Word: woodenness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Unlike the Afghans, Karens harbor mixed feelings about the use of children in war, vacillating between denial and pride. They revere childhood enough to try to preserve its innocence. A wooden schoolhouse in a village near Manerplaw is a tidy outpost of chalkboards, geography maps and tattered textbooks. Students wear blue-and-white uniforms and recite their lessons in singsong unison. They study math, history, Karen, English and even Burmese, and there is no time for indoctrination or propaganda. The war is only a few miles away, but little of it intrudes into the classroom...
Martin Ryan, a manufacturer of artificial limbs, has talked to business owners about the bill at local Chamber of Commerce meetings. The cost of improvements can be kept down, he maintains, by building wooden ramps instead of concrete ones or simply attaching a buzzer on a front door. "Many business owners say, 'I don't have many disabled customers, so why should I build a ramp or widen my doorways or install a pull on the door of my store?' " says Ryan. "I just try to tell them it's a cost of doing business, and it's worthwhile...
Less charming is Steven Petersen's protrayal of Lysander. While his movements and manners are well-studied, his delivery is wooden and unconvincing...
...other side of the globe, in a military ward of a hospital in the Cambodian town of Kampong Spoe, 25 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, a soldier named Neh Kon, 30, lies on a wooden pallet. He has lost both legs -- one just above the knee, the other just below. The stumps are wrapped in flyspecked, blood-soaked bandages. Neh Kon's wife sits beside him, holding their young child. Two weeks earlier, on patrol in Khmer Rouge territory, Neh Kon stepped on a mine. "By the time we get peace," he says, "a lot of people won't have...
Which is a good deal more than some of the other flat-voiced performers can claim. Notably wooden are Vanessa Parise as Maggie--she painfully distracts in "At the Ballet"--and John Weinstein as Al, the insipid husband of another dancer, Kristine. And though Brandon Lucas can sing, his casting as Don is a mistake. He seems out of place, even in this dated piece; he seems to have been borrowed from some '50s musical...