Word: gately
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gars and Goyles, is treading near the edge of the Inferno with his creation. A loose musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the fall production of the Radcliffe Grant-in-Aid Society suffers the fate of many similar musicals that break from the gate with fast scores, only to get bogged down in the backstretch with a muddy script. Borowitz's music and lyrics are undoubtedly first-rate, but his book is simply ridden with too many stale jokes to carry the action. As the playwright's first effort, perhaps, the play succeeds; but taken...
...passion owed much of its three-year Broadway run to theatrical devices that cannot be reproduced on film. Strip the stagecraft away, and all that remains of Equus is 2% hours of talky debate about shopworn ideas. The poor play stumbles and falls before it can break from the gate...
Bate has ignored none of these peculiarities, but what fascinates him is Johnson's temperament. By "storming the main gate of experience," Bate writes in a typically vigorous formulation, Johnson managed to resist his own failings and acquire mastery over "the dark, bewildered prison house of the isolated subjective self." His life was a series of afflictions: childhood illnesses that left him half deaf and half blind, recurrent episodes of near insanity, a career at Oxford that ended after a year because he could no longer afford the tuition, marriage to a woman 20 years his senior who died...
What do you say you woman so worried about your grade-point average, what do you say to this man who's not had a conversation in so long that his phrases creak and jar into sentences like a gate on rusty hinges, what do you say you woman whose family has paid their tax-deductible contribution to worthy causes every year, what do you say you woman who's been lectured since you were small never to talk to strange men, this kind of situation spells rape--or an obituary in The Globe more likely...
...justify the New York Times, which, having been slow out of the starting gate on Watergate, gave the front-page spotlight to Lance even on days when there was no story about him that deserved such treatment. There is a difference between pursuing the facts and going after a man. The end also did not ennoble William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter turned columnist who seeks to establish-with the repetitious use of labels like Lancegate -that all politicians are as shabby as Nixon. Cheap-shot comparisons are an old and dubious journalistic device: as if two people who share...