Word: kook
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...Congress, experts on violence and editorial writers almost universally urged him to cool his ardor for personal contact with the masses, at least until the frenzy, like the abated flurry of skyjackings, passes. "Mr. Ford is in effect baring his chest, sticking out his chin and daring every kook in the country to take another shot at him," Columnist Joseph Kraft protested. Even Betty Ford has told friends she hopes her husband will stay out of crowds and move faster when exposed. "The country needs him. The children need him. I need him," she told an intimate...
...American eccentric is no stranger to the U.S. stage. One thinks of such plays as The Time of Your Life, You Can't Take It with You and Harvey. The characters in those plays are part rebel and part kook, social dropouts, sort of sacred nuts. The tradition deepens in the works of playwrights like William Inge and Tennessee Williams. Their characters are not so much oddballs as odd souls who suffer psychic and sexual wounds. This is the world of the alienated self, the mutilated heart, the existential transient, moving a playgoer more nearly to tears than...
Fogarty & Co. is a sort of On the Road in the life of a kook. The narrative spans a three day bum weekend and interlude to a life that is itself something of a bum weekend. Fogarty, an Irish Catholic no account from Brooklyn is everything from a small time swashbuckler the's a deckhand on a tugboat) to a cult figure among the Radical chic He's also a dollmaker whose work even the Times has stopped to review. I Fogarty hates priests, quarrels with an incomplete slob of a white and lives with a Manhattan bound groupte...
...role of the kook in American drama is rather like that of the circus freak. He or she represents nature gone awry, a creature of bizarre habits, obsessive appetites, crazy compulsions. The kook has no claim on our common humanity unless he can be made endearing in some way as, for example, Elwood P. Dowd was through his affection for his invisible companion, the 6-ft. rabbit, Harvey...
...kook should not be confused with the person who has become strange through violations of the heart or the cruelty of others, the kind of being warped by fate that we find compassionately rendered in the plays of Tennessee Williams. In The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and to a lesser extent in And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, Paul Zindel aroused the hope that he might be a playwright in the Williams mode, one who could cast a kindly light in the dark corners of twisted souls. That is precisely the hope dashed...