Word: swann
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...Drop of a Hat is the two-man "afterdinner farrago" that ran in London for 759 performances. The two men are Michael Flanders, who is vivacious and bearded and sails about in a wheelchair, and Donald Swann, who is mousy and bespectacled and stays put at the piano. Flanders wrote the words for the songs they sing, Swann the music. Flanders also does the talking between songs, which is now and then at Swann's expense. The two of them are notably British yet notably themselves-casual and informal, yet with the timing of the solar system...
Sharply satirical one moment about political figures or popular songs, Flanders and Swann are gaily whimsical the next about animals (their specialty) or plants in love. Their tone is sophisticated; they never spell words out, and use many that are foreign. Their joking is educated, with here a lurking bit of Wordsworth, there a pun on Kyd. They can be most lively when most deadpan, and most deadly when most daft. But their triumph rests on their total effect. Delightful as their songs can be (one is about an Oxford-bred cannibal who no longer likes eating people), the evening...
...Little Lord Fauntleroy who threw temper tantrums and suffered from asthma. Much of Proust's boyhood had bucolic charm. At Illiers (Combray in the novel), Dr. Proust's home town, the family romped along the hawthorn hedges of the Méréglise Way (later Swann's Way) or ambled along a winding river (later the Guermantes Way). On the lawns of the Champs Elysées, the 14-year-old played at prisoner's base and puppy love with perky Marie de Benardaky (a model of Gilberte in Remembrance). When the affair ended, Proust...
Diabolic Ties. It was in this setting that Proust met the original of Swann, Charles Haas, who referred to himself as "the only Jew ever to be accepted by Parisian society without being immensely rich." Perhaps the most decadent and diabolical habitue of the salons was Comte Robert de Montesquieu, the original of Proust's depraved but magnificently Lear-like Baron de Charlus. Montesquiou was tall and thin, with a Kaiser mustache...
Representing the Crimson in the game were freshmen Philip Bernstein, left wing; Mark Swann, left inside; Bruce Johnstone, center forward; Ted Wendell, right inside; Shamus Malin, right wing; Dave Brannon, left halfback; Woody Spruance, center halfback; John Larkin, right halfback; Charles David and Sandy Cortesi, fullbacks; and Larry Martin, goal tender...