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redthroatedloonNo, I'm not talking about the season five opening episode of Stargate. It's also the name of a one-act play by a man named Arkady Leokum that played on television in 1971, and that I recently saw on cable.
It starred Ned Glass and Sam Jaffe as an insulting, taunting man who ate at the same restaurant every day for five years, and the patient waiter who had to put up with him. By the end of the play, the man's loneliness and desperation is revealed, and the waiter gets his gentle revenge. It's an absolutely marvelous play, but the real wonders were the performances by the two actors, especially Ned Glass as the diner. By the end of the hour, he broke your heart.
It also reminded me of when I was a child, surrounded by adults whose parents all spoke in the same Eastern European Yiddish accents that Jaffe and Glass spoke in the play. I was convinced that when you became old -- say, 40 or so -- you automatically began speaking in a Yiddish accent. It came along with the white hair and argumentative nature. It was just how the world was.
It starred Ned Glass and Sam Jaffe as an insulting, taunting man who ate at the same restaurant every day for five years, and the patient waiter who had to put up with him. By the end of the play, the man's loneliness and desperation is revealed, and the waiter gets his gentle revenge. It's an absolutely marvelous play, but the real wonders were the performances by the two actors, especially Ned Glass as the diner. By the end of the hour, he broke your heart.
It also reminded me of when I was a child, surrounded by adults whose parents all spoke in the same Eastern European Yiddish accents that Jaffe and Glass spoke in the play. I was convinced that when you became old -- say, 40 or so -- you automatically began speaking in a Yiddish accent. It came along with the white hair and argumentative nature. It was just how the world was.
