Word: amateur
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...movie's only problem is that it is too American, too comfortably nested in our native illusions. The glorification of the amateur and contempt for the professional are as old as Jefferson and as new as the push for term limits. Jefferson Smith, with his army of Boy Rangers, must be Ross Perot's favorite daydream. Militiamen and others who suspect the government and all "elites" of conspiracy or collusion will find confirmation of their views here. A whole race of phonies can be undone by one "genuine" American. "And a little child shall lead them...
Raitt had discovered folk music as a child in summer camp, listening to the tunes of Pete Seeger '40 and Joan Baez. She taught herself the guitar from the age of 12, and by the time she got to Harvard, she was ready to play amateur blues...
While a writing career never entered her consideration, an affection for opera singing, nine years of voice training and participation in the theater at Harvard and Radcliffe did lead to some amateur acting as well as an appearance in the first successful summer musical circus in New Jersey...
DIED. MANUEL ELIZALDE, 60, unfairly maligned Philippine official or rogue amateur anthropologist, depending upon whether his "discovery" of a primitive tribe in Mindanao is to be believed; of undisclosed causes; in Manila. No savage seemed nobler--or more unreal--than the bare-bodied Tasaday, whom Elizalde introduced to the public in 1971. When journalists found in 1986 that these simple, food-gathering folk had traded in their leafy loincloths for jeans, T shirts and baseball caps, skeptics charged foul play...
...half-time teacher, an amateur. It is the lifers who hold up the citadel, they who remain in the dusty stillness of the classrooms after the kids have tromped out. Amid the riot of The Nutty Professor, Eddie Murphy caught that look--all knowledgeable, all wistful, hopeless within his own superiority. Everything he makes vanishes except his size. As he chalks one line of an equation on the blackboard, his belly erases the other line. He is a visual fat joke. But he has something to teach them. He takes them seriously...