Word: awkwardnesses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Even in 1919, when Anna Gosko got her first look at him, Adolf Balaban was no matinee idol. He was an awkward, wistful little fellow with a flat face, jug ears, and old-country manners. He wasn't the smartest man in the world, either. He had been "over" from Poland for six years, had served in the U.S. Army during World War I. He had a laborer's job in a Brooklyn sugar refinery, but he could speak hardly a word of English...
Before the war, Tory conferences had been graced by exotically perfumed ladies, gowned as for a royal drawing room. This year, along the wide concrete promenade outside the conference hall, cheaply dressed men & women ambled with the awkward gait of country people unaccustomed to their Sunday suits. But the Conservatives still lacked the common touch. Even ordinary delegates spoke of "they" rather than "we" when they referred to the workers or the "poorer classes...
...inadequate. The episodes themselves are often skimpy and short-breathed; the minor characters are mostly not even wooden-just beaverboard. The many scenes, instead of serving as a flight of stairs to the great burst of emotion at the end, are like stepping-stones in a rushing stream, with awkward jumps between...
Agnes remembers herself as a plump and awkward little girl, who liked to scurry about the house, at the age of seven, imitating Pavlova. Her father, Playwright William de Mille (a brother of Producer Cecil B.), thought her imitation preposterous. Agnes could be anything she wanted, he said-except a dancer...
...Dear Guru." But the public also began to hear of an odd-duck Wallace who, in an awkward, headlong way, took up tennis and boomerang-throwing, who Indian-wrestled with an aide in his office between conferences. Before coming to Washington he had left his grandfather's Calvinistic Church, had had a look in at Catholicism and had finally joined the Episcopal Church. As an acolyte in cassock and surplice he regularly served at Mass. But now he had turned to Far Eastern mysticism. He became fascinated with a fork-bearded Russian theosophist named Nicholas Roerich, and later, when...