Word: bereft
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...cost $5 million to stage, it is heartening to see work as simple, spare and serious as Metamorphosis. One just wishes it were better. Despite an effective stage- acting debut by dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, the most ballyhooed highbrow event in the theater so far this year is all but bereft of emotional force. At the finale, two actresses stand rigid, their cheeks glazed with tears, yet much of the audience reacts only with uneasy titters. Director Steven Berkoff's highly stylized script and direction circle around the story, adding layer upon layer of ornament, when what is needed...
...scarce that 1 out of every 3 consumers obtains a ration card to ensure a supply. Now, however, everyday items like good shoes and toilet paper are also missing from the shelves. Shoppers in Moscow are queuing for laundry detergent, and last week the capital was virtually bereft of gasoline...
Well, at least they seem nice so far. Pat Sajak is the low-key, dryly sardonic host of TV's most popular game show, Wheel of Fortune. Starting next Monday, he will appear, bereft of Vanna White and those fabulous prizes, as host of the Pat Sajak Show, CBS's first late-night talk program in 17 years. Arsenio Hall, who co-starred with Eddie Murphy in the movie Coming to America, made his own TV splash as Joan Rivers' boyishly enthusiastic replacement on the Fox network's Late Show. This week he will rejoin the late-night fray...
Ironically, the success of the civil rights movement contributed to the continuance of the Underclass. The removal of many racial barriers allowed blacks who had made it to get out of the ghetto. This out-migration gutted the social structures of inner-city society, leaving neighborhoods bereft of a functioning middle class -- a middle class that once provided the neighborhood with shops and businesses and, more important, offered a model of workaday values that bound the society together...
...panic of a heavy smoker bereft of cigarettes speaks alarmingly of a physiological force at work that is more powerful than mere desire. Not long after taking up the habit, smokers become tolerant of nicotine's effects; as with heroin and cocaine, dependence quickly follows. Tobacco only seems safer because it is not immediately dangerous. Nicotine is not likely, for example, to fatally overstimulate a healthy heart, cause disorienting hallucinations or pack anywhere near the same euphoric punch as many other drugs. "People die with crack immediately," explains Alexander Glassman, a psychopharmacologist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute...