Word: toper
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Toper Into Craftsman. Impressed by so resplendent a prologue, poor Agnes felt let down when the curtain rose on Act I (a Village cocktail party), wherein Playwright Gene, studiously ignoring her, sprang half soused upon a chair and turned back the hands of a mantel clock, crying tragically: "Turn back the universe/ And give me yesterday!" Another time, he poured out a hate-filled tirade "in language that he had learned at sea and in the dives of the waterfront...
...soon afterwards), Agnes automatically became his leading lady as well. Their joint act swung endlessly between tragical melodrama and slapstick farce, was happiest and steadiest whenever they left Greenwich Village behind and settled in Provincetown or New Jersey. Then O'Neill would shed the trembling toper and turn into the contented craftsman, in bed by 11 every night, at work sharp at 9 in the morning. He so hated to be interrupted in his work that he would hide in a closet when company came...
...rate of some 3,330,000 gallons a year. In the dingy shebeens (speakeasies) dotting the big-city slums, any man with a stomach strong enough to imbibe this fiery liquid in greater quantities than his neighbors becomes the official "Brandy King" of the district. Brave is the toper who dares challenge his asbestos insides...
...Steen, too, had trouble making ends meet. But Steen was content to eke out his living as a brewer and innkeeper. Frans Hals, as great a virtuoso of the brush as ever lived, put clear understanding into his Jolly Toper (opposite). The Toper (which remarkably resembles Actor Van Heflin in the role of Athos of the Three Musketeers) has the eyes and mouth of any man on the higher slopes of inebriation. If universality was Hals's hallmark, particularity was that of Pieter de Hooch. Not one artist working today could make a tennis match on a Westchester estate...
...complete with such immortal lines as: "[Isabella] arose from the couch whereon she had been carelessly thrown . . ." He could ride and shoot like a Cody or a Hickock. When he was not dead drunk, he could spout a temperance speech that would awaken the remorse of the most sodden toper. When he was not in jail for fraud, slander, bigamy, libel or inciting to riot, he wrung women's hearts with his impassioned campaigns for purity. This was a sore point among his mistresses and his wives; he married at least six, in various cities, and sometimes...