Word: callings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Behind a glass door near the entrance to every apartment house in Paris sits a well-upholstered Cerberus who can purr contentedly or breathe fire at will. She (usually it is a she) is the Parisian concierge. Parisians call her La Pipelette, after Mme. Pipelet, a garrulous character in a popular French novel (The Mysteries of Paris). Paris knows her well, courts her favor, dreads and cherishes her power and protection. Last week, La Pipelette's very existence was threatened, and with it a bittersweet slice of Parisian life...
...engaged to the young man upstairs have come regularly to La Pipelette for information about her tenants. They are answered in direct ratio to the generosity of the tips Madame has received at rent-collecting time, at New Year's and for special services. Even the Paris police call on her for information. During the war the Resistance used the concierge as a perfectly positioned spy. Allied airmen shot down over France were passed safely across Paris from one concierge to another till they found a chance to escape...
...phenomenon takes place in U.S. urban life. Business falls off in many a nightclub, theater-ticket sales are light, neighborhood movie audiences thin. Some late-hour shopkeepers post signs and close up for the night. In Manhattan, diners at Lindy's gulp their after-dinner coffee and call for their checks as they did in the days of the Roosevelt fireside chats. On big-city bar rails along the coast and in the Midwest, there is hardly room for another foot. For the next hour, wherever a signal from an NBC television transmitter can be picked...
Fifty miles off the north coast of Sicily, the dying volcano of Stromboli juts 3,000 feet out of the tepid Tyrrhenian. Italians call its five square miles l'isola nera (the black island), remember that in ancient days its crater was known as the gateway to purgatory...
...standards of art. "I am willing to break my neck," she told a reporter, "to do something new." After she had seen the Italian-made prizewinning movies, Open City and Paisan, she wrote Director Roberto Rossellini: "If you ever need an actress with a Swedish accent, just call...