Word: calabash
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...tousled white hair quivering rhythmically, his ruddy, jovial face radiating glee, Alexander Calder was beating a steady tempo on the African tom-tom. Swirling around him, clanging a Mexican calabash rattle, clattering a huge Swiss cowbell, tinkling a melody on dangling wires, were his friends -writers, painters, musicians. A gentle breeze delicately spun the forest of mobiles hanging from the ceiling of the Connecticut farmhouse. Suddenly "Sandy" Calder stood up, walked outside past sentrylike steel stabiles, shuffled to a nearby creek. Staring at the soft, easy ripples, Calder exclaimed: "Look at those tiny waves, circling, soothing, yet so much alive...
...bush village of Bokouélé, the ancient Kani Eyobélé was dying, so he called his sons around him; the instructions he gave them were minute and terrifying. As soon as he died a calabash of palm wine was to be broken in the yard of his hut. Then in Eyobélé's open grave a white cockerel was to be beheaded and released. If the headless, fluttering bird flew out of the grave it was well: the dead man was on his way to the upper regions. But if the bird stayed...
...forest-girt village of Kirawara, 48 miles north of Nairobi, an awe-struck crowd of 2,000 Kikuyu tribesmen squatted in the market place amid green bananas and calabash gourds, clapping their hands to their mouths to signify their proper respect for "Big Magic." A spindly-legged youth, thought to be a hopeless deaf-mute, had suddenly started prophesying that "God would arrive in Kirawara at one o'clock." Attracted by the commotion, a British-led patrol of Kenya's African police came crashing through the jungle, intent on arresting the prophet as a mouthpiece...
...radio & television shows, Jimmy Durante lowers his voice to a hoarse throb and murmurs, "Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are." Who Mrs. Calabash may be, nobody knows, and Jimmy won't say. His friends like to believe that his airwave salute to her symbolizes the Durante character: grotesque tenderness beneath the mask of a public clown...
...house, at least in the stiff, sterile, museum sense. It look's like the home of a traveling tinker, cluttered with gadgets, junk and such craft objects as an old cradle scythe, an Algerian blanket, a tom-tom, a coffee table made from a square sheet of aluminum, calabash rattles and rattles made of beer cans filled with pebbles. Somehow, Calder's wife Louisa keeps the place livable, and their two children play happily among the mobiles...