Word: show-off
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...podium, though, Dole seems to resent having to stand up in front of everyone and pontificate, as if he, a man of some substance, had been reduced by forces beyond his control to acting like some sort of debate-team show-off. He says he's a doer rather than a talker...
Think back on the presidencies of people who did that part of the job well: John Kennedy answering a press-conference question on the Van Allen Belt or Ronald Reagan comforting the families of servicemen killed in a Christmas-season air crash or even Bill Clinton, the debate-team show-off himself, talking to black ministers in Memphis...
...when the new collection is a hit, he throws his hat in the air just the way Mary Richards does in the MTM credits. This is the first time out for Keeve as director, and he does a poised job of presenting a warts-and-all portrait--Mizrahi the show-off, proud of every clever phrase he coins, and Mizrahi the serious craftsman, determined to build on his considerable gifts. Show-off and craftsman have one thing in common: they're both catnip to the camera. Unzipped could be the genesis of a second line for Mizrahi...
When it comes to backbiting and ridicule, the pair easily keep pace with their literary friends. McCarthy finds Charles Reich (The Greening of America) "smarmily loving" and feminist Germaine Greer "an absurd Australian giantess." Not to be outdone, Arendt declares Margaret Mead "a monster" and Vladimir Nabokov "an intelligent show-off." Her 1957 take on Norman Podhoretz, critic, editor and later author of the confessional memoir Making It: "one of these bright youngsters with bright hopes for a nice career." Only three years later, it is "little Podhoretz, already soooo 'tired' like the proverbial Jewish waiter...
Ruth's parents abandoned him to a Roman Catholic industrial school specializing in "incorrigible" boys when he was an oversize, undereducated kid, and he went right from it into baseball. In other words, he was adapted only to heavily masculine, institutional worlds, and then solely as show-off, big spender and clown. His first marriage, to a homebody (played here with spunky charm by Trini Alvarado), was a disaster; the only family that counted with him was the team and the raffish demimonde it inhabited off the field. Ruth fared better the second time around. Claire Ruth (Kelly McGillis...