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Rumors Lost in Yonkers Jake's Women Laughter on the 23rd Floor London Suite Including the author's introduction: "How to Stop Writing and Other Impossibilities"
364 pages, Paperback
First published August 12, 2008
COOKIE: "I just don't understand why we're all wearing our best clothes to cook a dinner."– it’s otherwise pretty hard to beat this show as an example of Simon’s tour de force mastery of comedy-writing craft.
CLAIRE: "That's not your best clothes. It's a fifty-year-old Polish dress."
COOKIE: "A sixty-year-old Russian dress."
My talent is… used up. It doesn't keep filling itself over and over again, flooding the banks of your mind like the river Nile every spring. It dries up… cracks under the searing pressure of critics and readers who demand art, high standards, and enormous popularity all at the same time. I did, however, write eight wonderful {works} before the drought set in.As one who's seen both the original film The Goodbye Girl (Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss!!!) and the Broadway musical version (Bernadette Peters and Martin Short???), I can assure you that not only Neil Simon, but also composer Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) and lyricist David Zippel (City of Angels) have been put to better use. But it's still a shame a casual reader can't yet revisit these in print. Compulsive completist I may be, yet I find it reasonably galling that there's a full volume of his work as yet unanthologized. I hope Simon & Schuster aren't just waiting on the man to die. As my little foray into Simonology ought to demonstrate, a little obsession goes a long way.