Word: ventriloquistic
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DIED. WENCESLAO MORENO, better known as Senor Wences, 103, ventriloquist who created impish dummies out of his thumb and forefinger; in New York City. As a schoolboy in Spain, Moreno began using his hand as a puppet to amuse himself while in detention for answering for absent friends during homeroom roll call. On the '50s and '60s variety shows of Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, among others, he delighted audiences with sweetly silly exchanges. The often cranky Pedro, a disembodied head in a box, usually answered Wences' inquiry as to whether he was "all right" with a casual...
...necessary to understand his origins as recently described by Trey Parker, one of the show's creators. Now, it may not be immediately obvious why anyone would want to understand a series that features a stool specimen wearing a sailor hat and speaking with the voice of a castrato ventriloquist. But South Park, a cartoon about four profane third-graders, is the latest giant asteroid to slam into American pop culture, and so it requires our attention. Fortunately, it is also very funny, and Parker, 28, and his partner Matt Stone, 26, are the most genial purveyors of poo imaginable...
...play in a play already," observed Fagles. When ancient Greek rhapsodes performed dramatic recitals of epic poems from memory as their profession, the epic each time would be "performed by one person in a variety of voices." Presumably, such a virtuoso story teller could have "the talents of a ventriloquist" in playing all characters...
SENOR WENCES, 100, MANHATTAN; Ventriloquist from TV's golden age His guttural "s'all right" and squeaky "s'okay" have somehow remained part of the American comic vocabulary even as Senor Wences has faded from sight. Last week the ventriloquist quietly celebrated his 100th birthday with family in Manhattan before taking off for his customary half-year in his native Spain. Senor Wences was a staple on TV for three decades, starting on the Ed Sullivan Show, where he conducted absurd conversations with his dummy Pedro, his puppet Cecelia the chicken, or the blond-wigged Johnny, a face he painted...
...whom he is singing his siren song now. "We should aim our strategy primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and at working-class ethnics," Buchanan told Nixon, according to Nixon's 1978 memoir. As a speechwriter, Buchanan used Vice President Spiro Agnew as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy for his white-hot resentments of the political and media establishment. "We would never trust such powers over public opinion in the hands of an elected government--it is time we questioned it in the hands of a small and unelected elite...