Word: whoring
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...very first tale, In Broad Daylight, invites Western readers into an alien landscape and a harrowing situation. White Cat, the young narrator, learns from his friend Bare Hips that the Red Guards have caught Old Whore, a local woman accused of prostitution, and will parade her through the streets to the place of public denunciations and punishment. White Cat is excited at the promised spectacle, as is everyone in the town; a bleak place like Dismount Fort offers few public diversions...
This boy is too young to feel any pity for the tormented woman. But he does report his grandmother's opinion that Old Whore is getting off lightly: "They should burn the bitch on Heaven Lamp like they did in the old days." And he describes what happened to a woman condemned to Heaven Lamp: "She was hung naked upside down above a wood fire whose flames could barely touch her scalp, and two men flogged away at her with whips made of bulls' penises." The release of death usually came "a day and a night" later...
Since Catch-22 is about an armed force that wanted a few good men and no women at all, it is not surprising that only three women, each assigned fairly minor characters, round out the otherwise allmale ensemble. As Nately's whore, Chloe Cockburn exhudes plenty of passionate rage with an Italian accent, but little else. Kathleen Conroy plays Nurse Duckett with plenty of attitude; unfortunately, her quiet voice prevents most of the audience from enjoying her quips. Dana Scardigli, with another Italian accent, is decent as the contrary Luciana, and hilarious as a weeping soldier's mother...
...which her top executive, Olive (Kathy Najimy), persuades Ronnie to be a role model for a new anatomically correct doll (its breasts sag, and its butt protrudes). By this time, everybody is getting punch-drunk tired. Alley starts singing "I am woman, I am role model, I am whore." No one seems to notice. She smiles. She's happy, really happy, to be back...
...fond of books; steak tartare; gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause; cats; beautiful sentences; Stravinsky; and France." Salter's episodic memoir is studded with such fond remembrances of things, and persons, past: an insouciantly comfortable whore at a chic brothel in Morocco; that aged lion of a writer Irwin Shaw, drawn irresistibly to womanly beauty. "The great engines of this world," Salter notes, "do not run on faithfulness...