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unearths some literary gems.
***
[This exchange doesn't really make sense--the people speaking, a pair of Broadway dancers, are not in the employ of Scotland Yard, and in any case they don't seem to understand the correct meaning of the 'royal we'--but I thought you'd still enjoy hearing about the "Broadway we."]
"When you say 'we,' Penny, do you mean the 'royal we,' as in Scotland Yard?"
Penny shook her head. "I mean the 'Broadway we,' as in you and me."
***
[Rhetorical Questions, Answered dept. The fashion mag provided a clue that the protagonists now wish they'd never stumbled on.]
"Oh, Penny, why did you have to buy that fashion magazine? Why didn't you buy the Saturday Evening Post or Popular Mechanics?"
"Because we work Saturday nights and we don't have a car."
***
Bonus: "the thin mustache that looked more like an afterthought than a mark of distinction"
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unearths some literary gems.
From a Jules Feiffer memoir:***My girlfriend, Judy Sheftel... had an old-fashioned, forties movie star face with eyes that shared secrets although it wasn't always clear to me what they were.***From Evenings with Cary Grant, by Nancy Nelson:[According to the author, CG told the following anecdote]"I've always been apprehensive about serving as a master of ceremonies since introducing my colleague Walter Pidgeon one night and hearing myself say, 'Mr. Privilege, this is indeed a pigeon.'"
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Privilege of His Company, a biography of Noel Coward by William Marchant:***[Kenneth Tynan on John Gielgud's performance in Noel Coward's Nude with Violin]"Sir John never acts seriously in modern dress; it is the lounging attire in which he relaxes between classical bookings, and his present performance as a simpering valet is an act of boyish mischief, carried out with extreme elegance and the general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella."***[Said Coward]"One night I expanded the line. 'Of George IV there is absolutely nothing to be said,' and paused, and added in a sort of stricken voice, 'except that there is nothing to be said.' It was greeted with a shout of laughter, as it was at every performance thereafter until I threw the sketch out of the show."***[Marchant refers to a line, "Everything smells like something else... it's so dreadfully confusing," from one of Coward's plays, and describes Noël's attitudes in that vein, and in related areas]The lobby of the St. Regis Hotel in New York smelled to him uncomfortably like the piano department at Harrod's. [...] In America all sirloin steaks looked like bedroom slippers to him, and if the film showing at the old Roxy movie palace was no good, one could always look away and pretend one was rather drunk at the post office at Granada. [...] Beverly Hills looked like an uncommonly bad Raoul Dufy. [...] Strangers on the street or at restaurant tables were studied carefully to determine exactly whose twins they were. If the resemblance was only partial, or limited to a single feature, it was seen to have been an exchange of some kind: "That waiter has wickedly stolen Lilli Palmer's nose," or "Whatever can have possessed poor Margaret Rutherford to lend her chin to the Princess Murat?" [...] Faces were also understood to be in a transitory state and frequently seemed to be in a dreadful rush to look like someone else or to be marking time until the right original came along who might be copied. [He said of a Truman Capote photo], "What will this face be like twenty years from now? ... At the moment it isn't so much a face as a pre-face." [...]***
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unearths some literary gems.
From Blessings in Disguise, by Alec Guinness:[I don't encounter "bed-fluff" in print very often, but it showed up twice in the first fifteen pages of Alec Guinness's memoir, Blessings in Disguise. What's interesting is that while the first instance is a literal one (the child Guinness borrows a household implement from his mother to clean the bed-fluff out from under the bed of an elderly lady he visits downstairs), the second one is figurative!]To [Sybil Thorndike's] statements, though, about the greatness of Ibsen--how he cleared the air, got rid of all the bed-fluff, gave women their proper due, and so on--I could only nod in a way which I hoped looked intelligent.[As you can see, it's not clear whether Thorndike actually used the word "bed-fluff," or that was simply Guinness's "go to" word when paraphrasing.][Meanwhile,* a little later in the book]'So sorry I was late,' [Dame Flora Robson] said. 'My train is from Brighton. And at Victoria Station a plank fell on my head. Is my hat in good shape?' I reassured her: I wasn't quite sure what the shape should be.[*Because, of course, all pages in a book exist simultaneously.]***[sbj: a record from the Guinness bookThe Alec Guinness book, that is]Tyrone Guthrie was ... quite the tallest enfant terrible to be found in the English-speaking world--standing six foot four in his socks.***[Alec Guinness speaks of Edith Sitwell's "arched eyebrows like faint pencil lines querying the tiny eyes."][Guinness speaks of some actors at the makeup table "not knowing their elbow from a crimson-lake liner."Until I looked it up, I thought he was referring to some kind of inland passenger vessel!]***[sbj: the office cutupAlec Guinness, on first meeting his friend Ernie Kovacs]The first day Ernie and I worked together he deliberately got his head stuck in the clapper-board...***
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unearths some literary gems.
From Don't Cry for Me, Hot Pastrami, by Sharon Kahn:***"Do you all swear not to tell, not ever to tell what I'm going to tell you, so help you God?"This is too much. "I'm not swearing to God on this, Essie Sue.""Okay, Ruby, so we'll swear on my copy of the Jewish Forward--it has a national circulation. Good enough for you?"
***
From Up Front, by Victor Spinetti:
***
'You behave yourself when you're in Rome,' said Alan Webb, the old character actor. 'You be careful what you do here. We're representing Great Britain. Don't forget that.' The next day, he came to work in rather a state. He'd been found drunk wandering around Rome with no trousers on.'
***
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Page 38 of 64
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Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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