Word: possum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...table ((LETTERS, Oct. 30)). Many of those people probably enjoy crab cakes or crab gumbo, made from the scavengers of our bays, to which the most putrid bait is attractive. It is a puzzlement. I've never eaten dog, but I have eaten escargot, crawfish, catfish, alligator, rattlesnake, possum and coon...
FLIP on the tube at 6 p.m. and you can catch re-runs of "The Beverly Hillbillies," a sit-com about a family of "poor mountaineers" who strike it rich and move to the West Coast. In their Beverly Hills mansion, Granny prepares 'possum for dinner while daughter Ellie Mae plays with her new brassiere, which she thinks is a "double-barreled slingshot...
...then there is Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber's extravagant musical adaptation of Eliot's book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). The smash show has been seen by some 25 million people in 15 countries and contributed more than $2 million in royalties to the Eliot estate. Purists shudder at such commercial success and its spin-offs. Says Critic Hugh Kenner: "Eliot wanted to connect with a popular audience, but Cats wasn't what he had in mind...
Gore, whose last-minute media surge obliterated the ill-funded Gephardt, could point to the six Super Tuesday states he carried as evidence that you can run for President and still get a good tan. But for Gore, who played possum while the others scrambled up North, his Southern victories could prove as evanescent as Bob Dole's I'm-one-of-you Iowa sweep. Few voters displayed any deep commitment to the still ill-defined Gore candidacy; even in states that abut his native Tennessee, Gore won much of his support in the final 72 hours of the campaign...
Lloyd Webber was on his own in his next project, an audacious attempt to set T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to music. He turned to the innovative director Trevor Nunn and the brilliant designer John Napier to transform his plotless feline frolic into the spectacular Cats. Nunn found that the increasingly confident composer's sense of musical structure was "fantastically theatrical" and that what Lloyd Webber required of his collaborators was "ways in which his musical conception could be given a narrative or some character validation...