Word: polkaing
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...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...
...Ferrari, Racing Driver Mike Hawthorn, 29, was all that hero-hungry Britons could ask for. His big body hunched in cramped cockpits, his face set in a ferocious scowl, their Mike was a throwback to Battle of Britain fighter pilots -a carefree daredevil with unruly flaxen hair and polka-dot bowtie. In eight lusty years, lead-footed Mike punished cars, survived six serious accidents -and last October became the first world champion in British racing history. Two months later moody Mike abruptly retired from racing, said: "I can't properly explain all the reasons, even to myself...
...That cat over there in the polka dot vest. But just between you and me, I think he's a little square; he's not with It. Let's get the party rolling...