Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They were a type of American female now all but extinct, young women who aspired, through beauty and wit, to marry rich, famous and fascinating older men. Each got her wish. After a false start with a Hollywood agent, Gloria Vanderbilt made a better (although also temporary) match with Leopold Stokowski. Carol Marcus married William Saroyan and Oona O'Neill discovered lifelong romance with Charlie Chaplin. As this novelistic account makes clear, the three women were as interesting as the men they married. Aram Saroyan, son of the ill-fated Saroyan-Marcus marriage, takes them from their schoolgirl days...
Wilkinson, whose own prose style combines wit with understatement, is canny enough to give the flamboyant Bunting his head, quoting not only his anecdotes but such side comments as his thoughts on flounder ("I don't eat nothing with both eyes on the same side of the head"). The book is filled with whiteliquor lore, including a description of all the impurities to be found in moonshine: "Maggots spawn in mash. Rats, snakes, owls, possums, foxes, and other small creatures find their way to it and drink it and get drunk and fall in and drown." What Wilkinson does best...
...soul and Beth's body, open a nightclub, direct the hearts and minds of the natives as they build a bridge they do not need and teach them how to play New England baseball ("It's straight poker, but deuces are wild for white men"). He even has the wit and gumption to prevent his new span from being captured by convergent, divergent armies...
...form that usually gives off a flat glare of one-dimensional optimism. It is hard not to like the "well read, well shaped, well disposed widow, early sixties, not half bad in the dusk with the light behind me." She sought a "companionable, educated, professional man of wit and taste," and she probably deserved him. Her self-effacement is fairly rare in personals. The ads tend sometimes to be a little ner- vous and needing, and anxiously hyperbolic. Their rhetoric tends to get overheated and may produce unintended effects. A man's hair stands on end a bit when...
...makes, fractured and rhythmic and inventive, touches amusingly on endless varieties of weirdness. Starting out, the nucleus of the band formed in Providence in 1974, when Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, students at the Rhode Island School of Design, fell in with David Byrne, occasional student and otherworldly wit. Moving a couple of hundred miles south, and joining up with Keyboard Player Jerry Harrison, they became the premier house band for New York City's young artistic community. Artist Robert Longo even inserted a life-size cutout of Byrne, the group's lead singer and driving force, into a construction...