Word: jacket
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...weeks in the London hit A Queen Came By, Actress Thora Hird had spoken these lines in fear and trembling, while a sympathetic stage manageress stood in the wings with a glass of brandy at the ready. Whenever she spoke them, said Actress Hird, the second-hand Victorian jacket she wore in the third act tightened inexplicably about her neck and invisible hands seemed to choke...
Television in the Bathroom. For some time Thora suffered in silence. But recently fiftyish Understudy Erica O'Foyle had to go on for her. Like many another understudy in her big moment, Erica was nervous, but she did fine for two acts. Then she put on the bewitched jacket and started the third. She went pale, choked and forgot her lines. "My throat went suddenly dry," she explained weakly after the curtain finally came down. "I felt a great hand clutching me from behind. It was horrible." She indignantly denied any suggestion that the trouble might have stemmed from...
Next day the producer's wife, a shrewd judge of publicity and an amateur spiritualist, packed Erica and the jacket off to a professional medium. Big, bosomy Medium Jane Harley quivered when she touched the possessed garment. Such a treasure was almost too good to be true. She dragged it over her plump arms and promptly went into hysterics. Then the stage manageress, an old trouper herself, had a go at it, and tore the garment off. "I'm choking!" she screamed, and a very convincing scream...
...woman reporter tried the jacket with no effect, but no one paid much attention to her. The curse of the jacket was for more sensitive folk. The very next time Actress O'Foyle put it on, she fainted dead away. "There were hands," she gasped on reviving, "very old hands and very gnarled. They had worked on the land...
American Mothers, a Philadelphia lady named Anna Jarvis reasoned some years back, are overworked and underpaid. They should be recognized, rewarded on one day a year. She took her idea to the florist around the corner who forwarded it to the national association of florists, candy merchants, and bed jacket vendors in executive session in New York City. Mother's Day, an American Institution, was born. A public which has proved to be the greatest market in the world for "cards for all occasions," embroidered pillow-slips, and cut rate telegraph plaudits has taken Mother's Day to its soft...