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- <text id=92TT1969>
- <title>
- Sep. 07, 1992: Guess Who's Busing Tables?
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Sep. 07, 1992 The Agony of Africa
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- PEOPLE, Page 71
- Guess Who's Busing Tables?
- </hdr><body>
- <p>By Ginia Bellafante
- </p>
- <p> Interested in making your life story more marketable to
- Hollywood movie producers? Here are some suggestions: 1) join
- the Mob; 2) become the focus of a lurid tabloid scandal; 3)
- infiltrate a bastion of patrician civility and reveal the ugly
- prejudices of the very wealthy. The last worked wonders for
- Lawrence Otis Graham, a successful New York City attorney.
- Graham, 30 and black, wanted to find out what kind of racial
- attitudes really prevail inside the white-picket-fence world of
- suburban country clubs. So he dropped Harvard Law from his
- resume and landed a job as a busboy at Connecticut's
- insufferably swank Greenwich Country Club. After a 12-day stint
- refilling popcorn bowls for the rich and racially insensitive
- (overheard during a conversation about nanny selection: "If you
- ever have to choose between a Negro and one of these Spanish
- people, always go for the Negro"), he told all in a New York
- magazine cover story, and the studios came running. Warner Bros.
- won the rights to Graham's story. Denzel Washington will
- probably take on the lawyer-busboy role. Says Graham: "I went
- out on a limb with this because I knew it would upset people."
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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