Word: suburban
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Leslie Stein, a high school junior in suburban Needham, received one of the faulty exams and was told by her proctor to leave. "I was shocked," Stein said. "I had been taking [SAT preparation] courses. I thought I was doing great. I was very confident it was just unreal...
Passersby assumed they had stumbled on the filming of an episode of Miami Vice: a gang of men, dodging around cars and trees as they fired guns at one another on a sunny, suburban Miami street. But the scene was all too real, a bloody shootout between seven FBI agents and the two robbery suspects they had cornered. In the end, two lawmen lay dead--the 28th and 29th agents killed in the line of duty in the FBI's 78-year history. The suspects, William Matix, 34, and Michael Platt, 32, were also slain. As investigators last week traced...
Still, every season someone attempts to revive the form. This year's example is Social Security, the bawdy but bland story of a Manhattan art dealer (Marlo Thomas), her suburban sister (Joanna Gleason), their respective husbands (Ron Silver and Kenneth Welsh) and the aged mother who drives them crazy (Olympia Dukakis). Playwright Andrew Bergman has written lustily funny movies (Blazing Saddles, Fletch), but he places only ticktock jokework on the stage. Worse, he creates situations of real pathos and then anesthetizes them. The matriarch is 80, unable to get around without a walker, unwilling to be left alone...
Unseen but much discussed is the suburban couple's daughter, a college freshman who has stopped attending class to provide round-the-clock sexual service to two men. The girl's relatives fatuously assure one another that her self-abasing behavior is a phase she will outgrow. In another subplot, the girl's parents consider divorce, but the audience cannot see the agony they profess to feel. The entire proceedings, staged by Mike Nichols, are life as viewed through Saran Wrap. Although Broadway Veteran Nichols has mislaid his gift for telling detail, he has evoked maximum slickness and verve...
...mall. Connie is like any other teenage girl in heat, only she seems much more vapid and much less interesting. When Connie argues with her mother (Mary Kay Place) and refuses to help with the dishes or paint the house, she is nothing less than despicable. Connie is a suburban rebel without a cause--she is boy-craziness and giggles, meanness and anger, but not much intelligence...