Word: fortissimos
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CONGRATULATIONS to you 180 newly commissioned Midshipmen of the 4th class! To you go our stores of sympathy and advice during this adjustment period while your cars are not yet accustomed to Hanson's fortissimo, nor your stomachs to Cowie's food. To convince you your future is not quite so dark as our billets since the lamps were given to you, we offer the following advice, now immortal; "Don't worry, boys, don't worry." And that is sound advice, as sound when Dean Smith first gives it to you as it will...
...feature of Dorothy Donegan's swing piano playing is her footwork. Newcomers at Elmer's Cocktail Lounge sometimes swear that she has a drum concealed under the piano. She has not. That incessant triple-fortissimo thud that punctuates Dorothy's improvisations comes simply from Dorothy's ample feet, hitting the floor boards in loud, unconscious ecstasy...
...Razzle-Dazzle. Andrew Higgins stole the march by using a double dose of Kaiser's own technique-rough & tumble action plus fortissimo publicity. Right after Higgins lost his ship contract, he raised enough rumpus to start several Congressional investigations, to snag thousands of headlines, and convince many people that he was a victim of the Maritime Commission. When things slowed down Higgins bought full-page ads in leading newspapers, boasting "World's largest builder of boats...
...Bismarck with his treble voice, his shifty diplomacy, his forged telegrams and his lust for conquest; under the vain cripple, Hohenzollern, who was, himself, the slave of the half-crazy Ludendorff, who so loathed Christianity that he worshipped Thor and Odin." After getting his breath, Orator Duff Cooper continued fortissimo: "But never did the face of Germany assume so villainous or vile an aspect as under . . . this little gang of bloodstained, money-making murderers [the Nazis]. . . . Hitler says the whole German people is behind him. I for one am prepared to take him at his word...
Since the old Hellzapoppin was played fortissimo, no term exists to express the racket made by the new one. It is all the panics in Wall Street, all the riots in lunatic asylums, all the election nights in Times Square, all the Fourths of July in history, and all the alarm clocks in the world going off at once. But aside from its lustier detonations, it is pretty much the same show. Lena still wanders up & down the aisles calling for Oscar, the little flowerpot whose owner won't claim it still grows by stages into a gigantic tree...