Word: flea
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Interviewers who tried to pin down Sheldon Sackett found him as jumpy as a flea circus, and as vague as a summer breeze. He likes crimson shirts and flossy hotel suites, which he roams with Groucho Marxian energy, gulping strategically placed drinks of Scotch, nibbling toast, bawling into telephones, thrusting laploads of handouts on his visitors. The handouts range from his financial statements (sound enough) to his theories about what ails the U.S. press (mostly sound effects...
...Flea-Bag Years. When the library staff put on a show, Fred was ready. He had rounded up all his jokes and jugglery into an act. "I was a smash," Fred recalls. "They all told me I ought to be on the stage. The bastards. I believed them." At 17, he broke into Sam Cohen's Amateur Night circuit-50? a night. One night a noisy M.C. heckled him: "Where did you learn to juggle?" Allen tried his first onstage ad lib: "I took a correspondence course in baggage-smashing." Soon he got a chance to fill...
...hands." Since people insisted on laughing at him, why not be a comic and get somewhere-maybe even as high as the Keith circuit? Fred changed his billing to "Freddie James -The World's Worst Juggler," and headed for New York. The next year was a time of flea bags, dime dinners and very little work. After that, he traveled-and gained comic breadth. On a tour of Australia he developed a riotous "vent" (ventriloquial) act and a trunkful of stage tricks "to get laughs without doing anything...
Siphonapterology is not a finished science; there is still much to be accomplished. In the great U.S. West, there are still many flea species which have never been collected-for scientific purposes...
...Samuel 26:20. † Fleas also have their cultural aspects. For centuries, they have been used as entertainers in flea circuses. In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles sings of "a king, A lovely queen had he-But dearer far than queen or son. He loved a big black flea. . . ." Upon this item Russian Composer Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky based his Song of the Flea...