Word: houdini
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...voice have an interesting effect in songs such as "Keep It Open," where she sounds like several different people. But the harshness becomes irritating in the beginning of "Night of the Swallow" and grating when she reduces her voice to a croak in certain parts of "Houdini...
Eleanor Belmont, a former actress and wife of Millionaire August, hired Houdini to be handcuffed, bound with ropes and chains and dropped overboard from the family yacht, merely to divert some friends. Toward the end of her career, she was heard correcting the upright novelist John P. Marquand for his lack of taste and reticence...
Watching Horowitz unsuccessfully trying to shatter glass with a high note recorded on Memorex tape is a little like watching Houdini expose a séance. Commercials are viewed as a kind of ghost hunting; the greater fun is for viewers to see how they are being fooled, to see the bamboozler bamboozled. Most of the products Horowitz tests pass with high marks-he estimates 75%-but the blood sport is watching the advertisers turn into bozos when Horowitz can't wipe the scrawl off the Sherwin-Williams paint job, when three dozen eggs (out of 14 dozen...
...David Mamet has trundled out the theme of a reversal between two artistes, the aged veteran and the anxious ingenue, and bandied "concepts" about the stage for the better part of an hour before switching the characters' roles in a sleight of hand so fast it would have dazzled Houdini. The reversal, developed with delicious deliberation in A life in the Theater, happening so awkwardly here, so long after we have lost all interest in the characters, serves only to leave an unpleasant taste of dissatisfaction and cheapness. Bill Young plays the established writer Arthur with a mince and grating...
...Harry Houdini...