She came to Parsons years after a precocious friend had anointed him the perfect conflation of cuteness and musical talent.
She had declared her affection for his behind in a game of consequences only for precocious friend Julie to later post the declaration to Mitchell as a letter (or at least claim that she did).
I have another childhood memory: It involves sitting in a second-grade classroom, letting a precocious friend know that Santa told my father he wanted Italian cream cake this year instead of cookies.
At its core, Juno is a sweet story about family and friends rallying around a precocious protagonist, and it probably started some valuable conversations about birth control.
So primary and forceful have been this novel's appeal and effects upon two generations of us that to not already know Richard Yates's great book seems incongruous, and handing it over cold feels clumsy, a bit like introducing a sage old friend to a precocious new friend: we almost would rather not, for all the crucial things that cannot be thought and said again.
That weight is carried ably by Lena, Ginger's precocious best friend whose dreams of making something of herself are constantly threatened by her deeply troubled family life.
After all, he was a precocious poet, a friend of Picasso, a collaborator with Satie, Stravinsky and Diaghilev; a self-conscious artist whose films, plays, graphic art and novels drew on a Greek classicism tempered by a grasp of modernist art and the vicissitudes of fashion.
These school days are actually rendered rather brilliantly, especially the moments in which a new boy, Adrian, bursts on the scene, startling the friends with his precocious intelligence.
Like a precocious boy entertaining his parents' friends at a dinner party, he told of growing up in Germany, where his diplomat-dad was stationed, and riding his bike by the Russian guards into East Berlin.
She was dubbed "Tallulah" by family friends for her precocious antics… Tells about her early days in New York as an actress… "She had a quality like Laurette Taylor," says Uta Hagen, who was a judge on the fellowship panel and, along with her husband, the actor-director Herbert Berghof, later taught Batson.
