Word: waitress
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HOUSE OF JAPAN. Shoeless, seated at a low table, the happy diner is served hot sake, then a kimonoed doll of a waitress kneels and cooks sukiyaki. Meanwhile, entertainers in the colorful costumes of samurai, geisha and fishermen dance every thing from kabuki to the twist, and an Oriental chanteuse, Momotaro Akasaka, sings sonorous torch songs...
...central figures are Anne Duncan, a waitress and technically a virgin, and Zeke Daniels, the braggartly buffoon who marries her. There are assorted relatives: Anne has a weak, churchly mother, Zeke a managing mother and a popinjay father who struts in Klan robes. They are presented in a protracted series of flashbacks leading from the marriage of Anne and Zeke. The flashbacks do not resolve down to a nub of meaning but are centrifugal, leading away from meaning into the thinning reaches of an infinity of pointlessness. Conversations take place but nothing is said. Eventually the book stops, Farrell having...
...Nekrasov panicked the tour leader by always going off on little walks of his own. He marveled at Manhattan skyscrapers and abstract art, happily guzzled Coca-Cola, bought aspirin on the advice of TV commercials. In passing, Nekrasov takes a swipe at Russian restaurants ("rank odors and the waitress like a she-wolf"), Russian films ("The old worker always has exactly the right answer for anything you ask him") and Russian secretiveness ("Excessive caution does not bring people together, it drives them apart"). What would Marx and Lenin, say to this Communist traveler, who never dogmatizes and never claims...
...dining room, when he was discovered to be recording on tape police action in rounding up the children with dogs and cattle prods. St Augustine segregation becomes a ridiculous fetish in the instance of one experience of the group with Mrs. Peabody and Mrs. Burgess. At one restaurant the waitress evidently did not realize that Mrs. Burgess was Negro, so the group was pleasantly served. Toward the end of the meal Mrs. Peabody remarked to the waitress how glad she was that the management did not discriminate, and pointed Mrs. Burgess out to the surprised woman. The manager was hastily...
...direction falters. The various themes fail to fit together into a coherent fugue. Nonetheless, her characters are engaged in a sometimes sensitive search for meaning in their drab lives. Fred Willkie does a particularly fine job as Jake, a young garbage collector. Joel DeMott's performance as the waitress is fulled with nuance and her accent doesn't detract from her acting. Diane Kagan, who plays Gloria, one of the cooks, is less successful with the New York vulgar tongue, but Jaye Schulman as Lily, the other cook, is often compelling. William Roberts and Peter McKenzie are perhaps hurt more...