Word: teeter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...obsessive preoccupation. They become positively fussy as they pat into place and hover anxiously over the development of plots against virtue and propriety that are self-satirical as well as self-defeating in their loony complexity. As a result, Chabrol's tragedies and near-tragedies almost always teeter on the edge of farce. In his best work, there is something of the fascination of a high-wire...
...scale passages, his chords were clean and full-toned, and Liszt's famous accelerating octave chromatic scales sent tense waves of excitement through the audience. Kogan's marvelously smooth execution of Liszt's flamboyance was accompanied by a sensitive, mature interpretation of the melodic lines, which often teeter precariously on the brink of ridiculous melodrama and so are salvageable only through extreme delicacy...
...popularity may be less a show-business phenomenon than a lesson in crowd psychology. "I'm the first on our street to see it," chirped one suburban matron. All kinds of people, it seems, have been infected by Exorcist fever. Teenage girls on triple-tier wedgies teeter down the aisle behind pin-striped businessmen carrying briefcases. A silver-haired woman clutching a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper slides uneasily into a seat next to a middle-aged naval officer. Most audiences, however, tend to be young and to contain a far higher than average proportion of blacks...
...impact of the new Watergate revelations is felt. But there is more. The people who stop now around the square in the first warm sun of spring seem to teeter between a quiet revulsion and a kind of muted tolerance. They still hope for the best. They don't want the President to be disgraced. They don't want Richard Nixon to fail. It is Nixon's own abuse of this special grace which they hold out to him that baffles and disappoints them the most...
...time when the masculine hero is joining other endangered species, Hoagland looks to the circus, "the last place left where somebody can teeter on the brink of death and the crowd won't yell 'Jump!'" He finds his hero in Gunther Gebel-Williams, an animal trainer with an instinctive ability to orchestrate big cats into tawny fugues. To Hoagland, Gebel-Williams seems "to live in a state of direct gaiety." Unlike Clyde Beatty, for example, he does not conquer his animals crudely but controls them with a lover's touch...