Word: gumption
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Evita is a spectacular eye-catcher, but it seldom gets a grip on a playgoer's feelings. For one thing, the basic tale has been too oft told. It is the familiar show-biz saga of a nobody from nowhere who, through wile and gumption, achieves wealth, fame and glory as a dazzling superstar. In the case of Evita, this tale has been telescoped and occasionally tampered with. Most of the key events happen offstage. They are described in song and dance and recitative, but not dramatically rendered, so the musical lacks the warming pulse of intimacy...
...others get beyond her. A really good horse has that look. It breaks their hearts to get beaten." In fact, Ruffian can be too competitive for her own good. "We can't even exercise her with another horse," says Whiteley. "It gets her gumption up and she races...
Only Sheriff Big Track Bascomb (Lee Marvin) has the gumption to stick his head out the window-generally the one on the side of his patrol car, in which he tours the county trying to keep the high crimes to a minimum. Breck Stancill (Richard Burton) knows a little better. A Southern aristocrat gone to seed, he usually stays inside his house on top of Stancill's Mountain, spending his days mostly by swilling Ballantine's Scotch and remembering a forebear who was strung up by the townspeople for being soft on slavery. Stancill lets blacks live...
Like the Chautauqua and Lyceum orators, Pirsig is an inveterate moralist. In common with Emerson and the other nineteenth century American Romantics he bemoans the predicament of manufactured man and extolls "self-reliance" and "gumption" and the kind of knowledge that is not to be found in books but only at the cutting edge of experience. But Pirsig also recognizes that "self-reliance" has become the philosophy of American greed and reaction and that the familiar Romantic exhortations about experience and immediacy do not penetrate very far into technology nor into its scientific underpinning. For him the problem is that...
...residents prefer to call it-is quiet and orderly; each member has his or her own room and is free to come and go at will. Says Michael Widmer, 32, a Boston journalist and founder of the commune: "At first we were kind of surprised she even had the gumption to come around. Most of us were a little cowed by her at first. There was some difficulty adjusting to an older woman. She seemed to everyone like a mother." Miss Luscomb, who never married, thoroughly enjoys communal life. "I have no living relative," she explains. "I have lived...