Entertainment, family style

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The father plays Rachmaninoff on his euphonium on his days off from the aeronautics lab.  He puns on Plato and serves seven styles of risotto.  After subbing at his daughter’s hip-hop class, in casual bedroom shots he unbuttons designer shirts of lilac and ultramarine to showcase a solar plexus that would make Michelangelo fumble his chisel.  Peggy, the mother, dyes her hair pistachio.  She crushes bathroom scales in jumble sale T-shirts and pink sweat pants, enters with a crumbly cream-filled peach cupcake in every scene.  Her catch phrase: “Why try?”  Her stock gag: bamboozling her hair salon buddies into jimmying the boss’s shotgun cabinet so they can rumble to the dump and blast rockchucks.  Six episodes in the season fizzles.  Pallid actors pack cardboard boxes into taxis on a rainy Thursday afternoon in a quarter of the city where old studios stand like bombed airplane hangars.  A wrinkled entertainment weekly tumbles like a flamboyant afterthought across the plaza, catching in the hands of a crossing guard who like a vassal with a proclamation spreads and reads it, a punchy piece from an upstart columnist eager to make a name for himself, his thumb on the pulse of public taste, calling it The Death of Humor.

My Sitcom

About Matthew Babcock

Idahoan. Writer. Failed breakdancer. Two books of poetry, one of creative nonfiction, one fiction collection, and a book of fiction and poetry on the way. Points of Reference (Folded Word): https://www.amazon.com/Points-Reference-Matthew-James-Babcock/dp/1610192281?SubscriptionId=AKIAJ2F6RDUSIYCWQMFQ&tag=sa-b2c-new-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1610192281 Heterodoxologies (Educe Press): https://educepress.com/2017/03/16/now-available-2/ Strange Terrain (Mad Hat Press): https://madhat-press.com/products/strange-terrain-by-matthew-james-babcock Four Tales of Troubled Love (Harvard Square Editions): https://harvardsquareeditions.org/portfolio-items/four-tales-troubled-love/

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