Popular Culture
These resorts have been the setting for movies such as Dirty Dancing, Sweet Lorraine, and A Walk on the Moon.
Characters inspired by Borscht Belt comics include Billy Crystal's Buddy Young Jr. from Mr. Saturday Night and Robert Smigel's Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.
The early 20th-century Jewish experience of vacationing in the Catskills was recounted in the graphic short story "Cookalein" by Will Eisner. The story appears in Eisner's collection A Contract with God.
The novel Marjorie Morningstar was about the same era and locale, but the corresponding film was actually made in the Adirondacks, rather than the Catskills.
In The Sopranos episode, "Unidentified Black Males", Tony Soprano lies to protect his cousin, Tony Blundetto from a murderously irate Johnny Sack, by claiming that Tony B. could not have murdered Sacks' friend Joey "Peeps" because the two Tonys were upstate, in Monticello, searching for Tony B.'s missing daughter.
Read more about this topic: Borscht Belt
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“When women finally get liberated, they’ll do the same that men do—dog eat dog— that’s what our culture is.... Not cooperation but assassination. Women will cooperate until they attain certain goals. Then one will begin to destroy the other.”
—Alice Neel (1900–1984)