Word: offbeaters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Though he had to admit that he never got to Singapore on his recent 36,000 mile trip ("Perhaps I shouldn't tell you, but I believe the schools were rioting"), he whisked his young audience through 20 different lands, dropping offbeat bits of information on the way. The Seychelles, he explained, are "supposed to be the original Garden of Eden. They grow a double-ended coconut there that is supposed to be the original Forbidden Fruit. I'm not surprised. I tasted some. I think Adam was very ill-advised to taste...
After fiddling his way through the first movement of a Brahms concerto in Miami Beach, famed Violinist Isaac Stern, deeply annoyed by an unwanted metronome, insistent and offbeat, stalked off the stage, announcing: "That noise disturbs me. I cannot play with that competition!" His offending accompanist: a cricket that had taken up lodging in a nearby potted palm. After a five-minute search, workmen located the chirper, removed it so that Musician Stern, who had been mopping his brow backstage, could again return as solo soloist...
Quizman Nadler's success is a triumph of mind over manner. On the kind of show that hallows what it calls the "upbeat" personality, he is an offbeat figure: a small (5 ft. 4 in., 152 Ib.) man with an oppressed air, an uneasy smile and a cocky way of blurting his answers. His pronunciation is occasionally mangled, e.g., Joan of Arc was "beautified" in 1909. And his replies are so swift and sure, so full of extraneous details that come gushing with almaniacal glee that the show's producers feared at first that the show would seem...
Raffish characters and an offbeat setting can sometimes save a novel. This is what happens in The Fruit Tramp, a warm-hearted little first book about itinerant fruit and vegetable pickers who traipse along with the harvests. The orphaned hero, Polk Watson, leaves a Georgia farm to hit the picker's trail with his Uncle Chunk, a shrewd, garrulous, gallused cracker who proves to the hilt Author Williams' observation that "no picking machine invented can cup and coax a tomato free like the human hand." Polk grows up in a seedy world of depressing boarding houses, trailer camps...
...descended from the Maya gods and the lost tribes of Israel, but he is actually half-Mexican. He once flopped as the star of a roller-skating show in Italy. Now he is a skilled grease monkey in a ship's engine room, and this uneven, offbeat first novel begins when one of the count's shipmates takes him home for dinner on a shore leave in New Orleans in the early 1900s. The shipmate's sister Hilda, an ash-blonde icicle, melts visibly before the zany hothead. Casimir soon spills his top secret...