Word: hummingbirds
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...Windsor (who, he said, had perfect feet) and Ava Gardner. He was an artist for hire who worked for the new royalty of the 20th century: movie stars and socialites. Such clients tested his ingenuity. To fulfill the request of an Indian princess, he once fabricated a shoe of hummingbird feathers. But Ferragamo asserted that he was designing shoes not for the personality of the customer but the personality of the age. James Laver, the influential English fashion theorist, wrote that all significant fashion shares three qualities: utility, status and seductiveness. Ferragamo's shoes satisfy on all counts...
...elephants at the San Francisco Zoo is an attraction more commonly seen along city sidewalks: a parking meter. But drop a quarter in and you get a lot more than 30 minutes of parking time. When a donor turns the handle of the modified meter, a mechanical red-throated hummingbird flies across a jungle scene, signaling that the donation will be used to save a small plot of tropical rain forest...
...anyone who still thinks of the banjo as suitable only for rippling accompaniment to high-pitched country harmonies, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones is pure revelation. As a technician, Fleck is hummingbird-fast, whether picking with three fingers, Scruggs-style, or with the back-and-forth, thumb- and-forefinger method pioneered by Don Reno. Yet his technique is always at the service of a sophisticated musical imagination that can make the instrument sound as if it were born to play jazz. Unlike a guitar, a banjo cannot sustain a note for very long. ("Pop, ping, and then it's gone...
...lawn chair set on a piece of Astroturf. "My grass," she calls it. While the sun, rattlesnakes and tarantulas bed down, Bloomquist and tens of thousands of other tanned retirees enjoy another happy hour parked out in the desert, gazing at the mountains, puttering around their mobile homes, filling hummingbird feeders, thriftily sidestepping the cruelties of winter and old age in as mercurial and rambunctious a community as the Wild West ever...
Though the role might have winded any singer, Luciano Pavarotti easily sustained the ringing high notes, the plaintive appoggiaturas, the hummingbird runs and trills. Not his own, but those of 150 hopeful young singers. Bespectacled and wrapped in a colorful shawl, the celebrated tenor spent the past two weeks judging the finals of the second Opera Company of Philadelphia/ Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition. "If you win this competition," said Pavarotti at the outset, "it promises you an opportunity. But more important, if you do not win, it doesn't mean you will not have a career." Still, the expansive...