Word: coy
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...effective smear has at its core an outrageous charge that would be devastating if true. The author must be both coy and cowardly: he must make the charge stick while retaining deniability. Although Goodin, Atwater's friend of a decade, took the fall, the tactic bore the unmistakable Atwater stamp. As Bush's 1988 campaign manager, Atwater specialized in character assassination: last summer Michael Dukakis was dogged by rumors that he had been treated for depression. In a similar incident in 1980, Atwater was managing the campaign of South Carolina Congressman Floyd Spence when a reporter asked Spence's Democratic...
...play Eleemosynary, are determined to be exceptional. The grandmother is a New Age visionary, the mother a science scholar blessed (and cursed) with total recall, the child a national champion speller who not only knows the shape of words but revels in their layers of meaning. (The play's coy title is a spelling-bee word meaning charitable.) Yet for all their brains, beguiling eccentricity and epic betrayal, the women are touchingly ordinary in matters of the heart. Every woman, and everyone who knows and loves one, will recognize too familiar truths in the dilemmas Blessing depicts: mothers who urge...
...pratfall pandemonium of the opening scene of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum makes one long for a full-scale Broadway revival. The dance suite of teen gang wars adapted from West Side Story actually benefits by being divorced from the original's cute, coy lyrics, which in life would not tumble trippingly from the tongues of underprivileged youth. The wide-eyed wonder of city life may never have been more vibrantly shown than among the World War II-era sailors aprowl in On the Town. The comic chase among cops, con men, thugs and bathing...
Much of the work, in fact, now seems an appendage to Warhol's most authoritative creation: his fame -- the meticulous construction of a persona vivid in its coy blandness, pervasive and teasing in its appeal to the media, and deathlessly inorganic. Warhol looked like the last dandy, right from the start of his public career. As the late critic Harold Rosenberg put it, he was "the figure of the artist as nobody, though a nobody with a resounding signature." This subverted the romantic stereotype of the artist -- hot, involved, grappling with fate and transcendence -- that American popular culture, and hence...
Fending off Michael Dukakis' belated counterattack, George Bush evoked Harry Truman's name almost as often as Ronald Reagan's. Bush was hardly coy about his reason. "My pitch here in the last days," he said in Louisville, "is to those good Democrats, the rank and file, the Silent Majority. There is a presidential candidate this year representing your vision of America...