Word: plaster
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...rickety-looking stilts. Let one grey weathered house stand for the rest: Inside tall narrow stairs twist back up around a wide chimney. The room is hot and is smoky and full of that sweet sickening smell--like burning beans--peculiar to dirty houses with wood stoves. The plaster is cracking off the walls, revealing in places an old wallpaper from finer days, repeating and repeating a magnolia bordered portrait of your standard columned mansion house, through which irony we may fade...
...accurately, he walked and I stumbled, as I still felt the beneficent effects of my pitcher and a half of chicha. The burial ground was at the base of one of the smaller cliffs that shot up behind the village. Within a high, cracking adobe wall, crude blocks of plaster marked the rounded mounds that covered the bodies of the poor members of the community. The wealthier ones were placed in a miniature mausoleum, made of adobe, to the rear of the burial ground...
...shaped like a gargoyle, and a wooden scroll with Welcome All Ye Who Enter etched in red, tacked upon the molding. Inside a chandelier, tear-shaped bits of glass strung together in the form of a globe, dangles in the hallway; the walls are bumpy, like just dried mud plaster, broken by an oil painting of a girl in a red equestrian's uniform astride an auburn thoroughbred in a forest. The living roomis furnished in imitation gold-leafed Louis XIV, with mustard velvet upholstery and matching floor length drapes. There are three six-year-old portraits of the Rath...
...local or traveling craftsman. (By 1880 the mail-order and catalogue business was to change all that.) So folk art includes the minutely stitched embroideries over which the dutiful daughters of urban merchants strained their young eyes, no less than such humble ornaments as the chalkware statuettes cast from plaster by itinerant peddlers-of which a brightly spotted goat with striped horns and a Picassian leer (see color page) is one amusing example...
Over the years, store-window dummies have gone through almost as many phases as their garments. Early mannequins were sculpted from wax, and had a tendency to droop and drip in sunny display windows. Later came models of plaster, papier-mache and several varieties of more durable plastic. Though small boutiques balk at the idea of discarding outmoded dummies (average price: $300), most larger stores oust passe mannequins as quickly as last season's duds. But groupings, which can be easily rearranged into different patterns, may have a longer life than most individual mannequins...