Word: tans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...around a dirty Mexico City music hall called the Folies Bergere. Even at ii o'clock, when the second show began, they stormed the doors and raced up to the gallery. They were there to see Mexico City's popular clown-zoot-suited, 27-year-old Tin Tan (real name: German Valdes), billed as "The Only Authentic Pachuco...
...Tan can plummet his voice from coloratura soprano to Chaliapin bass. But-it is not his voice that enthralls his fans, it is his lingo. For Tin Tan is a master of pocho, and pocho, a bilingual bastardy of anglicized Mexican,† is as funny to Mexican ears as the English of a stage Englishman is to Americans. Pocho, which literally means something that has lost its color, has come to stand for the thousands of Mexicans near or across the border who have ruined their Spanish without ever quite learning English. To aficionados Tin Tan is high satire...
...Tan's clowning act is performed with a guitar-strumming stooge against a shiny backdrop that looks like the cover of a Pocket Books mystery. Tin Tan himself wears a cock's tail in his flat black homburg, a knee-length purple velvet jacket, a steel watch chain hanging below the knees of his balloon trousers which narrow at the ankles. He is forever fondling and fussing over his mike, always starts off by jabbering such gibberish as Viriviriviri-virividee, V por Victori. At intervals he tosses in his own crazy versions of mariachi tunes, Russian melodies, Italian...
...Negro troops, acceptance by their white comrades-in-arms was some thing to shout about. There had been gibes when units of the 93rd landed on Bougainville, on the heels of the Americal Division. The Americal knew by then what jungle fighting was like. They doubted that the "Tan Yanks" would stand up under the jungle's strange and silent horrors...
...that the mayor was in on the take, and warned him: "I'm not interested in being a conquering hero around here, but everybody is beginning to think you're a crook." Finally Hirst set a trap. He got the buxom Negro madam of the "Black and Tan Club" to insist on paying off to the mayor and police chief in person. Hirst's men watched through a peephole, recorded the transaction on a dictograph. Last week Attorney Hirst got his convictions...