Word: oiling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nitze has devoted much of his life to public service in part because he could afford to. He came from a well-to-do family, and his wife of 54 1/2 years, Phyllis, who died in June, was an heiress of the Standard Oil fortune. In addition to having a few silver spoons come his way, he had something of a Midas touch. He was a wunderkind of the investment-banking world in the 1930s -- "the last man hired on Wall Street before the Crash," he says with a wry smile -- and later helped develop the Aspen, Colo., resort where...
...their haunches. One man, Gebre Yohanes Haile, 50, has brought along his chief resource: his ox. His family is sick with hunger, and so only he and the animal made the journey. Thus he will receive just one ration: twelve kilos of wheat, two of beans and two of oil. He will sell his ox for $200, and then pay $150 for 100 kilos of grain, twice the usual cost. "We have food for today," Gebre says. "I don't know about tomorrow...
...pennant-festooned high school gymnasium in the imaginary Midwestern town of Oil City, four musicians who grandly call themselves the Oil City Symphony have come together for a reunion concert. There is Mark the pianist and accordionist, a geek with glasses in a white dinner jacket and purple slacks who is also the minister of music at his church; Debbie the drummer, an ex- prom queen in a strapless gown who exchanges one pink pump for a running shoe, the better to thump her bass drum; Mary the violinist, of stern Scandinavian stock, uptight, humorless and "best remembered locally...
Musical humor is no joke to perform, but it can be very funny, and Oil City Symphony, now playing at the downtown branch of Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater, is very funny indeed. Whether grimly trying to keep up with the quickening abandon of a mock Hungarian czardas, or haplessly segueing from Verdi's "Anvil Chorus" to Iron Butterfly's In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida, or just getting down and funky with a little tune of their own called Beaver Ball at the Bug Club, the Oil City Symphony lets the good times roll, and in the process...
...this mock recital, everything is played for real. Seated on folding chairs on the gym floor, the spectators are treated as if they had been classmates in Oil City, and each night a different woman in the audience is -- surprise! -- showered with affection as "Miss Reeves." While it is easy to make fun of ineptitude, it's quite another thing to make it sweet and touching. When Debbie and Mary can get a seen-it-all, done-it-all Greenwich Village audience on its feet, unabashedly doing the hokey-pokey and, later, singing a tender, hushed chorus of Joseph...