Word: bumbler
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...innate grace of a Hasty Pudding veteran. Director Tim Mayer knows, among countless other things, something of the deceptive nature of initial appearance; the show's greatness rests largely on his refusal to submit to seductive archetype. Those of you who know Bottom as a goodhearted if demented bumbler, Puck as a juvenile sprite, Theseus as a wise Shakespearian justice, or Hippolyta as a content and passive fiancee, are due for the nicest kind of surprise; for in troubling to treat A Midsummer Night's Dream to a "new adaptation," Mayer has restored to us a worthy (and terribly funny...
Reporters are encouraged to express their personal opinions. Hope, for example, wrote a column last week suggesting that Romney may not be quite the bumbler the press makes him out to be. "One might ask," he wrote, "whether Governor Nelson Rockefeller is a simpleton because he winks and says...
...sick mind who, like the Marquis de Sade, lent his name to the glossary of psychiatric terms. This first English-language biography by a journeyman translator and biographer (Pushkin, Brighter than a Thousand Suns) tries hard to deal coolly with its subject, but Sacher-Masoch was such a bumbler that the reader cannot take him seriously. The poor fellow was really a kind of romantic, who always hoped to find the worst in women and hardly ever did. He was born in 1836 in Galicia, then part of Austria, the son of a police commissioner. His early books were histories...
...last and out of doors, he is a dear, incompetent bumbler, forever picking a spot in a high wind for a game of cards (the solution: a magnetized playing board and card deck for $10). He is equally inept at the barbecue, getting mixed up about the orders for broiled steaks-for which he needs a $4 branding iron to remind him which should be rare, medium and well done. Making the martinis is also a struggle: to solve the how-much-vermouth problem there are Martini Stones ($3), to be soaked in vermouth, then dropped into each glass...
...Benny Profane, a schlemiel (the Yiddish word for chronic bumbler), is the novel's antihero. Shouts of triumph or yelps of protest are not for schlemiels; Benny's conversation is limited to "What?" and "Wha." The alligators come into it when he arrives in New York after a Navy hitch-the liberty scenes in Norfolk are done with loving verity-and needs a job. So he gets one shooting alligators for the city. This keeps him in beer, and more he does not need. He sleeps in the bathtub of a West Side apartment belonging to the Whole...