Word: coltish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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McMurtry has a fine time with youthful damnfoolishness, and so does the reader. The young Rangers are randy and daft, and so coltish around women that, as in Lonesome Dove, they refer to sexual congress as a "poke." Call and McCrae survive by dumb luck, though it's not clear by adventure's end that either has learned a dime's worth of sense. In fact, they are still...
Only briefly does Beauty become affecting, when Belle and her captor, a prince transformed into a sort of buffalo, fumblingly get to know each other. Terrence Mann finds coltish gawkiness in a lumbering leviathan and suggests a new reason why the myth has endured. When the beast stops slurping and growling and starts thinking of cleanliness and manners, he evokes the civilizing process boys go through in adolescence as they discover girls. Mostly, though, the characters seem even simpler when played by actors than they did as cartoons. The costumes that help them resemble a candelabrum or a clock also...
...stooped to watch coltish first-years frolicking in the Yard during last weekend's reprieve from winter. Perched on the cusp of real accomplishment, they were insolently unconscious of their power. This twentysomething resolved to savor this place and time. It won't be coming my way again...
...proud public man, used to cosseting. Candida's fail-safe feminist speech enlivens the otherwise kittenish and cloying Broadway debut of Mary Steenburgen, an Oscar winner for Melvin and Howard. But the real joy is watching fellow film star Robert Sean Leonard (Dead Poets Society, Swing Kids) as her coltish adolescent admirer. He brings quiet reality to the most extravagant talk and gawkily comic gestures and makes one think the play should be called, after him, Marchbanks...
...Sulzberger is 40 going on 60 one minute, he can be irrepressibly coltish the next, leaping out of his chair in his 11th-floor office with its view of Broadway on the slightest pretext: checking with his secretary on whether he calls his father "Dad," "Punch" or "the chairman" (in public, it's "the chairman"); grabbing a book by a management guru he admires; pointing out the stand-up desk where he reads the paper at 7 each morning. At a birthday party at the 300-acre family estate in Connecticut (where the family dogs have their own memorial park...