Word: evenness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...lover looks astonished. "You seem to have a very nice apartment. Could I see it?" "Are you a little perverse?" the lover asks dubiously, but he takes his visitor on a tour. The sight of an old anniversary present in the lover's bedroom is too much even for the husband's reserve. He seizes a piece of sculpture, beats the lover to death, and disposes of the corpse like a sanitation man hauling away the weekend debris. The husband's fate is irrevocable, of course, but watching him along the way to his comeuppance is worth...
Like Philoctetes' stinking wound-a classical symbol of the relationship between art and abnormality-Orsini's back is the burden of his genius. It compels him to refine everything into art, including cruelty and murder. He even lays a beautifully cunning trap to secure an heir by mating his brother with his wife. Ironically, this perverted, successful stratagem restores his own potency. A brood of his own follows-including another hunchback...
...their share of laughs. But his very special gift was a capacity to turn body English into a complete, expressive grammar of feeling. From his bulbous nose and porridge face to his spindly legs, the controlled disarray of Lahr's features and physique could point up ludicrous resonances even in a simple hello. Lyricist Johnny Mercer once wrote Lahr: "This is the first time I've ever seen a performer do my material better than I meant it. You find laughs where the laughs aren't even there...
This chronicle is often retrieved from corniness by touching moments and memories that allow young Lahr to mold humanity around the trite-tragic skeleton that his father's life seems to have been. For instance, there is Lahr as a budding vaudevillian putting makeup on his collar even when unemployed so everyone will know he is in show biz. One is touched by the physical fact that his left wrist was permanently larger than the right from breaking repeated pratfalls. And a fine moment comes when a wino outside the theater holds out a dollar saying "Here, Bert...
...requires dedication and patience to follow the trail of Hind's windings and unwindings, though the reader's kidnaped hours are in the end handsomely ransomed. Along the way, it is often difficult to see de Forrest for the trees -even with, or from, what McElroy calls "Hind's height...