Word: impromptu
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Premier Félix Gaillard summoned newsmen to an impromptu conference one night last week and greeted them with a broad smile: "Gentlemen, good news at last. A corner of blue has opened in the sky for France. We are delivered from the nightmare in which we have been living for many months." Gaillard had just learned that his emissary Jean Monnet, France's most famed advocate of European unity, was coming home from Washington bearing $655 million in credits...
...spot. By the time Act II's libretto called for Corelli to draw his sword in defiance of Christoff (who played Philip II, Don Carlos' father), both singers were ready to fight. They drew, and Verdi was forgotten as the prop swords swished with real abandon. The impromptu dialogue was splendid: "Criminal! Madman! You're trying to disembowel me! I'll crack your skull!" Winner: Corelli, who got only a scratch, sent Christoff sulking off with a bloody hand. Boomed the basso later: "He was standing too close; simply to make him draw back, I touched...
...thousands of viewers in the Los Angeles area, station KTTV's impromptu 90-minute crime show last week was better than the big networks' M Squad, Dragnet or Highway Patrol had ever been. Instead of Lee Marvin. Jack Webb or Broderick Crawford, they saw two real hooch-soaked hoods with six hostages as they held out in a tense siege by 150 real cops and FBI agents in an Inglewood dive just outside Los Angeles...
...hundred miles northwest of overcrowded Rio de Janeiro, in airy hills 4.000 ft. high on the edge of Brazil's vast jungles, forty city planners sat at a dinner table spread with snowy linen, and one of them recited an impromptu toast to progress in building Brazil's new capital. A year before, when they landed at the site, they found just one adobe hut. There now, nearly complete, stands a six-story hotel. 500 houses, and famed Architect Oscar Niemeyer's flowing, two-story Presidential Palace, resting on 20 arched concrete columns. Chugging ahead night...
Sometimes Roosevelt's fighting was impromptu. Frederic Almy, his class secretary, recalls that during a torchlight procession in the Hayes-Tilden presidential campaign a bystander on the sidewalk said something derogatory. The impulsive Teddy threupon, recording to Almy, "reached out and laid the mucker flat...