Word: blacking
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Many Dutch villages have their St. Nicholases and Black Peters, generally two popular local characters who know all the children. By prearrangement with parents, they leave toys for good children or threaten to leave a birch switch for bad as they go from house to house. Especially naughty moppets are supposed to be terrified into good behavior when grimacing Black Peter threatens: "Unless you mend your ways, I'll carry you off in my bag to Spain!" According to one legend, Blackamoor Peter came from one of the ancient lands of the Moors...
Walter Reynolds, Young England's 88-year-old author, still takes his dead-serious play seriously. He went to the opening of the revival, a sad, reedy figure in a great black cape, doddered up the stairs to his box holding on to both handrails, sat tense through the uproar, at the end bowed to the audience, thanked them. Asked in a BBC interview whether he wasn't angry at the way audiences treated Young England, he answered: "No. They're a little noisy . . . but they pay as much as 10 and 6 for seats, so they...
...wearing Director David Wark Griffith, from $2,000 a week to a three-year contract at $4,000 a week, typed him for life as an acrobatic comedian. Grinning, he slashed, sprang and flew through such cinema classics as Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, The Three Musketeers, The Black Pirate...
Baldheaded, 51-year-old Baritone Friedrich Schorr of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera is a specialist in dignified Wagnerian Wotans. He almost never smiles. Last week, black-robed and bearded as Wagner's Flying Dutchman, he scowled his way through the second act, knelt with dignity upon the Metropolitan's splintery stage and prayed for his redemption. The prayer over, Baritone Schorr got up and, with a regal gesture, threw his black mantle about his shoulders. The gesture enveloped him in a cloud of dust from the Metropolitan's unswept stage. The audience guffawed. When...
...drifting into an era of journalese," warned Publisher Laughlin. "Let us oppose the principle of destruction with the principle of creation." Readers found a few contributions (notably a peasant tragedy by the late, great Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a passage about a prostitute-waif from The Black Book by the English Writer Lawrence Durrell) that seemed creative indeed, many more that seemed fashionably frantic in technique as in content. A section on "American design" was atrociously badly designed. Question: does editorship of such a publication demand merely a generous ear, or also an exacting...