SLPAD - 71 - badinage on a bed of disaffection

[Michael Bailey]

At the crowded bar, whom should they see but the conceivably virginal

…Baxter, trying to put the make on a girl whose date was already
               too drunk to want to fight about it. “Oh god,” Levine said.
Picnic looked at him.
               “Not to sound like Rizzo or anything,” he said, “but what’s
the matter, Nathan? Where
               is the old Sgt. Bilko type soldier we used to know and love?
Is the past beginning
               to close in or are you on the verge of undergoing an
intellectual crisis or what.”


            Levine shrugged. “It’s probably only my stomach,” he said.
“After all the time I’ve
               been developing and caring for this here beer belly,
something like those stiffs comes
               along and throws it out of kilter.”


            “Bad, I guess,” Picnic said.



Another media reference, to Sgt Bilko, played by Phil Silvers on TV from
1955-59.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0047763/

Theft, misappropriation of federal property, and the attendant necessary
misprision figure as comedic themes in these tales of a peacetime Army.

Warrior trying to morph into entrepreneurship? A salutary counter-narrative
saluting rascality & joie de vivre in place of perennial battle-ready
esprit de corps?


Picnic’s moved to lament a change in Levine, away from Bilkoesque comedy -
but not back into RA regulation belligerence - rather by Levine’s deploring
the spectacle of Baxter blundering into an unseemly attempt at amour.

Levine refers the problem to (Sartrean?) nausea from his afternoon’s
witnessing.

As they watch the college kids, “each trying to look at it as something
unusual
               and nothing they had ever been or would ever want to be part
of,”

who should arrive but Little Buttercup, offering to play “Spot This Quote?”


“I know a better game,” Levine said.