Word: yarns
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...yarn is brightly punctuated, too, by Agnes de Mille's varied choreography-a sharp, expressive Civil War ballet, a waltz-drenched first-act finale, and some lively specialties in which Oklahoma!-born Joan McCracken is indeed pretty special. To her clean dancing style, she adds pert looks, funny gestures, a comic gift for bellowing a song...
Stepping delicately across the eggs they have laid, Holtz again proves himself one of the best yarn-spinners and smooth-delivery boys in the business. He unveils all the acts, barges in on most of them, joshes the down-fronters, throws birdshot at the producer. He smooths out his old jokes without a wrinkle, tosses in a few less fetching new ones, continues the long saga of his best pal and mealticket, Sam Lapidus...
...equally funny in both places. His Thursday-night card games with Harpo Marx and George Burns are riots of unbowdlerized storytelling. Though Holtz can come up with cracks like "I hope your marriage lasts as long as mine seems," his forte is not quotable nifties, but lengthy yarns, (whose point scarcely matters) that he tenderly unrolls like priceless fabrics richly embroidered with dialect. Fall guy of some of the best of them is Sam Lapidus, whose name Holtz lifted from a building sign 20 years ago. Typical Lapidus yarn (one fourth actual size): Finishing a stylish dinner...
...Marianas, U.S. correspondents thought they might have found one small part of the explanation for wholesale enemy suicides in the face of defeat: the Japs seemed willing to swallow any yarn their Government told them, believed they would be tortured and killed if captured...
Civilian prisoners taken on Saipan believed that the Japanese had captured the Hawaiian Islands, that their Navy had gone through the Panama Canal without losing a ship, had taken Washington. Another yarn, which U.S. reporters read in the English-language newspaper Mainichi: the late Navy Secretary Frank Knox was losing his fleet at the rate of one or two ships a day instead of risking it all in one battle. Reason (according to Mainichi): Publisher Knox would get more stories for his newspaper that...