Word: igor
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Russian-born Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky, the eminent early birdman and aircraft designer, has never forgotten a monumental nosebleed he suffered as a boy of ten in the Czarist city of Kiev. As he sat with cold compresses on his neck and waited miserably for his veins to close, he fell prey to an alarming thought: if his condition became chronic, he might never be able to become a flyer. One night a little later he dreamed of coursing the skies in the softly lit, walnut-paneled cabin of an enormous flying machine?a cabin he recognized with a start...
...other hand, he asks, did Otto Lilienthal, the Wright Brothers, Santos-Dumont, and a hatful of other pioneer airmen?among them, Igor Sikorsky ?come into a wingless world lusting to fly and apparently equipped with some kind of built-in mental equipment which helped them do so? Sikorsky never goes so far as to conclude that he is an instrument of Divine Providence, but neither can he, as a deeply religious man, avoid-wondering how else to explain some of his own rarer moments of intuition...
...atmosphere is that of a powder puff. Aaron Siskind's closeup of peeling paint is not supposed to look like paint alone; it is a faintly sinister pattern reminiscent of easel pictures by the German surrealist Max Ernst. Arnold Newman's portrait of Igor Stravinsky is heavily symbolic: its main feature is not Stravinsky, but a piano top photographed to resemble a looming note of music...
Aleksandr Borodin's first musical since Prince Igor hit the boards in 1890 is an entertaining show, in spite of some remarkably shoddy ingredients. Unlike Igor, Kismet's big assist comes from Minsky rather than Rimsky. With the vigorous cootch dance that shocked Elinor Hughes on opening night, bare-tummied slave girls paraded "for sale or for rent," and a number of jokes like, "Call me in the harem; I'll be lying down there," Kismet is often indistinguishable from Harem Nights at the Old Howard. Further debits are abominable lyrics ("We'll coo adicu without undue ado"), a script...
...studied 26 languages in prison, said he was "somewhat disappointed," but could "only accept the decision as gracefully as possible." Five & Dime Heiress Barbara Mutton and German Tennis Ace Baron Gottfried von Cramm, her "dearest friend for years" (notably since her 1951 divorce from her fourth husband, Prince Igor Troubetzkoy), were together again on the Riviera, giving weight to stories that their oft-rumored marriage was finally about to come off. Von Cramm's mother, in fact, had reportedly bustled off to Paris to make the arrangements...