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unearths some literary gems.
More snippets from James Thurber:
***[from "My Fifty Years with James Thurber"]His gold-rimmed glasses forever needed straightening, which gave him the appearance of a person who hears somebody calling but can't make out where the sound is coming from.***[ditto]One has the disturbing feeling that the man contrived to be some place without actually having gone there.***[from "The Cane in the Corridor"]"You remember Reginald Gardiner's imitation of wallpaper...in which he presented a visual image as making a pattern of sound?"[What? No, as a matter of fact, I *don't*!But apparently he did!"He delighted Broadway audiences in 'An Evening with Beatrice Lillie and Reginald Gardiner,' performing a series of witty impersonations of various inanimate items, such as lighthouses and wallpaper."https://findingaids.uflib.ufl.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/99826Bonus tangential search result: Everybody Sing, which you may recall was one of our Film-ictionary items, and in which Gardiner appeared. (If he imitated wallpaper in it, the Wikipedia article doesn't say so. Perhaps he did, but the wallpaper ended up on the--wait for it--cutting-room floor.)Meanwhile, though I couldn't find the wallpaper sketch on YouTube, I did find this, which seems to promise a few chuckles:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjx-353y4AIYou'll also be glad to know that the third search result for "reginald gardner beatrice lillie imitations" (after two versions of the sketch I've just linked to) was, for some reason, Ed Begley's Yiddish scene from A Mighty Wind.]***[ditto]"Here's to the Washington Bridge," she said. "Here's to some big dam or other."***[from "Sex ex Machina"]His wife explained that it was a card table, but that if you pressed a button underneath, it would become an ironing board. Whereupon she pushed the button and the table leaped a foot into the air, extended itself, and became an ironing board....The thing finally became so finely sensitized that it would change back and forth if you merely touched it--you didn't have to push the button. The husband stuck it in the attic (after it had leaped up and struck him a couple of times while he was playing euchre), and on windy nights it could be heard flopping and banging around, changing from a card table to an ironing board and back.***[from "There's an Owl in My Room"]Nobody and no animal and no other bird can play a scene as far down as a pigeon can....When it comes to emotion, a fish, compared to a pigeon, is practically beside himself.***[from "The Curb in the Sky"][Finishing Other People's Sentences dept.]"When William Howard Taft was--" some guest in Dorothy's family's home would begin."President!" Dorothy would pipe up. The speaker may have meant to say "President" or he may have meant to say "young," or "Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States." In any case, he would shortly put on his hat and go home.***[Bonus: A passing reference to Canarsie. And since this anthology is The Thurber Carnival, we might say (or sing) that the carnival went to Canarsie.]
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