by Lillian Ross
People in the audience called out subjects they had heard him do before, and these set Williams off on an even more manic scale. He went from gangster to drunk and on to Gorbachev, Reagan, Charles Kuralt covering toxic waste in New Jersey. He went from Mrs. Marcos to Louis Farrakhan and on to a small child watching his father leave and crying at a window and then turning away from the window, tearless, and saying, “Let’s put on that Fisher-Price music and get crazy.” (Williams has a three-year-old son, Zachary.)
Williams stayed on for about half an hour and came off looking refreshed and ready for anything. The following evening, in a taxi heading for the Improvisation (Forty-fourth near Eighth), he gave us a minicourse in comedy clubs. “That audience last night was made up of the bridge-and-tunnel people. They come in from New Jersey and Connecticut. They’re a challenge. You can get a big reception, but if it’s not working—one time, twice—then there’s nothing. Some comics have a lot of pride. They’ll do the material they set out to do, no matter what. I’m more chameleonlike. I find the basic level of the audience. Last night, I felt in the groove. I felt comfortable. I like going to the clubs, because it peels away all pretensions. About a week ago, I went to the Comedy Store, in Los Angeles. I was talking about bizarre things. I got going doing this whole thing about travelling at the speed of light, losing your luggage beforehand, doing Albert Einstein as Mr. Rogers, improvising. It was fun. It was like running in an open field.”
At the Improvisation, there was even louder screaming and yelling at the mention of Robin Williams. Again, he started out as an Oscar winner, sanctimoniously: “Thank you for your kindness. Your words are so meaningful.” Then he was South Africa’s Botha, and after that he became the state of Michigan and the Statue of Liberty and Frank Sinatra and Jewish hunters (“Let’s go out to the country and see if anything died”) and Lee Iacocca and Henry Kissinger and El Al Airlines.
After a while, someone in the audience called out “Dr. Ruth!”
“Dr. Rufe?” Williams asked, having obviously misheard the name. Then he got it, and immediately used the error to take off as a black woman preacher giving sex advice in a scolding vein. “Get yoh act together, now,” he said. “Yoh look lahk a Ken doll. Don’t yoh look at me wid dose mascara eyes goin’ flip-flap. Get on dat highway and make sure de bridge is open.” He kept it going for a good fifteen minutes. The audience was beside itself. At the end, Williams came off looking exhilarated and told us that that one had been brand-new—a breakthrough. He looked as though he had been running in an open field.
1986
EAGER — William McKibben
FAITH POPCORN, the woman who has called for a Frank Perdue of fish, runs a trend-analysis firm, BrainReserve, from an uncluttered, airy office eleven stories above Fifty-seventh Street—East Fifty-seventh. We visited Miss Popcorn, the woman who has predicted that by the year 2001 the bathroom will be “an anti-stress center or leisure area,” one day last week, because we felt we had no choice. Everywhere we had turned in recent months, and especially when we had turned to Newsweek, there was Faith Popcorn, the woman who recognized very early—when most people saw blue sky, and blue sky only— that Tofutti was not a sure thing. As early as the end of 1984, when Newsweek proclaimed that year the Year of the Yuppie, she told a reporter she was having trouble persuading her clients in the processed-food industry to develop new products such as a line of fresh baby food for the boomer market. On May 6th of last year, she told Newsweek that New Coke was a mistake. “The giant kneels,” she said. Seven weeks later, on June 24th, she told Newsweek that New Coke was “the marketing fiasco of the decade.” On July 22nd, Newsweek readers learned that she thought Coke’s problem lay in America’s mouth. “The American palate is dead,” she said. “You know that Thomas Dolby song ‘She Blinded Me with Science’? Well, you could say the same thing about Coke.” This spring, she returned to Newsweek to discuss the Fortune 500 and similar lists of the biggest businesses—lists she said had become the Social Registers of the nineteen-eighties. “It’s like the best-dressed list for money,” she said. Unaccountably, she failed to appear in the magazine’s June 2nd issue on the subject of the Marriage Crunch, but she has recently moved on the Associated Press wire (praising General Mills for the big Betty Crocker makeover), and appeared in U.S. News & World Report, the Wall Street Journal (at least four times by our count), USA Today (twice, but once was for making the Savvy register of the top sixty businesses run by women), Adweek, American Banker (taking strong exception to the Metropolitan Life ads featuring Snoopy et al., on the ground that they weren’t serious enough), the Times, and Boardroom Reports, a newsletter for executives (voicing her feeling that franchise restaurants would soon be offering “fast lobster”).
In short, along with the wind, time and tide, the tectonic plates, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Byzantine tax code, Faith Popcorn had been irresistibly shaping our life. So many of the things we thought to be true she had said. Did we independently think them to be true? Or is Faith Popcorn the ur of our era? Is she the oversoul incarnate? And, if so, is she nice? We can report she is as nice as she is omniscient, and that is almost totally. “I’m trying to think of a trend I’ve missed—it would be more credible if I could think of one,” she said. “Well, for the past couple of years I’ve been predicting a car specially positioned for a woman—the safest car in the world, with airbags, an SOS device, built-in baby seats. I thought that people would be willing to pay between thirty thousand and fifty thousand dollars for it—that they’d take out a mortgage, just as they would on a house. So far, it hasn’t happened.” But so many other things have—things that BrainReserve, which conducts two thousand in-depth interviews with consumers each year, has known about way in advance. In 1980, she said that this decade would see a big market for salt-free products, the return of flashy cars, a rise in the popularity of older TV stars, a declining divorce rate, and media rooms in homes. Success has sucked clients in the door: the roster over the last few years includes Timex watches, Vlasic pickles, Quaker Oats, Paper Mate, Anheuser-Busch, and American Cyanamid. In some cases, she helps launch new products; in others, she generates names; and, most often, she repositions old products. In every case, she relies on BrainReserve’s bank of fifteen active trends.
“At the moment, there’s a trend toward trends themselves,” she said. “It’s part of the trend toward control. A part of that trend has a name: ‘cocooning.’ It’s very complex, but basically it involves building a shell of safety around yourself, so you’re not at the mercy of the unpredictable world. That’s why people like to have their VCRs, and their Barcaloungers. Barcaloungers, some of them equipped with stereo headphones, are making a comeback. And part of the idea is that companies are hiring experts like me so the companies can be in control. Control, control, control.” In fact, people are so much in control that they will start drinking again soon, overwhelming the short-lived New Sobriety trend. “If you’re working hard and working out hard, how do you relieve stress?” Miss Popcorn asked us. “Not in meditation. People aren’t into meditation anymore. Alcohol is coming back. Not bourbon. It’s hard to work out with a hangover. And we want high style. Bourbon-on-the-rocks is not style. A wine cooler is higher style. We’re seeing the drinks of the thirties coming back—the Sidecar. You may even see the Martini coming back.” Also, Nouveau Italian will be the next big restaurant thing. “We’re blanded out,” she explained. “We’re not interested in the whites anymore—white wine, veal, it’s over.”
Miss Popcorn said that trends are so powerful she sometimes succumbs herself. “The control thing—mean. I hired a trainer for my morning workouts. And I’m so embarrassed. You realize it’s horrifying and then you realize you’re doing it. You can get your exercise if you go out and cut down a tree, so why don’t we? Why do we need someone telling us how? I really admire people who don’t care what’s going on. I really admire people who still smoke.” Some things, though, are too powerful to resist. “I have such a hard tim
e convincing manufacturers that Health and Fitness is not just a trend, it’s an intrinsic change in life style,” she said. “It’s how people will be from now on. Because as you get closer to death life gets sweeter.”
1986
POPCORN MEMOIRS — Susan Lardner
THE local movie house in a village that lies between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great South Bay was showing Kurosawa’s “Ran” last Monday night. The hurricane watch had been called off, but a sturdy east wind was blowing, and amazing clouds were moving across the sky. The sun was setting brightly, and a practically full moon was about to rise as the movie began. A fourteen-year-old boy was making his début behind the popcorn-and-candy counter. Four hours later, he had this story to tell:
I met L——, the woman who runs the movie house, on the street one night, and we had a little conversation pertaining to summer employment. She said she would keep me in mind. This afternoon, she called up and said to be there at a quarter after six. She hurriedly showed me the ropes—basically, cleaning off the counter, making sure to see that there was enough of all the sodas, and making sure I knew where the brooms were—and she also told me to see that the men’s room was mildly reputable-looking. Oh, yeah, she showed me how to do the popcorn. She did the first batch to show me how, and she told me to do three more. I say “do,” not “make,” because I don’t actually bring the popcorn into being. L—— has a good sense of how much popcorn to do—she really knows movie crowds.
You take a measuring cup, scoop the kernels out of a huge bag, lift up the top of the popper—Oh, this reflects the way I mistakenly did it. I’m supposed to put the Tastee Pop in first—that’s a popcorn oil and seasoner, it says on the box— but I forget and put it in after the kernels, usually. Tastee Pop is harder and flakier than butter. Then I’m supposed to put salt in—that’s one of the things she’s picky about, the salt—and then I lower the top. Oh, before I do all that, before I even start, I have to turn the little knob that says “Popper,” wait till it gets hot, and then turn on a separate switch for the motor and a light switch. Then I do three or four batches—have to use my judgment—and turn everything off except the infrared lamp that keeps it warm. Once each batch is popped, there’s a wooden stick that’s used to knock it out of the popper into the bottom of the box, which is where I scoop it out from. The stick is about two feet long with a flattish end where it’s chipped—like something you’d find on the beach.
L——’s business philosophy is the hardest thing to get used to. It’s “The customer is always wrong.” She didn’t put it to me in so many words, but I soon got the idea. One woman started out by wondering if the popcorn might be soggy, and then she complained about the Tastee Pop—she wanted to know was I using butter or imitation (we put butter on at the end, if they want it)—and then she said it wasn’t salty enough, and when I handed her the cylinder she said didn’t I have a saltshaker. I said to L——, “This woman seemed to think it was a wine-tasting party, or something,” and L—— said, “Oh, yes, she’s a ----- --- ---,” and she told me if I had any more trouble just say, “L——, we’ve got a complainer over here.” She told me she had once warned the very same woman, “If you ask me whether the popcorn’s stale, you’ll wear it.” Perhaps her thought was that I should hit complainers with the stick.
Oh, God, one weird thing. During the middle of the first show, there was a loud clatter coming from the projection room, so I ran to the foot of the stairs, and I got there just in time to see a huge reel of film speeding toward me, sort of half in the air and half on the stairs, picking up speed as it fell. I managed to jump out of the way before it landed and crashed into the wall.
I got to see some of the movie when business quieted down. The part where he was saying to the daughter-in-law, “Why do you look at me with love in your eyes?” That was so sad I began to cry, so I went over to the napkins to dry my tears, and L—— said, “Don’t take too many napkins.” This is another feature of her philosophy. At one point, a large person appeared and bought a large popcorn. He was a rather tough-looking fellow, perhaps wearing a black leather jacket (or I may have imagined he was). He stuck his hand into the napkin box—this was before L—— replaced the napkins—and he pulled almost all of them out. L—— had told me, “If someone takes too many napkins, just say, ‘Hey, don’t take so many napkins,’ because they’ll just wind up on the floor and I’ll have to sweep them up later.” But in this case I decided it would be better not to say anything.
Oh, yeah. Remember those sushi people? You know, the family that runs Sushi-Ya? This is from L——. She told me they came in and that they were delighted to have a movie in their own language. So she asked them could she have a free plate of sushi the next time she went to their place, and they said yes. I think she meant to imply that they were ecstatic.
Then, later, at the second show, a woman came in and said she had allergies, did we have any water, and L—— said, “No, no water.” That struck me as harsh. Then she relented and brought some water in a cup, and the woman bought a Coke. And I thought my paper-boy job last summer was weird!
You have to have an aptitude for this popcorn biz. I know it’s candy and soda, too, but I think of it as popcorn. Oh, this is part of her business philosophy: “Don’t bother getting them their sodas from the cooler—they can do it themselves. You have enough to do.” I was only trying to be helpful before I got too busy with the popcorn. I developed a rhythm for it surprisingly quickly. You take the— You’re supposed to put half a stick of Tastee Pop in for each batch, and if it isn’t cut yet, in half, take the church key and cut a groove around the middle of the bar and then snap it in half. So: cut, snap, dump the Tastee Pop in, scoop up the kernels, pour the kernels into the popper, sprinkle the salt. Cut, snap, dump, scoop, pour, sprinkle. Then you ask if they want butter. Of course, that includes somewhere in there opening and closing the lid of the popper.
One annoying incident—a Yuppie couple came in and asked for popcorn, and I filled the cup about this much under the rim, so it wouldn’t spill out, and the woman said, “Could you fill it up, please,” so I filled it to the rim and some pieces fell to the as yet unswept floor.
Last night, L—— underestimated the running time of the movie, so I ended up with only about two minutes to make two bushels of popcorn before the customers started to pour in for the second show. During the second performance, the reel ran out about half an hour into the movie. I was sweeping up, and suddenly I heard people screaming—this shout arose—and I saw the mustached projectionist running up the stairs. Every now and then, he comes downstairs and scoops up some popcorn. I was quite offended at first, as I thought of the popcorn as my domain, but he probably just wanted to save me the trouble.
One more night of “Ran,” then two nights of “Desert Hearts” (a very adult movie, I hear), then some sort of benefit for two nights, then “Ruthless People,” starting Sunday. L—— said to me, “So you think you’re pretty fast, huh? When the first day of ‘Ruthless People’ comes around, you’re gonna really understand what speed means. Maybe you’d better practice at home.” She values speed over perfection—you can tell. She talked a lot about speed, but when I was sweeping the floors during my period of ennui an hour after the beginning of the first show—I was sweeping all the nooks and crannies—she said, “It doesn’t have to be perfect.” She runs a rough operation. She’s great to work for. I haven’t applied her philosophy yet, because I’ve been too intimidated by the customers. Probably I’ll be forced to, though, when the mobs pour in. “Ruthless People,” I imagine, will be the true test of my abilities. I hope I pass the test.
1986
ADOPTION — Mark Singer
CONGRATULATIONS are probably in order. You have been selected as the adoptive parent of a Hudson River striped bass—you and thirty-one students in Michael Lugano’s sixth-grade class at P.S. 105, in the Bronx. Con Edison, which is one of the utilities operating power plants that across the years have killed significan
t numbers of young striped bass in the Hudson River, has more recently been doing its share to replace the striped bass. Recognizing its own good deeds, Con Edison helped to arrange a gathering at Wave Hill, in Riverdale, where you can claim your adoption certificate. There is much to be seen and studied along the way, and the potential for fun exists.
Remember to dress warmly, just in case a ten-inch snowfall begins while you are away from your desk. The following is a list of suggested activities to be performed in conjunction with your field trip:
1. Call Metro-North, ascertain train schedule to Riverdale.
2. Prior to trip, familiarize yourself with target area and establish safety rules. (No rides from strangers, no intoxicants, no explosives, etc.) Bring writing utensil and notebook in which to record meaningful data. While waiting for elevator, ask yourself whether to bring along field guides, clipboards, binoculars, twine, thermometer, surgical tape, shovels, old strainers, dip nets, plastic pail, glass jars, plastic-foam box, change of clothes, enormous plastic bag for all the above—or maybe bring none of the above.
3. Go to Grand Central. Board train. Enjoy ride. Remember to get off train. Walk up long, steep, slippery streets in approximate direction of Wave Hill. Notice general condition of area (nice neighborhood, ripe for historic-district designation); weather (incipient snow, sleet); bird life (may have been some); insects (too cold); light penetration (midmorning, the usual). Find something beautiful (three Hasidim carrying black umbrellas, approaching from a hundred yards away, looking like opening frames of Fellini film).
4. If you feel lost, and panic a little, ask Hasidim for directions. Walk past Wave Hill gatehouse. Close eyes. Do you hear natural sounds? Man-made sounds? Good. Follow path to main building. Inside, find John Mihaly, Wave Hill staff member, who makes welcoming sounds, plastic-name-tag-selection sounds, then points to stairwell.