"Happy Hour"

At the Home, to which Vera drives her aged mother when she is "on the Cape" and to which her mother otherwise commutes on the "old folks' bus" (Baker 1), the Williamses function within a reality that, objectively speaking, is neither threatening nor particularly uncomfortable. Indeed, the narrator Vera declares herself "fond of the Home, which has a good reputation; I like to think that getting my father into it was a coup" (Baker 1-2). The Williamses have no particular family angst to work through--none of that you-never-loved-me-enough business; they are all adults. Yet the whole effect of the story is to portray an experience of virtually no real comfort and little enough family feeling. Because the body of the paterfamilias has betrayed him into Parkinson's disease, none of them can control or affect the determinism of an institutional reality that his condition has bro

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screaming "doesn't bother me anymore," and she refers offhandedly to "the bed where Harry died" (Baker 3)--Harry being the erstwhile roommate of "Me Old Dad" (Baker 1). The screaming and the empty bed resonate not only with Vera's becoming inured to the normality of the absurdity of the realities of the Home but also with what is not ever directly stated--Bill's loss of the physical as well as psychic privacy and dignity that his own home could have preserved for him. This is not to say that "Happy Hour" is anything like a critique of nursing homes as a sociological and public-policy phenomenon. The closest that Vera comes to that is toward the end of the story, when she sums up her father's life as "not bad": "beautiful women to bathe and dress and toilet you, a man with a musical voice to feed you your puree, six ounces of cheap white wine with every evening meal." And then Vera adds, "Or is it?" (Baker 18). What should be understood is that despite everyone's good intentions--familial, institutional, even political--what is "not bad" about the Home can hardly be characterized as anything like positively good. The Home is not a wretched low-rent, patient-abuse warehousing facility but "handsome" and "gleaming" (Baker 1). Staf
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Aren't Baker, Bobbi Millicent, Dad Baker, Home Vera, Myth Sisyphus, , Home Otherwise, Bill Parkinson's, Violet Kennedy's, Alice Wonderland, baker 1, theatre absurd, family angst, williams family, esslin xix, myth sisyphus, baker 13, experience home, nursing homes, institutional setting,
Approximate Word count = 1613
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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