Word: crackers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...takes an effort of mind to recall the time, not so very long ago, when America was still something like a collection of small towns, and a provincial newspaperman named Henry Louis Mencken was its national cracker-barrel atheist. It is, moreover, a matter for wonder that Mencken, who dressed like the gallused boors he despised, chewed cigars like a Tammany clubhouse character and had tastes that ran to beer and bawdy jokes, was ever regarded as the epitome of metropolitan sophistication. The term smart set, which was the title of his first magazine, seems sadly unsmart today. The word...
...dancers but Burma-Shave signs, and the routines occur not at cocktail parties but in cornfields. That is their natural habitat. One of the company announces, "I'm a farmer in a candy factory." "Whaddaya do?" asks a chorus of rural voices. "I milk chocolate." In another rib cracker, the straight man wonders: "Hey, Junior, how come I saw you eating with a knife at supper?" Junior: "My fork leaked." After the worst lines-not that any of them are good-an offstage hand socks it to the culprit with a rubber chicken. Or an animated donkey pops...
TRUE GRIT is a creaky Western comedy that features a lot of painful cracker-barrel dialogue and a superb, self-mocking performance by John Wayne, who at 62 has never seemed more like The Duke...
...Last Ray of Hope is a highly polished pair of workman's boots (he spent two weeks polishing them) set on a platform of linoleum foil and enclosed in an immaculately machined glass box. They suggest a display in the front window of some country store with a cracker barrel and iron stove in side. The title apparently has some obscure relevance in Westermann's mind to his reverence for honest workmanship. Says Westermann: "I think they are beautiful. They're comfortable and give your ankles support." Wet Flower is his imagination at its most antic. Stylized...
...musical doubting and questioning does not mean that Ruggles lacks a ready supply of answers when he sits chatting with visitors in the living room or over the cracker barrel at the country store. Salty and profane as a whaler captain, he has a mean word for everybody. Composer Deems Taylor? "What a punk!" His Mississippi steamboat-captain grandfather, Charles Henry Ruggles? "A terrible old tyrant-he had to be captain of the ship all the time." His father Nathaniel? 'Drunk all the time." His boyhood hero, Actor Richard Mansfield? "A fine actor but a mean bastard," To this...