We preferred Daddy's room, with its dark paneled walls and tough plaid sofa, where we could wallow and fight and never fear we were damaging anything.

Next to the blue plaid sofa where he is relaxing is a little bottle of sterile artificial tears.

For instance, in the living room, an American prairie desk, above which hangs a signed Miro print, has its back turned to Dutch black leather chairs and a gray plaid sofa.

A lumpy plaid sofa sits in the front office, across from a cheap metal desk.

There, Mr. Tesh settled on a red-and-white plaid sofa in the two-story living room.

The scene changed to what was clearly heavily edited footage as the heavyset woman, now wearing too much makeup of the wrong shade for television, was sitting on a plaid sofa and talking.

He walked with a limp owing to a fall he took at the race track, and slept on a brown plaid sofa in his street clothes in the dormitory's living room.

Bart sighed, leaning back on the overstuffed plaid sofa and resting his arms along the back in a pose that might have been relaxed except for the tension practically humming off his sinews.

"It feels like they're trying to kick us out of our home," says Maria Alvarez, a petite and perturbed Salvadoran, sitting on a brown plaid sofa inside her immaculate apartment.

Around us in the Trinity Episcopal basement with the thrift store plaid sofas are maybe twenty men and only one woman, all of them clung together in pairs, most of them crying.