Word: mania
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...best idea: Eddie Albert is a cocky, unsophisticated provincial with a talent for writing tunes and a misguided mania for hyper-sophisticated lyrics (Psychopathology, psychopathology, you're the girl for me, he yammers abstractedly, trying it on for the polysyllables). He is sure that all a songwriter has to do to panic Park Avenue nightclubbers is to write lyrics that insult them enough. But when the Big Chance comes, the customers don't see it his way and Eddie and his good friends Miss Edwards, Constance Moore and Gil Lamb are suddenly at liberty...
...aged, he became one of the county sights-a "tall, sad-faced elderly gentleman ... in an ill-fitting suit. . . blue spectacles on nose and an old cape. . . ." He lived to see his Rubaiyat become famous, but died (1883) a couple of decades before its fame became "a mania which swept the world" and posed a literary question that still engrosses Rubaiyat lovers : How much of Omar is Omar and how much is FitzGerald...
...Tempestuous Petticoat, one of the children, Clare Leighton, now a U.S. wood engraver, has set out to remember mania in all her Edwardian glory. Mama first fell madly in love at ten (with a window cleaner), published her first novel at 16, and believed until the end of her life (1941) that the secret of a ladylike complexion was cold water, lemons and dry oatmeal, externally applied...
...prize mania, which the magazine started by offering a reward for a name, is still on, though, as Miss Tinker offered a prize for the best short story script submitted for the next issue of "Radditudes...
...instruments of yesteryear-tubes of bone or wood attached to animal bladders or silk bags-were replaced by a formidable piston-&-cylinder device. An apothecary or doctor's assistant, marching through the streets with a clyster tube on his shoulder (see cut), became a common sight, as a mania for enemas swept France...