Word: wax
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...turn of the century, in the golden age of U.S. opera. On the stage of the Metropolitan the great Australian-born Soprano Nellie Melba was singing Marguerite's spinning-wheel aria in Gounod's Faust. In midphrase Nellie was interrupted by the clatter of half a dozen wax cylinders which smashed down one after the other from the fly floor high above the stage. There, in brown suit and wing collar, crouched a spidery little man over an Edison cylinder gramophone with a horn almost as big as he was. Although he lost the Melba recording...
Waxworks. The recorder of the famous echoes was longtime (48 years) Metropolitan Opera Librarian Lionel Mapleson, an Englishman whose father was librarian to Queen Victoria. Mapleson set out in 1901 to put on wax live performances by all of the opera's greatest stars. More enthusiastic than informed, he at first propped his giant horn in the prompter's box, where it was easily visible to the audience. Then he decided to move it up into the flies, where it was no longer visible, though the grinding of the cylinders was still clearly audible to the singers...
...their heads (which the soldiers are ineligible to collect), 2,000 rounds of ammunition, scores of hand grenades and dozens of revolvers, half-a-dozen Thompson submachine guns and a 3.5 bazooka. The British had reason to congratulate them selves, and did. Said pink-cheeked, wax-mustached Brigadier J. A. Hopwood: "It was like a jolly big shoot, and my men acted as beaters...
...demands on Paris' prostitutes that the police ordered procurers not to furnish him with girls. One woman complained that he had lured her to a villa outside Paris, stripped her naked and bound her to a bed, beat her with switches, slashed her with a knife, and poured wax in the wounds. Exiled to his estate in Provence, Sade organized a private harem of both sexes. In a foray to Marseilles with his valet, he beat four streetwalkers and allegedly tried to poison one of them. When the police came to arrest him. they found...
...question, "But how make you gentles [i.e., fly larvae] to keep them?" the Arte says: "Of a piece of a beast's liver, hanged in some corner over a pot or little barrel, with a cross stick and the vessel half full of red clay; and as they wax big, they will fall into that troubled clay and so scour them that they will be ready at all times." On the same subject, Walton says: "You may breed and keep gentles thus: take a piece of beast's liver, and with a cross stick hang it in some...