Word: troupers
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...Change? Unlike Dorothy of Oz, Judy Garland never really had a backyard to call her own. Born Frances Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minn., Judy was a vaudeville trouper at the age of five. Her father died when she was twelve, and her mother, as Judy remarked bitterly years later, "was no good for anything except to create cha os and fear. She was the worst - the real-life Wicked Witch of the West." The nearest thing to a home that Judy had was the MGM lot in Hollywood, where - between long agonizing hours before the camera - Louis B. Mayer sent...
Retired though he is, Old Trouper Maurice Chevalier still loves to strike a pose now and again, in this case sitting like some jovial potentate flanked by a pair of pet cheetahs at the Count de La Panouse's chateau outside Paris...
...that made me feel mortal." Most groundlings trace the beginning of their phobia to an especially hairy flight. Jackie Gleason swore off flying in the 1940s when the plane on which he was a California-to-New York passenger lost two engines and landed in a Midwest wheatfield. Old Trouper Jimmy Durante also dates his dislike of flying to "the worst flight ever" some 20 years ago. He still flies, because "I gotta. But when it gets choppy, I say, 'Oh, my God,' and hold to whoever is sitting nearest." Such people get little satisfaction from the statistics...
...listeners feel proud of Labor's accomplishments. Identifying their problems with his own, Wilson observed that "we have gone through a great deal together in defense of everything we stand for." Finally, as London's Times observed, "hamming it unmercifully, but hamming it like an old trouper," he ended on a rousing burst of old-fashioned socialist oratory: "It is the job of every member of this party to join with their government in defending the bastions we have won from those who would seek to drive us out for their own gain. It is no defensive posture...
...outstripping their white imitators. Charles was the first to reach a mass white public, starting as far back as 1955 with his hit record, I Got a Woman. In more recent years, a string of others have come along behind him. Lou Rawls, for example, is a former gospel trouper who spices his blues songs with reminiscences of his boyhood in Chicago's South Side slums. He used to work only in the Negro nightclub "chitlin circuit." As for radio, Rawls says, "I never got played on the top 40 stations because they said I was too, uh?well...