Word: couches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mainstream America has no fixed address, but Toledo provides as good a vantage point as any to watch the couch-potato campaign of 1988. This slowly reviving industrial city of 338,000 has more than its share of card-carrying Reagan Democrats -- and all of Michael Dukakis' victory scenarios depend on wooing these blue-collar defectors back to the fold. But the struggle for their hearts and minds is oddly disembodied. Even a Dukakis visit to Toledo last week was merely a cameo for the cameras. Here, as elsewhere, the election has become largely reduced to the impressions created...
...periods are re-created with elaborate props: a looming female robot from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a railway car stocked with projector and films to recall the propaganda push of early Soviet cinema, a Salvador Dali collage with the probing eyes he designed for Hitchcock's Spellbound, and a couch inspired by Mae West's lips. Elsewhere, actors stroll about in character to fill in the historical blanks. In a room labeled "Cinema Goes to War," for example, "soldiers" roll about in trenches. Nearby is a majestic staircase canopied by MOMI's own high-camp Erecthyon: six sculpted muses...
...more intellectually-minded, with a generous dollop of cynical elitism thrown in, counter that the media is bound by a higher responsibility. Don't cater to the whims of the beer-swilling couch potatoes, they say. Let's ignore those natty Nielsen viewership surveys and give the public some healthy programming...
...saying 'We are not yet with you, Jesus,' " Frankie volunteers from the couch; her glasses shine. "Is that it?" asks Walter. "There's a place in my opera where I'd love to use that sound. We could mount four speakers at the corners of the theater and get exactly that same effect of being surrounded by the sound." Doug's brother is a deacon in the church, so maybe a full-scale taping can be arranged...
...expectations. Maggie recalls the remarks of her childhood friend Serena, just before Serena married a boy named Max: "It's just time to marry, that's all . . . I'm so tired of dating! I'm so tired of keeping up a good front! I want to sit on the couch with a regular, normal husband and watch TV for a thousand years...