Word: pattered
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Socialism. Just how socialist is Britain's new government likely to be? While Wilson indulges in some ritualistic patter about Wall Street operators and Ruhr barons, he stresses science more than socialism, efficiency as much as welfare. Besides, a great deal of Britain is socialist for keeps, no matter who is in power. Coal mines, railroads and a segment of steel are nationalized already; the gas and electric industries are run by public corporations, as are airlines, broadcasting, canals and atomic energy...
...Material came from home too. When Ethel Merman sang the funny patter song By the Mississine-wah in 1943's Something for the Boys, she was singing about the river that flowed through the 750-acre property in rural Indiana, where Cole Porter was raised. His father was an Indiana fruitgrower, and his grandfather was a coal and timber baron worth $50 million. As a boy, Porter was a prodigy who was writing songs before he was ten. When he got to Yale (class of 1913), he immortalized the college mascot; Yalemen will remember him forever as the chap...
With a plastic rose in her teeth, she is suddenly Carmen, doing the Habanera as an English patter song, clicking castanets. "I have to get these adjusted," she says of the castanets. "One is male and the other female. To me, they look much alike, but perhaps you are more discerning than...
Creeping Crickets. Twice a day, usually in early afternoon and again at dusk, the warm monsoon rains patter down. The paddies of the delta are already flooded ankle-deep. Plodding patiently across them, in a tableau ancient as the land itself, peasants in conical hats and mud-caked pants thrust pale green rice shoots into the fertile soil beneath the water. And in the humid dusk, countless crickets sing out-or get themselves captured by small boys who sell them to gambling elders for cricket fights...
Veteran Edward Schmookler is a properly pompous Sir Joseph Porter. Strong in both voice and acting talent, he gets out the patter-song words clearly enunciated. Renshaw's solo to the moon in the second act is weak, but he amends it with a splendidly mincing portrayal of the "lower-middle class" Captain. Renshaw, Schmookler, and Miss Schechtman share the evening show-stopper, "Never mind the why and wherefore," which could have at least three encores...