Word: raffish
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...some raffish first-act comedy, and very fitfully thereafter, when Wendy Hiller and Franchot Tone give urgency to O'Neill's clouded scenes, or give a face to his sense of lostness, A Moon stirs to life. But mostly it lies dead; and something a little too decent in everyone's basic motives makes A Moon soft as well as enfeebled. There is no tumble and toss of sick, bitter, angry, thwarted, even petrified emotions. Everywhere there is a sense of O'Neill's honest compassion, but nowhere is there anything incandescently imagined or inextinguishably...
From Manhattan's studiously select swankery, the Stork Club, came notice that hefty (circa 260 Ibs.), raffish TV Comic Jackie Gleason had been tossed out on his leer. With him went his blonde companion of the evening. Complained the Stork's Boss Sherman Billingsley: "He was drunk and rowdy, and the girl was even drunker. We don't welcome that caliber of person as a patron." Wailed Gleason: "I thought it was a joke...
...Raffish characters and an offbeat setting can sometimes save a novel. This is what happens in The Fruit Tramp, a warm-hearted little first book about itinerant fruit and vegetable pickers who traipse along with the harvests. The orphaned hero, Polk Watson, leaves a Georgia farm to hit the picker's trail with his Uncle Chunk, a shrewd, garrulous, gallused cracker who proves to the hilt Author Williams' observation that "no picking machine invented can cup and coax a tomato free like the human hand." Polk grows up in a seedy world of depressing boarding houses, trailer camps...
Somehow, it all results in a happy ending, and on the way there, the reader passes a raffish gallery of secondary characters: the Ivy League gangster, Junie Neidlinger; the Boy Scout Congressman, John Kaffey; the carnival hustler, Chick Samstag (who was so cynical that "the failure of tomorrow's sunrise would not have astonished him"). But Author Norris writes with more love of buildings than of people. Rhapsodies to the 20-story "thing of beauty" created by Jeff Hanes run murmurously through the book, and the Tower, though defaced by the years and its occupants, never becomes as caitiff...
Hearing of the cows to be found, more Puritans came from Europe, not all sparse of speech and life like the first. In South Boston Thomas Morton came and shortly gathered up a harem of Indian women and a band of raffish followers. "They also set up a May-pole," says William Bradford, "drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather) and worse practices." Morton was finally exported at twelve shillings cost which was divided among Boston's citizens...