Word: beggarly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...refugee-swollen Shanghai a child collapsed on the steps of a building, too exhausted to unstrap the baby she carried on her back. As she slept, clutching a beggar's cup in her hand, the picture she made was a picture of Nationalist China itself. Last week the bad news that poured into Chiang Kai-shek's tottering capital would have exhausted even the strongest...
...setting, the plot, and the words were familiar enough to Londoners. For it was the same bawdy Beggar's Opera that John Gay had written more than two centuries ago. Unlike some others who had tinkered with Gay's libretto (Frederic Austin, Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington), Britten had followed it carefully, keeping to the squalor and backside-slapping of 18th Century London. The music, in its latest disguise, was something else again...
...Farewell. The travelers moved on via gay Shanghai (where, after celebrating, Perelman next day could swallow nothing but "a little clear broth made of Angostura, lemon peel, and bourbon"), the Malay States, and Ceylon. "The last we saw of India . . . was a wizened beggar signaling us frantically for baksheesh. When none was forthcoming, he threw aside his servile manner and, bounding beside our porthole, dynamically thumbed his nose at us until we outdistanced him. It was a touching, and somehow an apt, symbol of the amity between our two great nations...
Thus Does a Beggar. . .In Savannah, sensitive city officials felt compelled to announce that local fishermen would have to stop digging for worms in the cemetery...
...Rome passers-by heard a beggar cry: "Just for a few days more, please. After April 18, I will never need anything again." A good many Italians felt like the beggar, but they were wrong. A Communist defeat would not settle Italy's problems or eliminate the Communists from the Italian scene. It would merely give the West and Alcide de Gasperi a reprieve, another chance to do better...