Word: cannoneering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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John Bellucci's Macheath is frequently too endearing a rogue. Bellucci fails to put sufficient distance between Macheath and the audience, even when addressing them directly, as in the Cannon Song, a duet Macheath sings with Tiger Brown. Bellucci's classical, stylized acting makes Macheath an adventurer, a guise sympathetic to the audience. But the actor strengthens in the second half of the opera, after Macheath has made his decision to visit the whores on Thursday as usual, knowing the police are after him. He acquires the stature that comes with a man headed compulsively to his doom: Bellucci dispenses...
DIED. Edmondo ("Papa") Zacchini, 87, Italian-born circus clown credited with developing the perilous, modern "human cannonball" act in 1922; in Tampa. Zacchini broke his right leg the first time he used a spring-powered cannon to hurl him 20 ft When he came to the U.S. to join the Ringling Bros. & Barnum & Bailey circus in 1930, he had already designed compressed-air cannons that could send him or one of his six brothers flying 100 ft through the air, although by the time he stopped performing the stunt in 1934 he had suffered four other leg fractures...
...always been a basic ingredient of the Washington pudding. But it was far less dominant a factor in the years when the economy was expanding. There seemed to be plenty for everybody. Not so long ago, the budget process was left to eccentric men like Missouri's Clarence Cannon, who ran the House Appropriations Committee for 23 years. The clerks who helped him were anonymous fellows who lived in Capitol warrens...
Lobbyists and a few journalists knew their power, but Cannon and his moles went largely undisturbed while the great legislative whales like Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson talked high policy about testing hydrogen bombs, shooting for the moon or passing voting rights legislation...
...boyhood home of Monroe. Boyce was well suited to assess the small-town rhythms of Monroe, with its old courthouse dominating the square and its passion for politics; he was reared in the very similar town of Danville, Ill., seat of the legendary Speaker of the House Joe Cannon. Says Boyce: "Politics aside, I could understand why those who knew Helms as a youth still speak of him with a pride that is only a touch vicarious. Conservatism is deeply rooted in towns like Monroe. For Helms to be other than he is would be to renounce his heritage...