Word: milquetoasts
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...company. With an accretion of under statements, Miles builds the universal tragedy of a family whose past consumes its future, that finds it far harder to acknowledge mistakes than to perpetuate them. His slow evocation of a vanished England is evident in the smallest vignette. For example: the town milquetoast (Norman Bird) appears at a charity show, blazes to life for one salacious song, then returns-almost with relief-to his eunuchoid role...
...little of either. In the end, Sir Gideon is forced to throw out everything except Askelon in a battle that is not so much pitched as rigged. Gielgud lends the part a tremulous, blinking dignity, but he can only play it the way Shaffer wrote it: as the milquetoast of human kindness. Like the devil, the devil's advocate has all the best lines, even if many of them are overwrought and overwrit. It is Magee's poet-haranguing, seducing, at once flailing out with and wincing from his own lash-who jolts the play occasionally into...
Within the fat man there may be a thin man, within the milquetoast a hero, within the bookkeeper a poet. Within every man, in any case, there seems to lurk an orchestra conductor - ready, at the sound of an 'A', to spring onto a fantasized podium in some glittering concert hall of the mind, drawing rich, powerful music from the players and bravos from an astounded audience. Few laymen get any closer to realizing this dream than wagging a finger behind their program notes, or surreptitiously waving their arms in front of their hi-fi sets. Last week...
...reader of the San Francisco Chronicle will tell you that Scott Newhall is not one of your milquetoast editors. There was, for instance, the night last February when a gang of white segregationists roughed up one of the paper's photographers covering a meeting about bussing schoolchildren. Next day, Newhall's anger exploded on the editorial page: "As of this moment we do not know the identity of these preposterous boors, but when we find out, the aging executive editor of this newspaper is going to do his best to kick their teeth right through the back...
Those who believe something can be done are, however, turning away from traditional areas of commitment such as religion. Harvard-based Lutheran Chaplain Paul Santmire, 29, finds that "these kids have been fed a Milquetoast gospel in a modern world; they view religion with a certain anthropological sophistication. Yet they are past Nietzsche, because they really would like to believe." More than 250,000 students are helping tutor children in depressed areas. A more immediately fruitful area for social involvement is the campus itself-a malleable microcosm of an existing and perfectible world. Harold Taylor, former president of Sarah Lawrence...