Word: slab
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...woodshop, the ex-President showed off his work with his own restrained style of joy. One piece was a coffee table that Carter had made out of some walnut he had got by trading a book with a neighbor; another was a bedside table made from a purplish slab of wood that came from the Congo. A huge hickory tree from the backyard had provided him with his own supply of local wood. He split the felled tree with a wedge, then used a heavy blade called a froe to cut them into the proper lengths for furniture. Pieces...
...first, cards came as promotions with tobacco, candy, meat, and cookies, but the manufacturers endeared themselves to generations of traders, flippers, and hoarders by including gum. The horrible, brittle pink slab takes about five minutes to break in, chews well for four, and then makes your jaw hurt more than two hours parked on Inspiration Point...
...slashing samurai, killer bees, Joe Cocker or Marlon Brando. Belushi's body, stolid as a '53 Studebaker, could erupt in spasms of grace. As one of the Blues Brothers, the blue-eyed soul group that brought Belushi a platinum record and a big-budget movie, this slab in a black suit would suddenly turn a series of split-second cartwheels, like a hippo Baryshnikov. Belushi was the ideal comic complement to his SNL colleague, close friend and fellow Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd. But whereas Aykroyd disappears into his wicked, perfectly pitched characterizations, Belushi was a Method mimic...
Everywhere, Warner casts her spell, literally. Her mother's ritual for boiling an egg becomes just that. In a piece on folk recipes-a pint of warm beer stirred with a hot poker will cure backache, a slab of raw beef will rub away a wart-the reporter edges deliciously close to magic herself. Even the inventory of the purple velvet handbag of Mme. Houdin, ten-year-old Sylvia's French tutor, becomes a litany of talismans to ward off disaster: smelling salts, two thimbles, a photograph of M. Houdin, the number of madame's life-insurance...
...self-deprecatory observations with venomous barbs flung disarmingly into the audience. Boyden weaves together Woollcott's conflicting guises by slipping easily from Woollcotts-as-narrator to Woollcott-on-the-scene, as when he details his reaction to his father's death--a cold identification of a body on a slab; or to his sister's death--a slow, emotional reading of a letter to a mutual friend. This lachrymose, sentimental scene, which closes the first act, strikes an incongruous note amid the witticisms that comprise much of the play...