Word: townes
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...Passaic, New Jersey! That crumbling, grumbling city across the Hudson from the gleaming skyline of New York, yet worlds removed from Manhattan magic. A place whose residents shiver in dour poverty, and whose most famous native sons and daughters had to leave town to make it big. The honor roll would include Joe Piscopo, Paul Rudd, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz, three-time Oscar-winning producer Saul Zaentz, sitcom regulars Loretta Swit and Larry Storch, sports hysteric Dick Vitale...and, Be Kind Rewind tells us, the legendary pianist and composer Fats Waller...
...special effects and borrow a young woman from the local dry cleaner's (Melonie Diaz) for the Sigourney Weaver role. (Later, the real Weaver shows up too, but not as herself.) The ruse is successful, Miss Falewicz likes their homemade version of Ghostbusters; and soon everyone in town is clamoring for the guys' rickety remakes of favorite movies, including The Lion King, Rush Hour 2, RoboCop, Boyz N The Hood, Driving Miss Daisy (with Black in the Jessica Tandy role), King Kong, Carrie, Men in Black, Boogie Nights, Last Tango in Paris, the 2001 sequel...
...Before the refugees, the population here had lots of problems," the deputy mayor of the town confessed to a group of visiting aid workers and donor representatives. Now, several international aid agencies have set up shop in the town to look after 2,500 Sudanese living in a camp nearby. And, with the aid workers have come some jobs, and a few more trucks carrying food and the odd crate of beer. Civilians who had fled miles into the bush, either escaping conflict or searching for diamonds, have started returning, many hungry and severely malnourished...
...fortunate is that the refugees in their midst came from Darfur, Africa's most publicized conflict. Hundreds of thousand others in the CAR have been forced to abandon their homes by a combination of local rebels, government forces and bandits, but receive far less attention. And few in the town have many illusions about how much help they'll get if or when their Darfuri visitors feel it is safe to return home...
...Since independence the governments and the presidents have forgotten about the northeast," says El Hadj Abdullah Yusuf, an elder and one of the biggest traders in the town of 20,000. "If it wasn't for the aid workers there would be no hospital here," he sighs...