Like the Waverly, it serves mostly comforting, occasionally very good American country-club fare.
As civilisation staggers to a halt, human nature is revealed, mostly base, occasionally noble.
"You are able to keep your feelings mostly hidden; occasionally they cough, or break a dinner plate," Ms. Wickersham writes.
The benefit of hearing them here was the mostly perky, occasionally stern stage persona she affected for the occasion.
The trainer, Del, is a vivid and utterly convincing character: mostly irritable, occasionally kind, a wheezing, ageing wheeler-dealer who understands his own desperate circumstances but pretends he knows what he's doing.
Their characters, named Abbi and Ilana, are twenty-something stoners in New York — broke, horny, heedless, daffy, mostly benign, occasionally brilliant — who work crappy jobs, bump around town, get into mischief, and, with genial vulgarity and dirtbag charm, accidentally complicate their lives.
The two women, as Nick Paumgarten writes in this week's issue, play "twenty-something stoners in New York — broke, horny, heedless, daffy, mostly benign, occasionally brilliant — who work crappy jobs, bump around town, get into mischief, and, with genial vulgarity and dirtbag charm, accidentally complicate their lives".
America's first dynasty, it turns out, is a fairly miserable lot: brilliant, certainly; honorable, mostly; successful, occasionally; but also carping and grasping -- and falling short of the idea of greatness that, in Brookhiser's view, "crushes and stimulates" four generations of Adams men.
Jupitus is scathing about the commercial sector – O'Connell excepted – and devotes 18 pages of his book to a transcript of a breakfast show he heard on tour which he describes as "mostly negative, occasionally offensive, quite often wilfully ignorant... with no redeeming qualities whatsoever".
