The Easy Hour
A Novel of Leisure
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Welcome to the “Easy” life!
When overworked, underpaid women’s wear retail slave Lisa Galisa (the rhyming name is only the beginning of her agonies) suddenly becomes the personal assistant to an infamous Chicago socialite, she accidentally, hilariously, becomes the toast of the town. Catapulted into the role of trendsetter, this frustrated working-class girl seizes the opportunity to unleash some South Side mayhem on a gullible society that hungrily embraces the next “new thing.”
Lisa offers them the “Easy” lifestyle, encouraging her new crowd to shake it up and party alongside janitors, fry cooks, and bricklayers. Soon she has the upper crust patronizing dive bars, wearing cheddar-hued polyester, and grooving to the bewitchingly canned melodies of easy listening—the emperor’s new music. And the social set is having it.
But as the Bridgeport-born-and-raised charlatan begins to buy into her own fraud, longing to leave behind the land of retail hell and Polish “saah-sidges” for life among the beau monde, her eccentric family and a mysteriously handsome janitor with a penchant for astronomy dip into their own bag of tricks to keep her on the right side of sanity, if on the wrong side of the tracks.
Join Lisa Galisa and the rest of these charming oddballs at the Easy Hour, where they find the best remedy for a hard existence is a little easy listening.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like her first novel, Fat Bald Jeff, Stella's sophomore effort is a comedy of working life. Lisa Galisa (yes, it rhymes) sells sportswear at Chicago's Fishman's Department Store, where she seems destined never to earn the coveted brown senior salesperson name tag. She does get to play Maria Callas as part of a storewide Greek Islands marketing theme (catering to "the shipping magnate in all men"), just what she needs to take her mind off being mocked in print by society columnist Babbington Hawkes, just because she threw up on him at socialite Honey Dietrich's Halloween party (to which the Fishman's staff is always invited, in exchange for keeping quiet about Honey's penchant for buying half-price irregulars). Her luck changes, however, when her friend Fred Wysocki asks her to help launch a retro-themed "Easy Hour" that evokes 1960s jet-set decadence at the tavern that his Korean-Polish family runs in the working class neighborhood of Bridgeport, where Lisa grew up. The Easy Hour becomes a hit with Bridgeport locals and high society alike. Honey hires Lisa to be her personal assistant, and soon Lisa is planning an Easy Christmas party for the social set. She's also falling in love with science teacher Ray Fuchet (yes, it rhymes), who works as a Fishman's janitor during the teachers' strike and plays Aristotle Onassis to her Callas. The funny, raffish Lisa is a more likable, less self-absorbed heroine than the one in Stella's debut, and this sparkling novel probes the humiliations and class divisions of the workplace with intelligence and wit. 3-city author tour.FYI:Stella was a founding editor of the political and cultural zineLumpen, well known in the Chicago area.
