Word: wisp
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Walser, a dark lad with curly hair, was "commissar," and Ishmael, who wears a wisp of black mustache, was "vice commissar" of a secret group calling itself "C?C" (Curiosity Club). Its members, 24 boys, nine girls, all wore a uniform of black shirt, black breeches and black boots. Male members also were expected to grow mustaches. Meeting in members' houses, they discussed sex, atheism and a program they distilled from Plato, Aristotle and Edward Bellamy's Utopia. Specific points in their program: less restrictive marriage laws, more sex education, a plan (a kind of first cousin...
When it was over, U. S. Composer Roy Harris, who had sat it out, sniffed: "I should say the piece was 19th-Century German Romantic." Confused Bostonians, looking everywhere but under the seats for the romanticism, found a will o' the wisp clue in their program notes, where Composer Krenek's own words told them: "At the end of the piece the piano seems to remove all traces of solidity, the orchestra reverts to the indistinct sounds of the high violins which introduced the work . . . leading the music back to the remoteness whence it came...
...Dorchester, England, last week, items from the Hardy family collection were put up for auction, including two bits of Nelsoniana. One sentimental antiquarian bid nine guineas (about $47) for the manuscript of the Trafalgar prayer. Hottest bidding, however, was over a wisp of hair, which the auctioneer swore had been cropped from Nelson's pate by his vivacious and tenacious mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton. The seadog's wisp was knocked down...
Like a steel-blue knife blade pressed flat into the heathery Scottish highlands lies 22½-mile Loch Ness. Natives of the district have for centuries been seeing kelpies, bogies, wills-o'-the-wisp. Relatively young, relatively real to the outside world is "Nessie," the lake's mysterious monster, "seen" every season since...
...with a compressed air sign, and allows passengers to scurry off. Two women, plump, middle-aged, the kind who dress the same for every occasion, every season, every time they go out of the house. A lad whose gaudy suit calls up instant associations with bargain basements. A sour wisp of a woman, ugly and thirty, about whose person the shadow of an old maid already hangs, trying desperately to make last year's finery do. In all of them, exaggerated copies of the true styles, or else utter disregard for any sort of style. Except one amazingly patrician...