Word: starting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...days hence, and Thursday afternoon for the Saturday paper. He makes no effort to store up ideas. "It's like analysis; you block out the time and see what comes out." If he writes what he thinks is a bad column, he does not wad it up and start over. He publishes it. "Observer" is not a single point in space but a curving line of ups and downs, and the sagging author figures he will have another shot at splendor in a couple of days...
...interplay and foolishness of it all. Pat Furgurson of the Sun recalls joking with Baker in the Senate gallery: "Baker would look down and say, 'Look, there's Ken Keating, wearing Charles Bickford's old hair.'" Charles McDowell of the Richmond Times-Dispatch recalls Baker's work: "He'd start out writing about some Senator, and pretty soon it would turn into a piece of architecture. He'd set scenes and roll around in his story like an essayist...
Despite the success stories, doctoring is often not enough. Composer Jule Styne believes that great hits-My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line-were great from the start and only needed polishing. "Ninety percent of plays that call in a new writer and director fail," says Styne. "Sometimes the best you can do is to convince them to close," adds Joseph Stein, who wrote Fiddler on the Roof and has doctored such plays as Irene and Raisin. "If you're lucky, the show will be mediocre...
Toward dusk, their small boats go whumping across lakes and bays, rooster-tailing on fierce twin-100 outboards. Caravans of eight-miles-to-the-gallon RVs start homing off the interstates, their occupants damply chilled in the air conditioning, bathed in Dolly Parton from the tape deck. In shopping malls, supermarkets the size of National Guard armories feel as cold as meat lockers; housewives in pedal pushers go Brrrr as they load their carts with food encased in a wealth of nonreturnable glass, metal and paper. They shake their heads as they pay what the check-out computer demands...
...with its own resources, lighting its cigars with $1,000 bills. In winter, visitors remark, the U.S. is always too warm indoors, and in summer always too cold; in a flawless little American parable, Richard Nixon used to turn up the White House air conditioning full blast and then start a cozy blaze in the fireplace...