Word: witness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Great Temptations. Summer came irrevocably last week to Manhattan when the Shuberts presented the first of the vast hot-weather revues. The Winter Garden, scene of unending parades of glowing damsels and the only first class playhouse in which one smokes, has never witnessed more elaborate proceedings. It seemed as if the chorus girls must have been drafted, there were so many of them. There were more principals than there were generals in the War. There were masses of gorgeous scenery and scores of swoops for the trombones. There were cool costumes and warm dancing. In fact there was everything...
Adjusting the newcomer to the college environment is a task not to be attempted in a spirit of levity. Harvard long ago abandoned the jocose practicality which often serves to initiate the Freshman. In place of practical humor was set up a system of more subtle wit the institution of Senior advisers. Some of these sages by proxy attended to their duties conscientiously, a numerous section did not. Too often the audience was treated to a handshake, a hurried call, and a request to drop around some time...
...potentate, Railroad Jones. From his fellow teamsters he learns the technique of hillbilly manhood- gulping moonshine, shooting craps Saturday nights in a wood, toting an automatic pistol for protection on "rambling" (courting) nights and for display at prayer-meetings. He reveres the four local gods- public opinion, money, wit and a glowering celestial Patriarch who, seeing all, likes little...
...pointing no moral, it is simply a contemporary pageant of ignorance masquerading as "smartness," bigotry as uprightness, mob violence as morality, pleasure as the unpardonable sin, among isolated people whose surroundings seem to have become a spiritual wasteland, stunting and evaporating in them all but their physical vigor, malicious wit and crudest humanities. Scores of characters crowd the stage, each closely observed in real life's unmistakable habiliments, from the principals clear down to Schallburger, the labor organizer, and Sim Pratt, slick soda-jerker. There are smashing scenes, but toward the end the cast gets completely out of hand...
...last week, at Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Mass.). The young ladies performed a pageant adapted from The Faerie Queen,* that poetic conceit of a "sweet wit and pretty invention" which young Edmund Spenser wrote to flatter Queen Elizabeth while he was helping to pacify her province of Ireland. Miss Lorraine Keck galloped right nobly as the Red Cross Knight to rescue pretty Helen Howard (Una) from the unspeakable machinations of Ivy Trace (Archimago) and her vicious minions. "Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound," the college musicians rendering appropriate strains from Meyerbeer, Gounod, Arens, Liszt or Wagner...