an to ponder death, how to go about it, how it would stop the pain. Then she and Art begin relations. She begins to have trouble sleeping, and at Jimmy’s one of the women tells her about sleeping pills. Hazel makes a train trip to New Jersey to obtain some of the pills. After a melancholy night at Jimmy’s she goes home and takes the pills. Nettie, the maid comes in the next morning to find Hazel lying almost dead in her bed. A doctor that lives in the building is called. After two days Hazel became conscious. She was sad and furious. She doesn’t want to be alive, and she was upset the doctor keeps her that way. Nettie tries to make her feel better, even comfort her, but in a way she doesn’t. Just like everyone else she tells Hazel, “you got to cheer up tha’s what you got to do. Everybody’s got their troubles.”(The Big Blonde) The Big Blonde illustrates a woman’s quest to free herself from the trap that society places her in. Hazel however, always finds herself back in the same situation she started in.The Waltz is a classic ironic Dorothy Parker story. A woman who is sitting casually in a restaurant/dance club is looking at a man who is dancing with another woman. She thinks to herself how she would never want to dance with a man like that. How he is the absolute worst dancer in the world, and she thinks of all the things she’d rather do then dance with him. Then he asks her to dance. She says she would love to, even though we know she does not want to. She begins to describe all the things she’d rather do like, take her tonsils out, and be on a burning boat late at night on the sea. She feels obligated to dance with him. They are rushing about the floor. She parallels this to American life and culture, “ Why can’t we stay in one place just long enough to get acclimated? It’s the constant rush, rush, rush, that’s the curse of American life.” ...
