Word: alack
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...Lear on the heath: "Prithee, nuncle, be contented; 'tis a naughty night to swim in. Now a little fire . . ." Russia's new Lear, Nilcita Khrushchev, passed his 72nd birthday on the heath outside his dacha near Moscow. His family held a pleasant little party all right, but alack, the palace-controlled Soviet press had neither poetry nor prose to mark the event. To them, the king is dead. And when the old dictator lit a bonfire to celebrate, the heavens opened and the rains doused Nikita's flame...
...cheering throngs from billboards and placards. Everywhere he is trailed by admiring troops and adoring women. Yet Ambrosia is only the infantile country of William Steig's "Dreams of Glory." Clearly, Billy's imagination has been spoon-fed and molded from childhood by radio, telly, and newsreels: it is, alack, the imagination of his whole generation--as trite and enfeebled as the bourgeois lives around him. Chained in Alger-like dreams of limitless possibility, Billy never learns this fatal secret...
...pagan Realm is invaded by Crusaders. These last are happily exterminated, excepting a worthy Christian elder. Him, and his image of Saint Nicholas, the King puts to the test: the image must guard the royal treasure. But--three thieves appear, and make short work of the king's coffers. Alack, the elder is to be mishandled! Saint Nicholas makes haste, to convince the thieves of their error. The treasure is returned, doubled. All the pagans are converted. Praises are sung...
...corral. Instead of "a wood near Athens," Reeve's Dream is set on a Texas ranch in the 1880s, and the guitar-twanging players appear in Stetsons, bandannas and bustles (Hippolyta is an Indian princess in white buckskin). The dialogue is unchanged except by Texas tongues: "O naht! alack, alack, alack! Ah feah mah Thisby's promise is furgot...
...lonely men of Harvard; Alone, alas, alone, alack, are we! And that's the curse we share, It's the cross we've got to bear For our irrefutable superiority...