Word: pluming
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Jocelyn Davey is the nom de plume of Chaim ("Rab") Raphael, who has been an Oxford don, a Foreign Office functionary and spokesman for the Treasury, and is as volubly at home in the fleshpots of North America as he is among the ar cane outer reaches of literature, music and art. It is no secret that Ambrose Usher is modeled on Sir Isaiah Berlin, the high-wattage Oxford intellectual, government adviser and nonstop conversationalist. Sir Isaiah is 71. The ebullient Ambrose, of course, has the fictional hero's privilege of suspended birthdays. Or else cloak and mortarboard...
...wisest to focus on the two romantic couples in the action. If the course of true love never does run smooth, it traverses some pretty funny country. The play, dating from 1706, takes place in the sleepy village of Shrewsbury. Captain Plume (Brian Murray), a recruiting officer, has come to the place to rook and hook the local lads into military service...
...rake of renown, Plume stirs the love of Silvia (Laurie Kennedy), who disguises herself in male uniform and eventually hooks him. Plume's best friend, Mr. Worthy (Frank Maraden), is led a mad matrimonial chase by a haughty heiress named Melinda, played in an impish comic vein by Laura Esterman. Bumpkins, worldlings, gulls and wits populate the evening. Toward the end of the play, it becomes evident that Plume is not a womanizing gourmand, as he pretends to the world, but a moonstruck child of sentiment who has found in the chaste but frolicsome Silvia his true heart...
...months later, Pauline launched her own column in the San Francisco Chronicle, her nom de plume taken from Abigail in the Book of Samuel ("And blessed be thy advice") and President Martin Van Buren. Landers was miffed, to say the least. The sisters hardly spoke for several years. Coos Abby now: "We're so close." Admits a candid Landers: "If anyone had written to me with the problem, I would have said 'Forgive and forget.' " Despite the rift, both columnists flourished, piling up readers on five continents, giving opinions on everything from Thai singles bars...
...year 1980, with a coincidence so uncanny that Charles Dickens might have written it, not one but two Edwin Drood continuations appear. The Decoding of Edwin Drood (Scribners; $10.95) is written by Charles Forsyte, the nom de plume for a husband-and-wife team of British mystery writers. The Forsyte book picks up where Dickens departed but omits the preceding chapters. The reader is left with only the latter half of the novel, composed without the tone or richness of its predecessor. The reader might well sigh with Kate Perugini, Dickens' daughter: "In my father's grave lies...