Word: knockabouts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Playwright Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin (rhymes with rain in), a jazz saxophonist during his knockabout days, has managed this much. His novel is cast in the form of a onetime saxman's fond, moody reminiscence of the hard-blowing early '303. Jogged by a telephone call from one of his old partners, the narrator recalls the rise and fall of the combo they formed. The group begins as a trio, built around an astonishingly good young trumpeter. Then the saxman finds a pianist at a Harlem rent party, and the trio sounds even better as a quartet. Bookings...
...Kathryn Murray, 50, tops them all. Not content with behind-the-scenes power, Mrs. Murray plunged into TV herself as M.C. of her husband's show, The Arthur Murray Party. Without a smidgen of experience as an entertainer, she tried her hand at songs, dances, fancy patter, pantomime, knockabout acrobatics. The result is even more phenomenal: in seven years Kathryn and the show have become such hardy TV perennials that the bills are now footed by a sponsor she is not married...
...keen ear of a private eye for the giveaway phrase, Author Capote recorded the adventures of the Porgy company from the time they entrained in East Berlin to the première in Leningrad two nights and a day later. The result is an hilarious tour de farce, a knockabout comedy in which real bones are broken...
...notable trend this year toward ecclesiastical do-it-yourself. "Save up to 50%," J. Theodore Cuthbertson Inc. urges readers of Episcopal and Presbyterian magazines, "on Finest Quality Church Vestments with Ready-to-Sew Cut-Out Kits." Hopkins Co. offers Episcopalians a "Once-a-Year Opportunity-only 159 Poplin Knockabout Cassocks Reduced to $12," and Cox Sons & Vining advertises a "Utility Anglican Cassock" for $22.50. Priests would presumably be relieved to receive NOWILTEX clerical collars that "never need laundering," while those with large parishes would appreciate a "SACRA-KIT," the "portable sick-call set for dignity and convenience in administering...
...more than a question of manners. There is in much of our early fiction-in Fielding and Smollett, for example-a lot of rough-and-tumble, knockabout brutality, as much a reflection of its time as Hogarth's pictures were. But this new violence, with its sadistic overtones, is quite different. It is not simply coarse, brutal from a want of refinement and nerves, but genuinely corrupt, fundamentally unhealthy and evil. It does not suggest the fairground, the cattle market, the boxing booth, the horseplay of exuberant young males. It smells of concentration camps and the basements of secret...