factory's brick wall, through which workers peddled pilfered bars of the precious commodity for $7.50 a case. Security at the plant was so lax that Dorofeyev managed to parade right out the main gate, his pockets bulging with ill-gotten goods, without drawing more than an indifferent glance from the guards. The moral of the tale for Soviet shoppers: if you want clean hands, grease some palms...
...Franco Harris' hands ("the immaculate reception") at the end of the Pittsburgh-Oakland championship game in 1972, that put Carl Bernstein in the newsroom of the Washington Post a few hours after the police found a strange collection of characters at the Watergate. (Actually, Watergate was a regular soap opera of the fortuitous: if one of the burglars had not stupidly left tape over the latch of a rear door, the night watchman might never have discovered the caper and Congress might never have investigated and the White House tape system might never have been revealed and Richard Nixon...