Word: chameleonic
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...With chameleon ease, the citizens of Verona and Milan alternately declaim Elizabethan verse and belt out pop lyrics in this Guare-Shaprio adaptation of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona. It's a good humored celebration of love, in which all's well since it ends well, despite a farcical dose of treachery...
...novel brew that contained cells from the lung fluid of cows and serum from fetal calves. In effect, the formula fooled the parasite into acting as if it were in a natural host. Yet trypanosomes are exasperatingly fickle creatures. After they invade humans or cattle, they show a chameleon-like ability to change their protein coatings, whose molecular structure serves as a precise signal to the host's immune system for the production of specific antibodies against the invaders. As the immune system begins mustering appropriately shaped antibodies against the trypanosomes, the parasites change their coats and force...
...elects to tell almost nothing. "I'm constantly play-acting," he says with unusual self-consciousness during an interview with Ivy Compton-Burnett. "Here, with you, I begin to talk like you. When I'm with a Chicago hoodlum, I talk like him. I'm a chameleon." This free-floating identity comes with the territory that Terkel long ago carved out for himself. Through sheer unobtrusiveness, he has become a man after Henry James' dictum: one on whom nothing is lost...
...Tomlin's characters reflect one or another of her chameleon shades. Some emerge straight out of a working-class background and her memories of growing up amid the plastic totems of the '50s. Indeed, everything about the '50s seems to have a kind of magic for her, and in conversation, as well as her act, she returns to those years, as if drawn by a magnet of nostalgia. Lily's family came from the Kentucky hill country, but like many impoverished Southerners, her parents moved north to Detroit during the Depression. She was born there...
Blye himself is something of a chameleon. He is 42, with a pleasant, forgettable face. It is in some of his convictions about how to do the job that fact and fiction touch. His wardrobe includes "an FBI outfit" - blue suit, white shirt and red tie ("It makes people want to stand up and salute"). His car is filled with hats of all styles - deeply valued props. Another prop consists of a wife and two children. The Blye family drives up to a house and, as the detective notes, "even subpoena-shy people are usually helpful to a man with...