Word: wastrel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...thieves, usurers, pimps and powder faces (prostitutes) who add up to a kind of road-company Decameron. The fat lecher Pi, for instance, lusts after the beautiful Silver Vase, a pubescent virgin being carefully tended by Lady Li, a flower-garden proprietor (brothelkeeper). Cash-and-Carry, a young wastrel, volunteers to act as go-between, but what he goes between are Silver Vase's sheets. Lady Li, who has been giving Cash-and-Carry a private course in flower arrangement, is outraged, and so is Pi. The lovers escape on a passing junk, but fall afoul of pirates...
...sluttish earth-mother figure and the doomed, self-destructive wastrel have appeared before in Eugene O'Neill's plays; some day--if it has not happened already--a Freudian scholar will write a book confirming our suspicions as to what these figures meant to their creator. Meanwhile, here they are again, livid with agony, struggling to find more than a painful, temporary peace in one another's arms...
...wastrel is again James Tyrone, the elder brother who haunted his way through Long Day's Journey into Night: now, he is measurably nearer to the grave which is his best hope. The slut (this time paradoxically endowed with a strange secret of virginity) is a huge, slatternly girl, both proud and ashamed of her physical bulk and power...
...impatience with Communist society that is apt to surprise U.S. readers. In Yury Nagibin's The Night Guest, a feckless sponger is held in contempt by two zealous Soviet citizens, but not before one of them reflects sadly on the ''warmth and gaiety" that the wastrel brings into people's lives. Loaf Sugar, by Konstantin Paustovsky, features an overbearing Soviet Organization Man whose mere presence "filled the air with weary boredom...
...young ranchman fiancé in the shade, the wedding bells begin to grow faint. For father's ideal of enjoying every real or sham pleasure goes to daughter's head like champagne. Simultaneously, the blood rushes to the ranchman's, and he denounces father's wastrel charms in ringing tones. After that, the play gets a bit shaky-and talky-what with having to cast its vote for either irreproachable dullness or irresponsible dash. In the end, daughter goes off for a before-the-wedding whirl with her fermented father-presumably as a way of eating...