Word: rubbings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...though the original pretense, sewing for the poor, has long since been abandoned. There are more modern advantages in having an eleemosynary excuse for an enchanted evening: 1) costs are tax-exempt contributions, and 2) the socially ambitious will write big checks and work furiously for the chance to rub elbows with those who have arrived. Credit-by-association is used as a negotiable commodity by many of the Old Guard to do good in the world. "The very social Mrs. Lytle Hull," observes Society Photographer Jerome Zerbe, "is so obsessed by her pet charity, the Musicians' Emergency Fund...
Howells argued eloquently and wisely that novelists must abandon fairy-tale heroics and write of the commonplace. But he could not see what James knew instinctively-that there was another side to reality, that life "often risks combinations and effects that make one rub one's eyes." Life as portrayed by Howells risked no such effects, and his novels unrolled with a tameness that even admiring contemporaries could not explain away. Henry Adams, writing a delicately equivocal notice of an early Howells novel (one of the pleasures of a collection of criticism is seeing eminent men of the past...
Cries of, "God, lookat dat big rat!" attracted several minions of the law. A squad car parked further down Holyoke St. Unsuccessful attempts to rub out the rat with hammer and broom drove the Yardling down the street. A howling mob of nearly 50 passers-by followed with shouts of "God, lookat...
Long the world's highest-paid violinist,* Kreisler was famed for both his astonishing musical memory and his aversion to practice: sometimes he would go a whole summer without touching the violin on the theory that "if I played too frequently, I should rub the bloom off the musical imagination." In the mid-1930s, Kreisler astonished the musical world-and embarrassed critics-by confessing that for years he had been palming off a whole series of his own compositions as the works of such classical composers as Vivaldi, Martini, Couperin, Dittersdorf, Pugnani. Explained Kreisler: "I found it inexpedient...
...machine in a rented hotel ballroom, .his beautiful wife is entering a suite in the same hotel to cheer Avery, who has twisted his neck severely by throwing back his head in a Rooseveltian campaign laugh. Duggan bitterly re-creates the scene: the pink, passive hero, the innocent back rub, the tide of passion...