Word: tramp
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Every few weeks, outside the movie theater in virtually any American town in the late 1910s, stood the life-size cardboard figure of a small tramp--outfitted in tattered, baggy pants, a cutaway coat and vest, impossibly large, worn-out shoes and a battered derby hat--bearing the inscription I AM HERE TODAY. An advertisement for a Charlie Chaplin film was a promise of happiness, of that precious, almost shocking moment when art delivers what life cannot, when experience and delight become synonymous, and our investments yield the fabulous, unmerited bonanza we never get past expecting...
...poem about Chaplin, said his pantomime "represents the futile gesture of the poet today." Later, in the 1950s, Chaplin was one of the icons of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac went on the road because he too wanted to be a hobo. From 1981 to 1987, IBM used the Tramp as the logo to advertise its venture into personal computers...
...mother Hannah, a small-time actress, was in and out of mental hospitals. Though he pursued learning passionately in later years, young Charlie left school at 10 to work as a mime and roustabout on the British vaudeville circuit. The poverty of his early years inspired the Tramp's trademark costume, a creative travesty of formal dinner dress suggesting the authoritative adult reimagined by a clear-eyed child, the guilty class reinvented in the image of the innocent one. His "little fellow" was the expression of a wildly sentimental, deeply felt allegiance to rags over riches by the star...
...emotional frailty. And in Christopher Guest's haphazardly delightful Waiting for Guffman she's a fast-food counter girl who gets the chance to co-star in a tacky musical tribute to Blaine, Missouri. Posey graces so many low-budget films that she has called herself "that indie tramp." An apter title would be Queen of the Indies...
...plot is always the same. People with problems--"husband says she looks like a cow," "pressured to lose her virginity or else," "mate wants more sex than I do"--are introduced to rational methods of problem solving. People with moral failings--"boy crazy," "dresses like a tramp," "a hundred sex partners"--are introduced to external standards of morality. The preaching--delivered alternately by the studio audience, the host and the ever present guest therapist--is relentless. "This is wrong to do this," Sally Jessy tells a cheating husband. "Feel bad?" Geraldo asks the girl who stole her best friend...