Word: starching
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fake, the tawdry and the pompous. Even the titles of Perelman's "bits of embroidery," as he called his pieces, set new boundaries for comic absurdity: Somewhere a Roscoe; Beat Me, Post-Impressionist Daddy; Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Enough; Insert Flap "A" and Throw Away; No Starch in the Dhoti, S'll Vous Plait; Methinks He Doth Protein Too Much. His death last week in New York at 75 closed the page on a generation of American humorists that included Frank Sullivan, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and H. Allen Smith. Yet as Humorist Russell Baker observes, Perelman...
...which is strong enough to power a typical car motor, a home brewer needs only to throw some vegetable matter such as corn, potato peels, even rotten garbage, into a vat. He then adds a couple of commonly available brewer's enzymes (to speed up the conversion of starch into sugar) and some baker's yeast (to bring about the fermentation). After fermentation is complete, which takes less than a week, the mess is dumped into a still, where the alcohol is boiled off. Basically just moon shiner's gear, the device consists of a steel drum...
...encourages farmers to hold down their grain crops, so expanding production would not be too difficult. Moreover, alcohol can be produced from a variety of infinitely renewable sources. Though U.S. distillers now use mainly corn as their alcohol base, experts assert that just about any substance with a high starch or sugar content could be used, including wheat, potatoes and sugar cane...
...evening is an amiable mixture of songs, dances and wisecracks seasoned with the rueful wisdom of age. Maxine Sullivan, whom one must not refrain from calling ageless, stops the clock and the show with a briskly resilient number called A Little Starch Left. An October-October romance between a carpenter (Peter Walker) and a woman (Sylvia Davis) whose husband is hospitalized and dying supplies the musical's bittersweet plot line. At show's end the pair sashay out of the Golden Days to share their sunset years, and on leaving the theater you may find your own step...
...station--propelled by Gilbert's jabs at pomp and middle-class mediocrity--still fills an evening. But it was the deliberate self-conscious irony that made something out of Pinafore's obviously inane plot--the hundreds of little jokes in the script that combine to take all the starch out of the Victorian stuffed shirt...