Word: polkaing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Speed Mad. At 7 a.m., in silk dressing gown and polka-dot pajamas, he padded down the hall of Laranjeiras Palace, his official Rio residence, to his one-chair barbershop for an hour-long ritual of shave, facial massage, manicure, interviews, English lessons, more phone calls. Ahead lay a morning of decisions: "I think you should get the Belo Horizonte-Brasilia highway ready by January instead of April. Why can't the contractors do it now and charge it to next year?" At 1:30 he ate a big lunch with his wife Sara and daughters Marcia and Maristela...
...sing the role of Minnie the barkeep. To help fill his cavernous outdoor stage, he hired a covered wagon and a troupe of horses from a 4-H club. And to avoid frequent scene changes, he transferred the action in Acts I and III to the outside of the Polka saloon, constructed a typical Hollywood false-front street-all of it heavily anchored down to prevent the set from blowing away in the waspish mountain winds that swirl into the amphitheater every evening...
...Polka-dot curtains brightened the windows, and red valentines fluttered from the walls. But there was only blankness or despair on the faces of the score of patients who shuffled one day last week into a recreation room at the Federal Government's St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, B.C. Schizophrenics who had been hospitalized for a year or more, they drifted silently in their own private worlds. One man was racked with uncontrollable tremors. Another lifted his head as if to hearken to inner voices...
...Beat Me Up." She started slowly, encouraging her patients to make hand movements in time to the music. To help them work off hostility, she put on a polka and danced from man to man, staging mock punching battles to the bouncing beat. "You can really beat me up," she cried breathlessly. "Yes, I can feel anger too!" After half an hour, everyone was trying to dance, even the tremulous man who could do little but rub his hands together. The session ended with a slow waltz that lulled the patients with a soothing, cradling motion...
Although she is most successful with schizophrenics, Dancer Chace works with all kinds of mental patients, twice a week goes into the wards. She allows her patients full freedom in dancing out their emotions (one woman smashed the record when an aide forced her into a formal polka). When a combative patient makes a menacing advance, she may win him over by sinking to the floor and smiling, to show that she is no threat. The breakthrough may take weeks, e.g., not until two months after she had asked one patient if he had studied dancing did he break...