Word: breathing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Saving her lungs for such important tasks as upper-register squelching of impresarios, Diva Maria Callas ordered no candles for her 35th birthday cake, instead plopped on the pastry one tiny light bulb, at the climactical moment puckered up for a symbolic breath, simultaneously pressed a button that throttled the glow. Explained her dutiful husband, Industrialist Giovanni Meneghini: "She thinks it's more modern...
...Europe in search of cane of the proper hardness, grain and color, maintains a studio where he spends dozens of hours a week whittling reeds to size (he uses as many as three reeds in a concert). The trick in oboe playing is to pay out supplies of breath in small, even quantities. This, says Ralph Gomberg, is a task roughly as taxing as "a strong man trying to juggle eggs without crushing them." Brother Harold is even more pessimistic about the ill wind he blows so good. "You have to have the tenacity of a bull." he says...
...complete reversal of the social hourglass, he lives with the daughter of his former porter. He is mocked and ridiculed. A kind of Suffering Servant, he does odd chores for his neighbors. One morning, in a Moscow trolley, he feels suffocated, tugs vainly at the window for a breath of air and dies short minutes later of a heart attack-buried alive, as the first-page parable foretold, for lack of the vital air of freedom...
...Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile. Fully powered with close to 370,000 lbs. of thrust, the 80-ft. beast leaped from its Cape Canaveral pad, rocketed off the Florida coast into the starry night and arched serenely over the moon. The Cape's missile watchers held their breath as, in shucking its booster motors, the ICBM blazed like a meteor 200 miles from earth; then it faded and seemed to hang for a long time, suspended, like a star-colored point, just below Orion...
...great leap forward," the Chinese Reds took as their primary slogan: "Overtake Britain in production in 15 years." and after revising production targets ever upward, claimed that by the end of this year China would have produced 10.7 million tons of steel-double last year's figure. More breath-taking yet was their claim that production of edible grains would soar to 350 million tons, 90% over last year...