Box Office
The first impression the box office attendants have of the customer determines their admission or the rates charged. The common practice at the box office is usually kids trying to appear older to watch films meant for an older audience. In this case, the customer looks older but he is at a disadvantage because he has to pay full price:
“The money was a reference to the movies. The Downtown Cinema has a special Friday night offer—half-price admission for high school couples, seventeen or younger. But the woman in the box office took one look at my moustache and charged me full price. Even when I showed her my driver’s license. She charged full admission for Cindy’s ticket, too, which left me practically broke and unable to take Cindy out for a hamburger with the crowd afterward.”
Mike’s Girls
The interaction between parents and their children’s girlfriends or boyfriends creates the basis for this imagery in the third story. Mike’s father gets to meet his son’s girlfriends over time and concludes that they all have the same attributes. For him this might not be such an overgeneralization since young people are usually not far apart in terms of their personalities:
“All the girls Mike brought home looked alike. Long hair and short skirts. Or long hair and hip huggers. They were polite and pretty and had been pumped full of vitamins from the day of their birth and had started keeping dental appointments at the age of three or four. They were all entranced by the same songs on the Top 40, and they wore the same cologne. They had similar vocabularies—words like gross and heavy—and they prefixed almost every sentence with like.”
Marriage Protest
The conflict in the “Protestants Cry, Too” is the differences that exist between a Catholic family and a Protestant one. The man’s family is protesting their son marrying a Protestant girl because of their religious beliefs. He vividly describes the reaction of his family after he delivers this news:
“My father took the news without expression, his doorway-wide shoulders hunched over the table as he chewed the blood sausage slowly and deliberately, but my mother flushed deeply, paled, looked at my father in horror and back at Armand in disbelief. My other brothers and sisters immediately set up a chorus of hoots and whistles, like a fleet of ships docking at Boston Harbor.”
Deployment
The common imagery is the military homecoming where the servicemen are wearing their attires as they are received with love. However, the sense of gloom when they go off to serve as they leave their families behind is rarely captured. The narrator describes this scene of the comrades leaving for deployment in their civilian outfits:
“The clock in the steeple of the Congregational Church in the square stroked the hour of nine and we listened to its echoes in the crisp morning air. The army bus stood at the corner and I was fascinated by its color, the olive drab giving an air of emergency to the gathering of people on the sidewalk. The fellows who were leaving for military service were not yet in uniform, but already there was a hint of the military in their bearing. A soldier in uniform paced the sidewalk impatiently near the bus.”
