The Thanksgiving dinner includes her
next-door neighbor Lillian Kite, a 70-year-old widow who is "a dear soul, but tiresome." And there's Myron Kleinschmidt, a former pupil of Agatha's who is now their district's congressperson and a calculating sort who has earned her vote only three times in his seven congressional campaigns.
When
next-door neighbor Jimmy Freeze shares some of the weed Tess's dad has sold him, their subsequent lovemaking opens Tess to all the pain she's been repressing: "...
Then Alec, Greta's husband, informs Britt that her sister was killed in a house fire, but their 11-year-old daughter Zoe was saved by the
next-door neighbor. Britt goes to Vermont for the funeral and winds up staying to solve the mystery surrounding Greta's death.
But look even closer, and the unpredictable comedy-drama morphs into something even more surprising:
Next-door neighbor, retired military officer Colonel Fitts (played with defensive rectitude by Chris Cooper) harbors an unhealthy obsession that his teenage son, Ricky (Wes Bentley), is getting a little too friendly with Spacey's muscle-building Lester Burnham.
His mother is given to fits, his father is a philanderer, his older sister is a distant satellite, his
next-door neighbor shoots herself to death in the garage and her husband may be in the Mafia.
Other, truly transformative agents of Western influence, such as Pope John Paul II, the labor union movement, international commercial institutions, and the influences of
next-door neighbors like the Federal Republic of Germany were at work.
We're just these two quiet guys who are your
next-door neighbors and work hard."
Make sure that you don't miss a word these
next-door neighbors have to say.
Hattie's
next-door neighbors, who help her survive, include a man who is German, so the persecution comes close to her, even threatening her own home because she refuses to turn her back on her neighbors.
Sometimes my words have come back to haunt me, like the time my
next-door neighbors interrupted my gardening by shouting over the fence, "Ruby does it in the bushes," inspired by a column on my youthful travel to Cuba and Brazil.
I think it's our custom of treating the dead like
next-door neighbors temporarily on vacation that gives those who aren't Catholic the grue about relics.
If there's anything subversive about the play, it's that Silver assumes a world in which gays and lesbians are sufficiently ubiquitous and so accepted that they have entered the pantheon of comic types to be made fun of, alongside ethnic taxi drivers and Jewish
next-door neighbors.
