Status Updates From Collected Stories of John O...

"Mr. Winfield could see more of her face, and he found himself asking, 'I wonder if that child really likes anybody.' Well, that was one way to be. Make the world show *you.* You could get away with it, too, if you were as attractive as Miss Farnsworth...She had spunk. He bet she knew what she wanted, or seemed to, and no matter how unimportant the things she wanted, they were things she wanted, not someone else."

Mmm, this homemade cocktail, Crusher w/a splash of Pernod...

"Because wolf means predatory...Wolf's a new word since [Mother's]day. I think she thinks anybody that goes around with a lot of girls is a wolf. That isn't what wolf means, necessarily. A wolf---is out to make a score, just for the sake of the score."

"At your age, love comes to *you,* plenty of it. You don't have to walk thru moccasins for it." 1945/47

Doctor's orders. "You'd better limit to two a day, Mr. Spring. None at all, if you can do without them. No brandy. No golf. I don't want you to drive a car or gamble or run upstairs, and try to keep your temper and don't get in quarrels with people. No more making speeches. From my information, Mr. Spring, you'll go right on doing as you please about women, but common sense should tell you..." 2 stories, 1946+47

" 'Sure, I know him, but that doesn't say I *approve* of him.' 'Naturally. Then why didn't you go to *him*?' 'That's easy. I wouldn't like to ask him for anything. I don't approve of the man, at least as a politician, so I couldn't go & ask him a favor.' 'you're not one of our team, but yet you'd ask me a favor. I don't get it.' 'You didn't get here you are by not being able to understand a simple thing like that.' "

Youthful dalliances + teasing via tennis matches, confusing age references, and creepy, manipulative cops being suggestive to girls

"Through the summer, being with your own bunch, you did not think much about being young or old or anything. But when the fathers started to go back to town, and young married people, only the mothers and the young boys and girls were left, and it made you remember that you were young."

What an imagination on this girl.

"There was always something about that first whiff of New York air...But that was an irregularity, and for a year there had been no irregularities in her life, not even such a slight one. Then when she arrived at the hotel that slight irregularity had been followed by a major one: just as she was approaching she had had an almost overwhelming impulse to register under a false name."

Now I figure out the dating formatting I'm used to from past reads---dates of the stories are attached at the end of each story. 'Now We Know' (1943), a story of a playful, teasing, transitory relationship of banter and 'J-o-x---jokes' between bus driver and bus rider.

"It wasn't that Mary was a lazy girl. But she likes a good time, and when you live a four-dollar taxi haul from Times Square are likely miss out..."

"It got so, after a while, after going to so many schools, that you recognized the difference between being 'wanted in Somebody's office' and 'Somebody wants to see you.'...Roberts didn't know why this difference existed, but it did, all right.
. . .
Roberts, from his years of experience, recognized it as torture tactics. They always made you wait to scare you....even used to it..It was sort of like the third degree.

A short story further along, The Friends of Miss Julia, about a salon worker getting deathly sick and a fellow salon worker making friends with a patron, getting taken out to establishments on Wednesdays. Focus on conversation.

"
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A middle story, 'The Girl From California,' a short story about a famous couple from New York visiting family at a gathering in Renton, NJ. Not that it really does, but the dialogue definitely sounds like a Woody Allen film or a Hollywood script. It's mostly just family and friends small circle dynamics, mostly between wife and husband and father and son. Decided upon it at a local microbrewery, indie bookstore buy.

These stories are from O'Hara's later period, in the early 1960s. He seems to be obsessed with wild women and tough men.

O'Hara is good at characters and dialog, for people he is familiar with, mostly white people in the East. I'm currently reading "Imagine Kissing Pete," about a man who becomes a sexual abuser of his friend's wives. The response is typically old-school: Don't tell my husband, don't invite us to your house and I won't invite you to mine. This leaves the victim isolated even from her own husband.

Very old-fashioned.

Well written but three stories so far have used The Infamous Noun (n-word). I guess that's how they talked in early 20th century New York.