Word: corked
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...this comes off well," he continued, "people might be willing to try it again. Despite the troubles. We've had trouble getting in time with the orchestra. The orchestra sits on the same level as the audience, so all you can hear is the orchestra. And this room has cork walls and is lined with tapestries; it's dead. But the show should be well received. We've got lots of opera fans around here who aren't fastidious enough musicians to be put off by this performance...
When Irish Novelist Sean O'Faolain (pronounced O'Faytawn) was 20 and a student at the University College in Cork, he wrote a poem containing the phrase "Mother Ireland's teeming navel"; he was subsequently astounded, he recalls, to learn from a medical student that in the history of medicine "no mother had yet been known to eject a baby through her belly-button...
Withering Sirocco. In the city of Cork at the turn of the century, the O'Faolains were "shabby genteels at the lowest possible social level, always living on the edge of false shames and stupid affectations." O'Faolain's father was a police constable in the Royal Irish Constabulary; his mother was a farm girl, a deeply pious woman whose "religious melancholy withered everything it touched, like a sirocco." The ambition of both of them was to see their three sons reach "the highest state in life that anyone could achieve"-that of a Gentleman...
...writer's instinct was first honed at the stage door of the Cork Opera House, where every Sunday afternoon he witnessed "the arrival of forests, waterfalls, mountains, white douds, paneled halls, cannons and candelabras." Out of them he fashioned "highly emotional images of the Admirable Life," undisturbed by the fact that the stagehands who handled the props might be "Lazy Casey or Georgie Cantwell, who might, tomorrow morning, be holding up the street corner by the quay waiting for the pub to open...
...product of South Boston's melting pot ghetto, Cushing feels a Bostonian kinship to the Kennedys. The cardinal's father, after emigrating from County Cork in 1880, became a blacksmith for the old Boston Elevated. "We were ordinary people, but comfortable," Cushing recalls...