Word: rapt
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Preaching was once the beating heart of Protestantism. John Knox could hold a congregation rapt and on its feet for three hours, and Jonathan Edwards used to keep the attention of New England Congregationalists for a good two hours at a stretch. Today the model of a modern minister is expected to occupy the pulpit for a scant 20 minutes of a Sunday and put in hours on end as an amateur psychiatrist, sociologist and group-activities organizer. Yet there are still a few top-notch preachers around to keep the Protestant tradition alive...
...Hollywood nightspots. Nothing but an ailing script can keep him from sleeping nine hours a night, and he is hard at work every morning at 8 o'clock. In his spare time he stares at motion pictures, often "stopping them and backing them up" to engage in rapt inspection of every last optical effect and lap dissolve. In five years, he has read only one book (The Caine Mutiny), but few films, good, bad or indifferent, have escaped his coldly appraising...
...rapt audience at Baltimore's Goucher College, Novelist Carson (The Member of the Wedding) McCullers streamed through her consciousness, trying to tell the strange tale of how she and Playwright Tennessee Williams converted Member into a Broadway hit one summer on Nantucket Island. "Ten's not a cook and I'm not a cook, and the house kind of went to pieces," recalled Carson in a kind of far away tone. "We ate mostly pea soup with wienies in it, I guess, and the cat had kittens on my bed. There were milk bottles and whisky bottles...
Sarah Bernhardt, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Taft visited The Hights to pay their respects to California's poet laureate, but it became notorious for the succession of girls in their teens and 205 who stayed there and left rapt testimonials. Samples: "I was his Empress and the Hights was our Empire," "Joaquin was such a wonderful lover." Fearing for his own women relatives, Ambrose Bierce wrote down an emphatic promise: "If that woolly wolf, Joaquin Miller, doesn't keep outside the fold, I shall come down and club him soundly...
...come there to be married to a frog-faced murderer named Jose Ortiz Munoz, called El Sapo (The Bullfrog) by his fellow inmates. Demure in a green frock and red shoes, Maria de Jesus mooned over El Sapo, natty in a clean striped uniform, as he listened with rapt attention to the district judge...