Impressions of America:
Atlanta: An entire city surrounded by an airport.
Maine: Two men in plaid shirts snowbound in a cabin in the woods with a moose in the guest room.
Chicago: Four ward heelers in rented tuxedos meeting in an opera-house lobby during an intermission of Rigoletto to discuss the rising price of embalming.
Virginia: A group of beautifully mounted hunters galloping behind baying hounds in pursuit of a union organizer.
Oregon: Eighty billion gallons of water with no place to go on Saturday night.
Indiana: A mammoth basketball court with one hoop in Lake Michigan and the other in the Ohio River.
Philadelphia: A lonely widow, no longer young, composing an essay on Marlowe’s superiority to Shakespeare for publication in the Chamber of Commerce magazine.
Montana: A grizzly bear praying for the early arrival of cable television.
San Francisco: Marcel Proust editing an issue of Penthouse.
Florida: The complete works of the Marquis de Sade after being bowdlerized by Gerald R. Ford.
Boston: Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for finishing second in the Irish jig competition.
The New Jersey Turnpike: A man sealed in a metal cage has the complete writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, James Fenimore Cooper, Dale Carnegie and Edgar A. Guest read aloud to him in a metallic monotone by a machine invented by the telephone company.
Dallas: A custom-built limousine with a built-in table large enough to permit six millionaires to play Monopoly in the backseat en route to a revival meeting.
Iowa: Four Republicans meeting clandestinely in a cornfield to practice a Haydn quartet.
New York City: Two armed men strolling through yesterday’s battlefield and shooting the wounded fall into a heated argument about which of them is the nobler human being and shoot each other, but not gravely enough to deter them from continuing their work.
California: Four tennis rackets with expensive teeth-capping jobs discuss the latest thing in religion while being massaged beside a swimming pool.
Houston: The twenty-fifth reunion of an Ivy League class debating whether abandoning tweeds for ten-gallon hats constitutes a sellout is interrupted by the arrival of an oil tanker which pumps them all full of gold.
Cleveland: The Venus de Milo with the torso missing.
Las Vegas: Sammy Davis, Jr., lecturing Benjamin Franklin on the old American virtues.
Reno: A set of false teeth buried in the arm of a slot machine.
Washington, D.C.: Dinner at Lucrezia Borgia’s house with Tartuffe as the guest of honor.
The Grand Canyon: Zeus and Moses each telling the other, “And I thought I’d seen everything!”
Los Angeles: A car with an incredible bosom and a $50 hair styling auditioning for the lead in a new television comedy series about a hermaphroditic automobile that is constantly being pressured by friends to choose one sex or the other, submit to the necessary surgery and quit being an embarrassment to its neighbors.
Denver: A mad industrialist cackling happily over his chemical retorts as he dreams of strangling the Rocky Mountains to death in a noose of fumes.
Utah: Johann Sebastian Bach composing “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.”
North Dakota: Henry James with writer’s block.