Word: pits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...novel the whole publishing world is buzzing about! . . . Exposes the commercial snake pit of the book world where power-hungry men and love-hungry women struggle for survival and fulfillment." So say the ads. Actually, The Brain Pickers is a shoddy novel by Hallie Burnett, wife of Author Whit Burnett, that reveals very little about the publishing business, although it may start a sort of human Tangle Towns contest as to the possible identity of its leading, characters...
...caravan of eight vehicles circled to a stop in the morning fog that lay on the floor of the open-pit Minnesota iron mine. With swift precision, the coveralled men of the launching crew lowered an eight-foot metal capsule-an elongated vacuum bottle-to the crater floor and attached to it a gigantic (280 ft. high), pear-shaped polyethylene balloon. Within the capsule, a balding Air Force space surgeon named Dave Simons stirred impatiently in his tight little world...
...Gateses, things quickly go from bad to hideous; Laura tosses a glass of Scotch in Tracy's face, and Tracy, rising to slug her, falls to the floor, dead of a heart attack. A repentant Laura kneels and prays that he be restored to life. While a pit chorus explains what is going on, three legendary miracles are enacted at one side of the stage: an Italian Renaissance woman finds her dead child coming back to life, a Scottish lass sees her cow revive, and a German soldier of the Thirty Years' War exchanges his own life...
...audiences at the Bayreuth Festival have usually focused more on the props than the performance. But last week at the festival's curtain raiser-a new Wolfgang Wagner production of Tristan und Isolde-all ears were sharply tuned to the sounds coming out of the concealed orchestra pit. There Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, at 34 perhaps the most gifted German conductor to emerge since Herbert von Karajan and the youngest ever to conduct at Bayreuth, was making his most important operatic debut...
Augsburg Apprenticeship. The solid routine of conducting he learned after the war as assistant conductor at the Augsburg Opera (where he also occasionally tinkled the triangle in the pit). In 1953 he tried out (with 64 other applicants) for the job of music director at Aachen. With a piano score Sawallisch prepared Aachen's cut version of Tannhäuser, learned on his way to the podium for the last act that a 20-page cut had been restored, sailed through the intricate music at sight without a bobble. He was promptly hired...