Word: wasserstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Wendy Wasserstein...
...Wendy Wasserstein is funny. She must be funny. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for writing funny in The Heidi Chronicles. And in this collection of pieces, she says she's funny. She first realized this, she claims, in the second grade when she "brought down the classroom with my comedic routines on our prospects for lunch (vegetable chop suey was a highlight)." More recent evidence is that she likes I Love Lucy...
Humor is often in short supply in books by writers who assert they are funny. This is not second grade, and the territory Wasserstein covers has been strip-mined by those who preceded her -- Nora Ephron, Ellen Goodman and Anna Quindlen. A piece about the split between women who shave their legs and those who don't would have to come up with some dazzling insights to merit another look. Ditto painted nails, being fat or single...
...pressure Wasserstein feels to come up with material is frequently evident. Disappointment that a weekend in Maine was not a chintz-covered, Ralph Lauren-infested affair but rather one where the couch was acrylic and the drink Diet Coke is stretched to five pages. A lunch interview with Philippe de Montebello is a struggle to win his admiration. When she drops a name he recognizes, she writes, "Once again we are on equal ground." Equal ground with the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? So eager for approval, she becomes the journalistic equivalent of Sally Field at the Academy...