Word: swanboat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
They don't come expecting exotic sights. Once you've made one loop around the small island where the ducks live, there's nothing too exciting to see. Instead, the "swanboat experience" is passive. Sit on the park benches bolted to these flat-bottomed tubs, let the sun heat you shoulder-blades, and listen to the subdued whir of the propellers...
...review of the 1959 Festival, I urged the use of a concerted brass ensemble as an effective outdoor medium, after the predictable failure of setting puny strings afloat on a swanboat in the lagoon. Now that the brass proved so successful on the Festival stage, let's have a brass ensemble on a floating swanboat next year...
Finally, 15 musicians boarded a swanboat decked with flowers and shrubs, and performed Handel's "Water Music" Suite while the boat sailed around the Public lagoon under floodlights, with thousands of people lining the banks all around. It was an amusing gimmick, but it badly misfired. Whenever the boat got 75 or so yards away, the strings and woodwinds became totally inaudible and one could hear only the two horns and, in the finale, the two trumpets. The basic idea was not bad; the choice of music...
...York school where Brother Leo janitored for $5 a year. At home in the long evenings he read Blackstone and the Bard. In 1915 he left his two pupils for the Times, pieced out a cub's salary with the slightly ornithological sideline of running the Central Park swanboat concession. When he went to War his father, then dean of Hunter, supervised John's boat stands. After the War John returned to the Times, married his favorite office telephone girl...
| 1 |