Word: penchant
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Charlie (Wallach) is a failed vaudevillian; Harry (O'Shea) was a scoutmaster until his penchant for boys was discovered. On a cheerless Sunday evening in the dismal London suburb of Brixton, they are in their barbershop giving each other the full tonsorial treatment. This Sunday is particularly cheerless, since Charlie has been summoned to trial for "impersonating a female" in a club known as the Adam's Apple, and may face a jail sentence. Since the confrontation never does take place, the play's electricity is static: tingles of apprehension but no real voltage of menace...
...TOURIST TRAVEL. The President wants a $500 million drop in the $2 billion-a-year payments deficit caused by the U.S. penchant for globetrotting. He not only urged Americans "to defer for the next two years all nonessential travel outside the Western Hemisphere," but also promised to ask Congress to put teeth in the ban. Most likely: a head tax of $100 or more per person per trip. If Congress enacts effective curbs, the $14 billion world tourist industry, among the largest ingredients of world trade, will suffer quite a jolt. Some 3,000,000 U.S. tourists spend...
...trust. Johnson's official verbiage tends to be dull, and though he can be pungent and forceful in private, his public charisma is just about nil. He doesn't always look entirely "sincere," and he can't always. His effectiveness has been blunted by his all-too-familiar penchant for secrecy, gimmickry and deviousness...
...State Department, officials commend TV for its taste in "the invasion of battlefield privacy," but deplore the penchant of correspondents for overplaying each skirmish as some kind of turning point. Only recently, in a rare turnabout, CBS characterized the battle of Loc Ninh as simply the recapturing of a town that was overrun by the enemy, while ABC more correctly described it as one of "the greatest American victories...
...chaos" of contemporary life-jangling telephones, whirring machinery, blaring car horns-can make him physically ill. He has been known to get off elevators before arriving at his floor because he found the "treacly tripe" of Muzak so grating. Dubbed "the Phantom" by musician friends because of his penchant for withdrawing into secluded rooms to commune with his gentle-speaking instruments, he would be happy to spend most of his time in the placid surroundings of his country house in Wiltshire, about 75 miles from noisy London...