Word: cocked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Communism is moving ahead on all fronts and will win a "complete and final victory" throughout the world, boasted Nikita Khrushchev last week. This cock-a-doodle-doo reflected his own characteristic buoyancy, as well as the pseudo-scientific Communist theory of inevitability. But the facts of world politics, A.D. 1959, make no such reflection...
Living with a son and a cluster of bodyguards in the Jaragua Hotel, Batista and his crew present a picture of wariness. One day last week the trigger-cock sound of a purse snapping shut in the hotel lobby made a group of his fellow Cuban exiles swivel around. Batista himself refuses to stand before an open window, spends almost all his time in his suite, scuttles out of the center of a ring of bodyguards only to eat. Trujillo's mouthpiece newspaper, El Caribe, outrightly told Batista to "get out," but he has nowhere to go. France last...
...Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (by Sean O'Casey) waited nine years to reach New York, and then turned up off Broadway. Written long after O'Casey's lusty, naturalistic prime, it is streaked with fantasy and symbolism. Its man-sized crowing cock is everything that Ireland, for O'Casey, is not-life-loving, joyous, free. Against his feathered friend O'Casey sets all his inveterate foes-ignorant old windbags, bullying priests, superstition-clogged rustics, tightfisted employers. Above all, a tyrannic Puritanism blasts the temptations of the flesh, makes war on warmblooded temptresses...
With its scarifyingly freakish weather, eerie sounds and collapsing houses, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy becomes at times a farcical free-for-all, as at other times it blares a propagandist freedom-for-no-one. Much of the writing, whether wrathful, lyrical or lowdown, has the true O'Casey tang. And despite symbols that are more like stencils and incidents too much like one another, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy has its amusing scenes and its fiery ones. Unhappily, in a quite un-Gaelic and ponderous production, there emerges nothing of the robustly comic playwright; the horseplay is elephantine, the darts...
...went to Europe in my junior and senior year. I went over in the summer and concocted a cock-and-bull story about wanting to be in the diplomatic service .... I wasn't in the diplomatic corps. The ambassador let me be in the embassy. Just t' see if I liked...