Word: gentlemanly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thursday, 10 p.m., Downtown Crossing, red line. Barely a dozen passengers linger at this nearly silent stop. A scruffy- looking gentleman zips up his guitar case. Sergei Alexeev heads home; there is seemingly no more money to make for the night. Rather than bless his crowds with songs of old Mother Russia and Stoli, this immigrant with a thick accent strictly sticks to the guitar. For three years he has played in subways full time. This 36 year-old hope to get noticed and eventually belong to a big-time band...
...Friday, 7 p.m., State Street, orange line. A synthesizer rolls out the accompanying beats to the tunes of a shiny chromatic harmonica and a lively voice. Michael Wright wears a baseball cap, a warm fleece sweater and a huge grin. Dating back to 1978, this amiable gentleman in his early 40s is a veteran of the Boston subway system--one of the original underground performers. A truly accomplished musician, Wright has played in several local bands and in venues such as the Wang Theater and the Berklee Performance Center. During the daytime, Wright supports his music career with "straight jobs...
...accumulated stories. My grandmother once collected several hundred dollars when she was misheard at the ticket window and given a trifecta she hadn't asked for, but which hit anyway. The entire Habib family got rich when an exacta combining Sweet Charlie (my father's nickname) and Texas Gentleman (my uncle then lived in Houston) defied long odds. I once made the mistake of playing an exacta straight instead of both ways, and was roundly rebuked. To each story was ascribed a moral: never correct a wrong ticket, always pay attention to the names and always box the runners...
What I didn't realize until hours afterward was that I had been practicing breaking joints on three women. We were the only four people there, and I didn't even have to turn off my "southern gentleman" switch...
...voluble and candid. He spoke of his college days at Yale, where he says he "worked hard and had a lot of fun" but also encountered an East Coast intellectual "arrogance" that annoyed him. He said he was furious when a stolen copy of his Yale transcript, with its gentleman Cs, turned up in print last fall in what he deemed "a violation of my civil rights," but then decided not to push the school to find the culprit. Making a smooth segue into foreign policy, he offered a nuanced assessment of Russia's acting President Vladimir Putin as "showing...