Word: tinning
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...formed 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...
...Tin 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...
...Tin 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...
...with a penchant for double-breasted waistcoats, he has a personal charm that smooths all paths for him. His business abilities were established beyond cavil by his spectacular rise in the metals industry, wherein he first became manager of the giant British Metal Corp. and then fathered a world tin cartel...
...revolutionary Government of President Gualberto Villarroel had long since done all that the State Department had requested. It had rounded up and deported some 80 high-placed Axis agents, had sent German and Jap diplomats home, had purged the Government of Axis sympathizers, had upped the export of tin and tungsten...