Word: hissing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...directed by Joe Calarco. The setting is a regimented boys' school, where four students march onstage, recite their Latin and math lessons and then embark on an impromptu performance of Romeo and Juliet. They play all the parts, provide the sound effects (pounding fists, stomping feet, a slow hiss when a character dies), and manipulate the show's single prop: a red silken fabric that serves as, among other things, a shawl, a sword and a vial of poison...
...Scare reached national prominence with the accusations of Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, against Alger Hiss, a former top State Department official. A young Richard Nixon helps to keep the accusations in the news, culminating in the discovery of the "Pumpkin Papers," microfiche hidden in Chamber's pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm...
After the second Hiss trial, Luce said he didn't want Chambers back at the magazine. Some of his friends, citing his forthright testimony in the trial, thought he should be allowed back. But Luce said: "A converted Communist on the staff? That's fine. But a man who spied against America?" Much as he admired Chambers as a journalist, he couldn't tolerate that...
...bearing the news that God has just impregnated her (you can see God in the background, as invasive and patriarchal as could be), seems to have fairly burst into the room. A cat, scared witless by the angel's irruption, bounds away, back arched--you can almost hear it hiss. The painting is funny and reverent, gawky and vernacular and dreamlike, all at the same time. Hence its modern appeal...
...Whittaker Chambers (Random House) Historian Sam Tanenhaus rights an old imbalance in this scrupulous biography. For more than 40 years, most discussions of the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers affair focused on Hiss: innocent, as he claimed, or guilty, as Chambers charged? But of the two, Chambers was by far the more interesting person and tormented soul. Tanenhaus' perceptive illumination of Chambers' life also lights up a dark, troubled period of American history...