Word: schreckengost
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Latter-Day Alchemist. The plot is standard. An ambitious small-town disk jockey makes a tape of a teenager named Anna Lou Schreckengost singing at a country-club dance and sends it to Sid Harper, A. & R. man at Manhattan's Blackwood Records. Anna Lou and her grandmother are flown to New York for an audition...
Novelist Ishlon tells her story in a two-part stream of consciousness, first through the oversimplified mind of the girl in a kind of Schreckengost-written prose, then through the hypomanic mind of the A. & R. man, who has abandoned serious composing and now sees himself as "a latter-day alchemist, compounding dross voices with banal notes to produce gold." Novelist Ishlon insists that Anna Lou Schreckengost is no one in particular. She could be an approximation of Cincinnati's Doris Kappelhoff, who-with 1946-3 Sentimental Journey-made famous her new name, Doris Day. But coincidence falls closer...
Common denominator of U. S. ceramists is whimsy. Sculpture at the show ranged from Viktor Schreckengost's Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, three haloed Negroes smiling down at the flames, to Sascha Brastoff's boneless, bulbous, button-mouthed females, Emergence and Timid Maiden (see cut), who look like a pair of praying mantises. Ceramist Brastoff's figures, tastefully mounted on bases of grey velvet and satin, won a sculpture prize. Fit for the flossiest mantelpiece were such lively pieces as Annie Laurie Crawford's Dancers Martinique, Carl Walters' blue Hippopotamus...
Twenty years ago such an anomaly was born on a scrabbly farm near Pittsburgh to a poor Pennsylvania Dutch family named Schreckengost. The Schreckengosts named the child Clara and brought her up as a girl. After Clara was 10, she ceased to grow. Her features acquired a slanting cast and she gave no physiological evidence of oncoming womanhood...
Nobody seemed more pleased at this strange outcome than Father Schreckengost. Said he: "Many a night I couldn't sleep thinking about that poor child crying because of the shape she was in. I tell you, it's a pitiful thing. She's never had any pleasure out of life...
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