Word: wasps
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...roots and returning to native dress and behavior. Buttons proclaim: KISS ME, I'M POLISH, HUNGARIAN POWER and ESKIMO POWER. Richard Nixon has boasted of his trace of Irish ancestry, and George Wallace allows as how he has Jewish in-laws. Practically nobody tries to pass for a WASP any more...
...Wellesley. I think, now, that part of her attraction to me grew out of her thinking that I could lead her to him. I never understood this delusion of hers, but I'd drag her to parties anyway. And she would torture herself beforehand into the Look, a wasp-haired caricature, binding her curls tightly in a turban around her head, in a towel steamed for straightening. And she would chatter, and the pink would glow in her face. But then she would stand mum and prudish all night and hate herself in a corner. Afterwards...
They threw away their bras as a symbolic breaking loose, they foreswore make-up in revolt against the Look, and donned shapeless Indian prints that defied the Hollywood wasp-waisted ideal. They sat with legs widespread in mockery of Propriety and wore tattered jeans to taunt Ladylike Deportment. And they stopped shaving and stopped bathing to exult in the smells they trailed in the air. Rebellion against the Look was merely the easiest way to protest the Role, since the Look, be it slickfigured or heavy-breasted, was primed for seduction, for capitalizing on your assigned status...
...Portnoy's Complaint, the public flowering of the Henny Youngman Roth, the brilliant cocktail-party mimic, hilarious storyteller and improviser of ingenious bits. His university degrees were set aside for the lessons learned on Newark's front stoops, where wisecracks and putdowns were the comic antitoxins against WASP sting and the guilt that could result from calling chicken soup consomm...
Casey's campaign is equipped with the standard props -- cynical Irish father, devout Catholic mother, crazy aunts, WASP college roommates, leftist Jewish professors, a hard-boiled campaign manager, sex-crazed secretaries. Only Casey himself stands out from this familiar array. The first half of the book is a family chronicle of his illness, the second -- after a gap of twenty years -- the story of his race for President. The long hiatus leaves our understanding of Casey hopelessly incomplete...