Word: manhattanization
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...inner cities the scarcity of jobs and hope for the future invites kids to seek pleasure with little thought for the fallout. "You'd think AIDS would be a deterrent, but it's not," says Marie Bronshvag, a health teacher at West Side High School in upper Manhattan. Their lives are empty, she observes, and their view of the future fatalistic. "I believe in God," says student Mark Schaefer, 19. "If he wants something bad to happen to me, it will happen. Anyway, by the time I get AIDS I think they'll have a cure...
Father Dan is homosexual, like nearly every other character in Jeffrey, Paul Rudnick's rollicking AIDS play. Not sex-mad, exactly -- sex-nutty. "Do you know what it's like in that confessional?" he rhetorically asks Jeffrey, a Manhattan actor-waiter whom the priest has vamped in St. Patrick's Cathedral. " 'Father, I've had impure thoughts about my soccer coach.' Where are the Polaroids? What am I, a mind reader? Say six Hail Marys and bring me his shorts...
...hero is no less shocked and outraged by this catechism of concupiscence than a middle-class Manhattan playgoer might be. But because the plague years have forced Jeffrey to retreat from sex, or even from expressions of love, he is desperate for wisdom from any source. And -- surprise! -- Father Dan has some for him. "Of course life sucks," the cleric says. "It always will. So how dare you not make the most of it? . . . There's only one real blasphemy: the refusal of joy! Of a corsage and a kiss...
...Broadway comedy I Hate Hamlet: "Fame pays better. Fame has beachfront property. Fame needs bodyguards." But Rudnick's pay is fine, thanks. He doesn't need Malibu acreage; he has a dashingly ornate apartment -- one previously tenanted by John Barrymore, just like the I Hate Hamlet flat -- in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Rudnick would laugh off bodyguards; he is an unguarded fellow in an edgy age. "Paul is so charming," says his old friend William Ivey Long, a Tony-winning costume designer, "that you suspect something is lurking underneath. But amazingly, he really is a nice...
...delirious whirl of the Manhattan club scene depicted in Social Disease (1986), le plus chic twosome is Guy and Venice Huber, dancing their youth away -- and, because they are Rudnick people, constantly refreshing it. With its Evelyn Waugh drawl, Social Disease is Rudnick's revenge on the less- than-zilch nightlife novels of the mid-'80s. So I'll Take It (1989) must be his anti-Portnoy. A Jewish boy who loves and enjoys his mother -- call the cops! Paul's mom Selma and her sisters Lillian and Hilda are the models for Hedy Reckler and her bargain-hunter siblings...