Word: freakish
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...freakish fringe of religion is changing so fast these days that fiction cannot keep up with reality. Last week ABC Television presented Can Ellen Be Saved?, a TV movie that depicted an aggressive, doctrinaire Jesus sect called the Children of Jesus. The fictitious sect was obviously a thinly disguised counterpart of the real-life Children of God, complete with a West Coast farming commune, buses that sweep into cities to pick up new converts, biblical aliases for the members and a frank affection for the money and property gleaned from converts...
Except for the rare and freakish abnormality, nature never violates the integrity of its forms. One cannot imagine, for example, nature grafting a giraffe's neck onto the body of a hippopotamus and topping it off with a chipmunk's head. Yet man, the born tinkerer, is forever fashioning hybrids out of his art forms. With reckless profusion, novels are turned into plays, plays into musicals, musicals into movies and vice versa. This is partly a matter of crass commerce, partly of dried-up imagination, and partly of pure madness...
...turned him down. Years later, apparently, she told him that when she rejected him she had just learned she was pregnant by another man. "I often wonder," Maugham is reported to have told a friend, "what course my life would have taken had it not been for that... freakish circumstance...
...given a battered desk close to the window of Variety's office just off Manhattan's Times Square and never changed it. He was rarely without the bow tie and sleeve garters he affected to look like Sime. He seemed to know every entertainer, the famous and freakish alike. A walk down the street invariably involved dozens of exchanged greetings and many an impromptu conference. He found time to coauthor, with Comedian Joe Laurie Jr., Show Biz: From Vaude to Video, an encyclopedic history of the business. He traveled constantly and kept up with entertainers all over...
...Teddy who gets the saddest and truest line. "We spend all our time trying to keep cheerful," he confesses during a break in the antics. Holding their freakish reality at bay is, nevertheless, a full-time job that draws heavily on the twins' seemingly endless store of hope. Perhaps its source may be found somewhere in that laundry bag, humming in D minor, under the bust of Beethoven. "R.Z. Sheppard