Difference between revisions of "Chapter 12"

Revision as of 13:08, 24 September 2013

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Julia Richman High
Julia Richman High School is a defunct comprehensive high school in Manhattan, New York. Built in 1923 and located at East 67th Street and Second Avenue, the building was the only public high school in the Upper East Side of New York. The school is named after Julia Richman, the first woman district superintendent of schools in New York City. For much of the school's history it was a girl's high school; it changed to co-educational in 1967. In 1995, after years of academic decline, the city reorganized the school into six separately functioning small schools within a building renamed as the Julia Richman Education Complex. From WIKI.

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Cy Twombley
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibited his paintings worldwide. Twombly used the nickname "Cy", after his father (also nicknamed Cy) who was briefly a pitcher in Major League Baseball, and the star baseball pitcher Cy Young. Twombly's paintings blur the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive "e"s. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge – each mark with its own history – as its proper subject. From WIKI.

Omar the Owl wall clocks
Cute indeed. You can see one here.

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Me, I want a hula hoop
The lyrics to a popular Christmas song by The Chipmunks. A paragraph earlier, Tallis is descdribed as having a "sub-Chipmunk voice."

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Al-vinnn?
Another Chipmunks reference. A running joke throughout the Chipmunks cartoons is that the Chipmunk named Alvin is always late or screwing up. So he is often yelled at.

But Ricky, it's only a hat
An allusion to the TV show I Love Lucy, which often featured matrimonial dispute. Specifically, this line refers to the 1954 episode "Ricky Loses His Temper."

Smith & Wollensky
Smith & Wollensky is the name of several high-end American steakhouses, with locations in New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Columbus, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago, Boston and Washington D.C. The first Smith and Wollensky steakhouse was founded in 1977 by Alan Stillman, best known for creating T.G.I. Friday's, and Ben Benson, who later opened his own steakhouse at 123 West 52nd Street, in a distinctive building on 49th Street & 3rd Avenue (once occupied by Manny Wolf's Steakhouse). Many of the restaurants have a wooden exterior with its trademark green and white colors. The individual Smith and Wollensky restaurants operate using slightly varied menus. In 1997, Ruth Reichl, then-restaurant reviewer for the New York Times, called Smith & Wollensky "A steakhouse to end all arguments." From WIKI.