Word: cribbing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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CHILDREN'S FURNITURE. More than 200 crib strangulations are reported each year, and near misses are common. An infant can slip his body but not his head between the slats of most cribs. No laws regulate the design of cribs or other infant furniture, and the industry has no safety standards...
...Rats, for example, takes us to an oversized nursery in a Harlem tenement. Jebbie, "a fat Harlem rat," sits counting his money amidst a six-foot-high crib and ten-foot baby chair. It is quite possible that a metaphor of a man as a rat in the nursery of the universe was implied, but Horovitz did not choose to develop the play in that direction. Bobby is a hung-up Greenwich, Connecticut rat. Jebbie exclaims, "I gotta tell you kid, I'm hip to your problems (Greenwich and all that) because I get calls from two-hundred little madras...
Finally, Jebbie begins to wax dramatic about the smell of death (carbon bisulfide). At that moment, something incredible happens: what appears to be a ten-foot-high black baby wakes up screaming in her crib. Actually she is Carolyn Y. Cardwell, from Robert Downey's Putney Swope, and probably is no more than five and a half feet tall. Bobby wants to eat her and Jebbie does not. The baby then screams, "Rats! rats! rats!" and the lights black out (except the cue was missed on Thursday). Jebbie is left weeping and asking "Why?" If the rats are simply anthropomorphic...