Word: cott
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...boarded a bus in Montgomery, Ala. "My only concern," she recalls, "was to get home after a hard day's work." When the driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white who was standing, she refused. From that spontaneous act of defiance sprang the boy cott of the Montgomery bus system, the leadership of Martin Luther King and, it can be said, the civil rights movement...
Phyllis (Susan Van Cott) has the most beautiful voice of any in the cast; though--as frequently happens in a G & S female part--it is sometimes difficult to understand her words. Iolanthe (Nancy Wilson) also has a lovely voice, though her acting is wooden and uncertain. The chiefs of the Fairy chorus (Patty Low, Patty Woo and Rozlyn Anderson) are all fine. One of the few flaws in the characterizations is Doug Morgan's portrayal of half-mortal Strephon. One always sympathizes with actors condemned to boring straight roles while others are allowed to bring down the house...
...genre never faded permanently. As Cott points out, rock musicians, like Donovan, dabble in variations of fairy lore; professors, like Tolkein, study the Silent Moving Ones; and Victorian imagination persists in the social and political satire of "The Wind in the Willows" or "The Wizard of Oz." Susan Sontag relates that the North Vietnamese Women's Union rehabilitated thousands of prostitutes after the liberation of Hanoi from France in 1954 by telling them fairy stories and encouraging children's games. "That," a spokesman explained, "was to restore their innocence and give them faith again in man. You see, they...
...Cott includes an almost intimidating photograph of George Macdonald, one of the most influential of Victorian writers. He has an imposing, theatrical head--with staring eyes, straight nose, and a massive white beard--a black cassock is draped over his shoulders and bound with rope at the waist. Macdonald wrote allegorical, spiritual fantasy in a language that can only be described as lyric and dignified. Archetypes people his tales--like Photogen, the "day boy" and Nycteris, the "night girl" whom a witch raised on "wine dark as a carbuncle, and pomegranates, and purple grapes, and birds that dwell in marshy...
Only one of Jonathan Cott's selections is disappointing. "Wanted--A King" reads like a cramped collage of Mother Goose rhymes. The author writes too stiffly and her familiar characters--Jack Horner and Mother Hubbard--detract from the narrative's originality. Unfortunately, this tale reinforces the "quaint" stereotype of children's literature with annoying passages on the order of: "She was most devoted to any baby; she loved the whole baby race, as every girl should do, and, in fact, as every right-minded girl does...