Word: charme
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...started to fool around with this marvel--it worked like a charm in my office!--my fantasies began to change. I decided that my first real test would be on the train. Why just the other day, over the course of a fitful hour, my sleep was disrupted by three different phones ringing to the tunes of La Cucaracha, Fur Elise and the Ride of the Valkyries. With the C-Guard secreted in my briefcase, I would lie in wait for some Valkyrie-riding nitwit to make my day. Just as my unsuspecting victim's phone trilled, say, the Mexican...
...know that you won't have heard of him. But if you're a baby-boomer, you probably knew someone just like him as you grew up in the '60s. Dr. Prinz was the music teacher at my elder brother's school. A booming, opinionated Austrian with mid-European charm, he was a frequent guest at my parents' dinner table in the '60s, where he would hold forth on the merits of Mozart and the contributions of Chopin...
...discovered them brash and raw, and without changing their music he shaped them and made them presentable for a mass audience that suckled on the television tube. No TV show in Britain (let alone America) would have embraced the leather-clad Beatles. The foppish suits and Olde World charm of that little bow at the end of each set sugar-coated the Beatles' jagged pill and made them irresistible...
...Viewing the film 36 years later is a giddy pleasure. The Beatles' charm is easy and still disarming. The visuals exactly match the springily monochromatic music that the Beatles were creating at that time. Each Beatle was defined with a persona that became enshrined as the capsule version of their true-life characters. John the irreverently impish rebel; Paul, self-aware and cute; George laconic and Ringo the down-to-earth lad next door. (It was Ringo who prepared himself for the spiritual trek to India by shipping out crates of English baked beans...
...with Queen Orontea swearing to stay faithful to her own freedom and never fall in love, but she soon finds this promise hard to keep. She becomes torn between the statements of her court advisor (Jesse Billett '01) who pushes her to follow reason, not passion, and the irresistible charm of her court painter (Jason McAdams, a New England Conservatory second-year Master's candidate), who is desired by every woman he encounters. Once this passion gets out of control, there is little that reason can do to reduce the chaos that ensues...