Word: suburbias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Author Jean Kerr emerged as a popular humorist in the late 1950s, when the U.S. was in thrall to togetherness, Doris Day's celluloid virginity and the beckoning greensward of suburbia. Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957) and two later collections of essays treated these and other national preoccupations comically but gently. She did not topple idols but admired them from a safe distance. Her pose was that of the indefatigable but bumbling striver, chirping away about her supposed inability to stage a dinner party, cope with preternaturally wisecracking children or conform to the feminine image conveyed...
Mickey Johnson, 24, was naturally anxious: she had never had a baby before. But everything seemed pleasantly reassuring. Instead of a cold, sterile delivery ward, she entered what might have been a cheery, yellow-tinted bedroom in suburbia furnished with rocking chairs and an old-fashioned walnut armoire. Well-tended plants hung from the ceiling. There was even a stereo to play Mickey's favorite music. During the long, painful hours of labor, she was free to get up and pace the corridors. Her husband Bruce was at her side during the critical moments of delivery. Almost immediately afterward...
There's something very depressing about listening to vacation plans which combine jet travel, Bermuda, suntan lotion and volleyballs when you know you're just trundling back to suburbia next week. Ever since my parents decided we couldn't afford the psychic toll of another family vacation (the fighting in the back seat finally got to them). I have known, with a sense of doom approximating the feeling of a Christian Scientist with appendicitis, that I will not be embarking on a spree in the Netherlands Antilles, but on a hopeless quest to entertain myself in a deserted suburban wasteland...
After I've exhausted the limited resources of suburbia, there remains that most hallowed of vacation traditions--visiting the relatives. In my family, that's quite a ritual, because the bulk of my father's large family still lives in one very clannish neighborhood in Brooklyn. They inhabit a world where no one ever moves away, women get married at 18 or 19, and everyone knows everyone else and what they're doing. Visiting my grandmother, one of the local matriarchs, is always an occasion Despite our protest that we have eaten, overeaten, or can feel our aortas congealing into...
...merely missed me in the overall picture of Mr. Eastwood's audiences. But I can't believe that he never noticed any other women in those long lines outside the theaters. The Eastwood image of strong, quiet masculinity turns on a large female audience, even here in suburbia...