Word: housemaid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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McKay's Bees has perhaps a roomful of such figures--Henry David Thoreau comments on the biology of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz terrorizes his students and commits indiscretions with his housemaid. John Brown and his gang of Missouri border ruffians wage war on free-staters in Kansas. Even President Pierce gives an audience or two, once weeping, once belligerent...
...Cherry Orchard is the most farcical of Chekhov's major works, and the cast (including George Voscovec, Raul Julia, Cathryn Damon, Marybeth Hurt and Michael Cristofer) whoops and tumbles through it with exaggerated zest. Especially delicious is Meryl Streep's housemaid Dunyasha, all borrowed gentility and sexual flutter...
Still, with more than due respect and the grandfatherly twinkle of one who has seen 'em all come and go, West offers the reader a fly-on-the-wall view of such things as a housemaid and F.D.R., in turn, discovering House Guest Winston Churchill's proclivity for stomping around his rooms, chomping his cigar, stark naked. West recalls Harry Truman's unreconstructed Southern mother's downright refusal to sleep in Lincoln's bed. Lyndon Johnson's specially installed, multinozzled, Texas-strength shower nearly knocked the newly elected Nixon clear out of the bathroom...
...cave "because he had observed women closely all his life." Cather was also a prude. We are not told Marian Forrester drinks a little but merely get "the sharp odor of spirits." In My Antonia, the local lecher is obliquely indicated by the comment that he set a former housemaid up "in the business for which he had trained...
...toward the unpleasant Krafft-Ebing revelation concealed behind that coy yellow band. In the denouement there are traces both of Psycho and the Roger Ackroyd device: Are you sure you should trust the narrator? But Ellin conceals his key surprise in a phonetic note written by a distracted Mexican housemaid: Noscool sonic comic loc. Work that out and the solution may fall into place. Since the note appears on page 21, well before the band, Random House is jeopardizing its petty-cash supply. ·Jay Cocks