Word: macke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With fingers lighter than a Luna moth's wings, Timothy Mack has spent 13 years spiriting wallets from the pockets and purses of Los Angelenos, an artful dodger's career that has been interrupted by 20 arrests and two jail terms...
...Mack's latest sentence is the law's ingenious tribute to his skill. When Mack was brought before Los Angeles Superior Court on charges of picking $15.11 from a woman's purse, Judge Richard Hayden improvised a sentence worthy of Dante's Purgatory. In addition to serving 20 weekends in jail Mack was condemned, for the next two years, to wear mittens any time he is in a public place. "The mittens," said the judge, "must be of a texture a least as heavy as 8-oz. duck." One might as well break Artur Rubinstein...
...optimistic and rigorous sculpture might well be engulfment by museums. It is not meant to occupy a sacred exhibition space, fenced by a rail-real or psychic. It belongs in the parks and streets, in a world of wear and tear and, above all, use -the way a Mack truck belongs on the highway...
This section of the book is good, gossipy reading. There are vivid cameos of Mack Sennett trying to spy on his writers; of Harry Langdon, the baby-faced vaudevillian, suddenly famous and going to pieces; and of Harry Cohn, the libidinous vulgarian who ran Columbia Pictures. It is the latter part of the book, when Capra returns to Hollywood from Army Signal Corps duty during World War II, that makes The Name Above the Title such a poignant reminiscence...
...there was a funeral, she could not go to bed until the last mourner had left; she was often wakened, she says, by rats as big as full-grown cats that (for reasons perhaps best left unexamined) lived in the mortuary cellar. At 16, Ann-Margret sang on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour but lost out to "a Mexican leaf player," and at 19 she turned up in Las Vegas. She had a firecracker energy and a hot, staccato style that could take your eye off a charging tiger...