Word: awayed
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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While the audience in Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House waited & waited for the curtain to rise, they whiled away the time by reading in their programs an apologia-by Surrealist Salvador Dali himself-for the surrealist ballet they were about...
...loves directing, though he belittles it as "a lot of over-rated goings-on." His ability to keep things moving and get every last chuckle out of a funny line is based on pounding away tirelessly at details, and on an infallible ear for the rhythm of conversation. He will rehearse a play for 15 minutes without looking at the stage, only listening to the dialogue. Suddenly he will call a halt, take out one word which interrupts the flow. No actor has ever managed to ad-lib even a syllable into his lines without Kaufman's spotting...
Lacking the courage to stay away, he goes to all his openings (arriving with the ushers) and suffers through them. He hates first-night audiences-the swishiest and toughest gang in the world-and usually hangs backstage, "so I don't have to look at all those bastards out front." He is in a constant dither that his show will flop. After one opening that had the audience rolling in the aisles, the leading man found Kaufman crushed against a wall "looking a little like the late Marie Antoinette in the tumbril...
Father (Howard Lindsay) is a rigid reactionary who, to get his own way, turns the worst kind of anarchist. With all the convincing changeability of the weather, he blusters and blows and comes away emptyhanded, while his Vinnie (Dorothy Stickney) scoops up the prizes. Given to impulses and to oldfashioned, faintly apoplectic swearing, Father understands very little of the world, and nothing at all of his wife. He would certainly not understand, for example, why for stage reasons his family is shown, in the play, eating breakfast in the living room. "My God, Vinnie!" he would howl, "a gentleman eats...
White, Federal and Diamond T trucks, and most trucks made by the automobile companies, went on display downstairs from the gaiety of Chicago's regular Auto Show. Sixty blocks away at Navy Pier, National Motor Truck Show, Inc. (grumbling that Automobile Manufacturers Association had hogged half of its exhibitors) put on a technical truckman's exhibit of new monsters, eight-wheelers, trucks that do two things at once. Individualist Henry Ford played along with both; until the middle of the week he exhibited at A.M.A., and then he moved his exhibit to Navy Pier and opened again...