Word: zoot
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mexican-American boys in zoot suits who are attacked by club-swinging sailors the night before they are to join the Army...
Most raucous needier was a zoot-suited, jobless young Puerto Rican named Fred Boysen, who had somehow wangled a $2.50 box seat. Boysen's view, as he expressed it later, is that "the fun of baseball" is kibitzing; a big-league manager should be able to take it. He dished it out. He spat in Durocher's direction and said: "Here, Leo, this is for you." As five hapless Giant pitchers were mauled, he cried at the Giant boss: "Why don't you go in and pitch yourself, you monkey?" Leo also said he heard Fan Boysen...
Konstantin Berman, one of Moscow's favorite clowns, did his best to remedy the lack. He strutted into the ring dressed in mauve zoot-suit jacket and pinstripe trousers. "I will now demonstrate the Marshall Plan," said Berman, holding up a boomerang. The boomerang, he explained, was the dollar. When he threw it in the air, the missile split and two dollar-boomerangs returned to his hands. The crowd roared out its applause...
...Michael & the Zoot-Suits. Ash Wednesday Eve I drove through the most devastated streets of Munich, through rubble lanes barely wide enough for a car to pass, to a factory standing in darkness. We climbed a rickety outside stairs to a second-floor door that opened into a garish six-room apartment, slyly constructed by the factory owner in violation of housing laws. Our monocled host greeted us with tipsy cheeriness as his guests oohed and aahed over his gay shirt pasted with cutouts of Esquire girls. Inside the rooms were assembled, in monstrous taste, old tapestries, carved Italian statues...
Notable among the allegorical figures was "Gloom," garbed in long black veil and sweeping Gay Nineties feathers, who delivered dire predictions ("Slump and boom, slump and boom, is the rhythm of your doom"). There was also "Black Market" in a Piccadilly zoot suit; he offered his wares "out o' patriotism so as ter keep the owld country goin'," Central character was "Fear" (entwined from head to toe by a prop serpent), who declaimed: "Of all lands, my favorite and pet is England, blitzed and starving and in debt...