Word: raying
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...needs to be loved. And Arlene McKinney (Helen Hunt) is the girl to do it. She, naturally, has her own problems. She's a single mom, a waitress working extra shifts at a topless bar while she struggles with alcoholism; she hides her bottle in a chandelier, just as Ray Milland did in The Lost Weekend. But there's good stuff...
...more than 20 years in this business, I can safely say that these are the most mediocre political ad campaigns I have ever seen," said Ray Strother, president of the American Association of Political Consultants...
...formal it might as well have been wearing a tuxedo") and lots of pert social commentary, especially about a Los Angeles subspecies of sexual predators "whose highest accomplishments are that they were cute in high school." But the author is serious about his glove lady, Mirabelle Buttersfield, and about Ray Porter, the fiftysomething man Mirabelle admits into her solitary life. Once Martin fashioned funny-weird balloon animals; now, at 55, he creates funny-sad, nice and not-so-nice people, as real as your morning-after face in the bathroom mirror...
Mirabelle is a study in isolation. When not standing sentinel behind the counter, she works on eerie drawings. Pretty and slim, she is so shy, so inexpert in marketing herself, that people don't notice her--or, if they do see her, think of Olive Oyl. Ray, though, has a more discerning eye than most. A rich businessman on a field trip for erotic adventure, he stops at her counter to buy a pair of gloves, and--a nice touch--sends them to her. Thus begins a courtship defined by emotional compromise, misunderstood signals and the sort of betrayals that...
...Ray is a considerate lover and, that rarer commodity, a considerate suitor; he doesn't push conquest. In his fashion, Ray is also faithful: when he has erotic daydreams, he thinks only of Mirabelle. But he does not see that her need is of a greater, higher order than his. Besides, Ray is a man. "His caring is a potion," the book's omniscient narrator tells us, "mixed with one part benevolent altruist and one part chimpanzee penis." Is that unusual? Or, for that matter, wrong? No, Martin says. "But it's a ratio. When you're young, the chimpanzee...