Word: chalkings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...against Hoad in the finals, everything worked. When necessary, Ken found he could command the net himself. His long, flat drives flicked baseline chalk so often that overworked linesmen seemed to make more errors than he did. He pulled Hoad up with sneaky drop shots. He sent him scurrying toward the baseline after deft lobs that his beefy blond adversary seemed to have forgotten how to handle. He ran Lew Hoad off the slippery green court...
...town that is still rude and crude. Cold westerly winds deliver a raw penetrating drizzle on one out of every two summer days. One night last week snow fell. Even so, cars churning through the town's main street-pridefully named the Boulevard-kick up clouds of chalk-colored dust; paved streets and sidewalks are still luxuries for the future. Chibougamau's population has shot up to more than 2,500 permanent residents; their new clapboard houses, many still unpainted, are crammed with the latest in electrical gadgetry...
...race. He had pored over his form charts like any careful bettor, studied past performances, and decided that Nashua needed every ounce of 132 Ibs. to bring him back to the field. He doled out his weights so carefully that even with the "big horse" gone, the chalk players had a pretty problem...
Thus there is Miss Madrigal, the newly-hired "companion" in the house on a chalk cliff, who acts very mysterious and displays a frighteningly detailed knowledge of gardening. Her quirks are perfectly accounted for in the last act, when her background is exposed and the play's pseudoallegorical meaning underlined. Laurel, the 13-year-old girl in the house, is impetuous, over-self-conscious, and neurotic in just the way one would expect from her family background. As she herself says, "My case is in Freud." Dominating the household is Laurel's grandmother, Mrs. St. Maugham, who typifies...
...having Miss Madrigal tell the grandmother: "You have not a green thumb with a plant or a child," the playwright tries rather painfully to impart some undue significance to all the gardening prattle that has gone before. I could accept the fact that raising a garden on chalk soil symbolized overcoming the obstacles of life, but any more detailed meaning seemed just too heavy for the dramatic structure to bear...