Word: pattered
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...another class, this one in U.S. history, the teacher keeps up a patter of jokes and badinage. A discussion of economic competition sends him off on constant tangents. "I've got to borrow some pens," he says, leaping up and racing around the circle of desks in the room. His point, although garbled, is that pen manufacturers must be careful not to overprice or their products won't sell. When a student volunteers that his Bic pen cost 39¢, it strikes the teacher as a revelation. "Really? Have they gone up that much?" The kids loll back, tittering. "Would...
...psychological patter of the '70s is as inescapable as Muzak and just as numbing: Are you relating? Going through heavy changes? In touch with yourself and doing your own thing? Are you up front, or just hung up and uptight? Boston Writer R.D. (for Richard Dean) Rosen calls it psychobabble, and in his new book by that title (Atheneum, $8.95) sees America awash in soggy therapeutic clichés. "One hears it everywhere, like endless panels of a Jules Feiffer cartoon," Rosen writes, "this institutionalized garrulousness ... this need to catalogue the ego's condition...
...would have been easy for Cole to fall into the role of dilettante, composing patter songs to amuse his intimates. Instead, as Alec Wilder observes in his classic treatise, American Popular Song, "the body of [Porter's] work shows clearly that he constantly sought to maintain a high level, not of social frippery, but of professional craftsmanship." Cole worked as hard as he played. Each morning he would sit down at the piano for three hours. When he went on a cruise he took-along with his tailored dinner jackets and crates of his favorite champagne-a piano organ...
...hotels. Sonny had his girl friend Susie Coelho in tow, and Cher, newly separated from Husband Gregg Allman, brought along the little ones, Chastity Bono, 8, and nine-month-old Elijah Blue Allman. "The show," says Cher, who glittered onstage in her beaded finery, "is just songs and some patter and the same old Sonny and Cher...
...year. An Evening of Bernstein passes over the contributions of his two collaborators, putting an unjust emphasis on Bernstein's lyric-writing genius. On the whole, this Evening at the Agassiz suffers from the inevitable comparison with Comden and Green. The two professionals knew how to put songs and patter together in a continuum; they had the ability to make the most rehearsed gesture appear spontaneous. But the spoken interludes in An Evening of Bernstein are only too obviously filler between songs. The audience--and probably the cast as well-will wish them over soon. Flynn and Smith are especially...