Word: mask
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...selfishness: "I figured something like this would happen so I took a course and became a minister of the Universal Light Church Inc," one said. Others talked--seriously--of going to Canada, of going underground, of becoming conscientious objectors should the draft resume. But the personal motives mask a core of political beliefs. Americans may have forgotten about Vietnam, but it doesn't take much to remind them, and draft registration brings memories back to the surface. Exxon and Mobil will be distressed to learn that large numbers of America's youth think oil isn't worth dying for. "What...
...weeks of his life are run-on reminders of his inferiority. No luck. No chance. And of course-as a connoisseur of the hairsbreadth art of stand-up comedy will tell you-no respect. These components of Rodney Dangerfield's fractured comic mask form one of the unlikeliest success stories around. Dangerfield was a has-been even before he was anyone at all. "I dropped out of show business once," he often confesses in his act. "But nobody noticed...
...direct and suffused with melancholy, the poems were carried into the trenches of World War I by thousands of "lads," few of whom knew anything of the author-just as the poet wished. A Cambridge don who shunned any mention of his verse, Housman hid behind a late-Victorian mask of colorless propriety. The flamboyant London literary scene of the turn of the century left him cold. "He was like an absconding cashier," recalled Max Beerbohm. "We certainly wished he would abscond...
Biographer Graves (Lawrence of Arabia and His World) pierces that mask to show a man Max might have admired: a homosexual wrestling with his "curse," an atheist, gourmet, lover of nonsense verse and devoted companion to the few people he could tolerate...
...operator, and Tommy still dreams of the old days, when the rats would murder pigeons on the roof above his bed. No happy Miracle-on-34th-Street memories of his city childhood; instead, the central figure is one Dr. Frankfurt, the local dentist. "Frankfurt would just ram the ether mask over your puss and when you woke up there was enough metal in your mouth to set off the alarm at the airport. Then on the way out he'd hand you a lollipop to make sure you'd be back real soon. In fact, Frankfurt was the only dentist...