Word: amateurness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...audience chose a celebrity victor, Magician Harry Blackstone, who beat out the bigger names like Dick Cavett, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole and Actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. "I hate magicians," noted Sherrill Luke, a judge from Los Angeles, "but this man was very amusing." Forty-three hopefuls entered the amateur contest, fondly known as the Hal Holbrook Speaking Ladder because the actor who makes $20,000 each time he impersonates Mark Twain was discovered there. Nine contestants made it to the finals, where Edythe Bregnard, 63, the "Pixie Poet" of Sun City, Ariz., gave the winning speech, a whimsical look...
...carnival-like atmosphere of Webster's 19th century lecture tours is recaptured during the five-day convention, where the audience chooses a winner from among both the celebrity and the amateur speakers. At one of the numerous parties, Cleo Dawson, who will not give her age but is recognized as the eldest I.P.A. member, sat beneath a flower-bedecked hat and shouted encouragement to various contestants. "Hello, honey," she yelled, "you were wonderful last night." Turning back to her table, Dawson got serious. "There are no second-raters, not here. They're all artists." Her favorite lecturer? Says Dawson: "Myself...
Speaking careers can be catapulted into orbit at the I.P.A. convention. Last year's amateur winner, Joe Schwartz, 74, of North Hollywood, Calif., now lectures for $1,000 a shot. on how to beat retirement. The exiled monarch of Tunisia, King Rechad al-Mahdi, 38, was virtually unknown when he spoke soporifically about the need for a constitutional monarchy two years ago. But an enterprising agent now gets him $2,500 for a lecture called "A Royal Saga." --By Amy Wilentz. Reported by Alessandra Stanley/Washington
After graduation, Shish plans on joining a mariachi band and playing viola in an amateur orchestra. Although graduation is a few months away, Shish has a full slate of performances ahead of him right here at Harvard which include playing viola in the Gilbert and Sullivan Players’ production of “Princess...
...Amateurs begins as straightforward coverage of the manic scramble for a handful of spots on the 1984 U.S. Olympic rowing team: "It was not a celebrated event ... no tickets were sold, and the community in which it was held, Princeton, New Jersey, largely ignored it." But a subtext soon makes itself apparent. Within a few pages the book becomes not merely an examination and celebration of one of the few authentic amateur sports. It is also a close analysis of addiction. For these rowers are, to a man, driven, single-minded, type-A combatants who make better companions...