Word: sacking
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Once, after he was urged to sack Rusk as Secretary and appoint him Ambassador to the United Nations, Kennedy said sadly, "I can't do that to Rusk; he is such a nice man." Nevertheless, writes Schlesinger, Kennedy finally decided that he would eventually have to install a more dynamic man at State. "By the autumn of 1963," says Schlesinger, "the President had reluctantly made up his mind to allow Rusk to leave after the 1964 election and to seek a new Secretary of State...
Some of the biggest names in British exports are double-barreled: Rolls-Royce, Mini-Minor, Terry-Thomas. Even without the hyphen, the actor's face would probably have made his name familiar the world over. Its features are a bounderish British blend of sad sack and pukka sahib: busby brows that shoot up in startled innocence or beetle down with Mac the Knife malevolence; lugubrious eyes rocketing around like apoplectic billiard balls; a Scotch-sodden thatch of mustache, and, of course, those two front teeth, gaping wide as Becher's Brook. Wherever he takes a stroll, from Soho...
Emily, the pet five-foot python that Geraldine Chaplin, 20, used to carry around Europe in a sack, evidently taught her something. On location in Spain, where she is playing the role of Tonia, the demure, bourgeois wife of Dr. Zhivago, the great Charlie's daughter suddenly assumed a herpetic pose. But as Geraldine said once, "For a young dancer like myself, what a treat it is to watch a snake move. Their suppleness and their elegance are incomparable...
...first assignments for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1923, Cub Reporter Milburn Peter Akers followed a sack of potatoes from farmer to housewife to find out why they were so expensive. He handed in a story that had plenty of potatoes but no meat. He had failed to question critically each middleman's excuse for jacking up the price. When the city editor read the piece, he tore it to shreds and bellowed: "You let everybody impose on your credulity!" "On the way back to my desk," recalls Akers, "I looked up credulity in the dictionary...
These touches are funny, and when they work smoothly, add sparkle to the show. But they don't attack the real problem. They strengthen the sack, when they should ask the lady inside to reduce. Ubu Roi needs some ruthless cutting and directional pacing. The Quincy House Dining Room isn't big enough to take two and a half hours of shouting. Have the lady skip a meal and rest quietly for a minute, the she'll bounce over the finish line ahead of everybody...