Word: keys
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...cheerleaders' All-America seven (because that is the size of the average college squad) is chosen each year by Gamma Sigma, national college cheerleaders' fraternity, with the aid of sportswriters and sportcasters. Gamma Sigma has no college chapters, no fraternity house, no key. Its 900-odd members are divided into two chapters: Alpha (for All-Americans) and Rho (for also-rans). To become an Alpha and wear the All-America insignia (a shield with two crossed megaphones) is as great a distinction among cheerleaders as getting a Phi Beta Kappa key is to a bookworm...
...Key Largo (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by The Playwrights' Company) brought Paul Muni back to Broadway after seven years in Hollywood. It also proved to be Maxwell Anderson's most serious play since Winterset. When Anderson gets really serious, the dilemmas of mankind stiffen their doughty horns, philosophy flaps its aerial wings, Webster's Unabridged donates its longest words, prose ascends to verse, and there is a general intimation that the Almighty is in the throes of mapping out the universe...
...Key Largo tells of King McCloud (well played by Muni), who deserts the Spanish Loyalists when he sees their cause "betrayed" and doomed, and his own patrol about to be annihilated. To him this is riot cowardice, but the common sense of disillusionment; to his companions it still seems better to die for an ideal than live without one. Afterwards, though still believing he was right, King is burdened with a sense of guilt. The play does not, however (after the fashion of Conrad's Lord Jim), trace out the psychological consequences of King's desertion; instead...
Despite its grim situations, Key Largo is not realistic drama but a philosophical sweatbox giving the third degree to a question that has agitated every mind from Shakespeare's to the corner grocer's: Is life a mere vicious muddle, or are there things worth dying for? Unfortunately it is a problem not to be solved by all the logarithms of philosophy, but by the simple arithmetic of each individual heart. Anderson is determined to use logarithms. His people look inward, outward, up, down, in prose, in verse, in gestures, in glances, until every word they utter appears...
...dispute. But the sound playwright who long ago wrote What Price Glory? and Saturday's Children has gradually given way to a fuzzy cosmos-gazer. Anderson is the most flatulent and pretentious of U. S. dramatists because he seldom does justice to his grandiose conceptions. The verse of Key Largo will not stand comparison with such contemporary dramatic poetry as T. S. Eliot's or Archibald MacLeish's. So little feeling, indeed, has Anderson for fit words that his people talk like stilted schoolmasters as well as windy poets : a businessman, for example, refers to gangsters...