Word: lines
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...inventiveness with language, constantly pirouetting around the tired cliché or the pretentious phrase. Yet he had an infallible internal censor that kept his wisecracks from ever being cheap, or risqué, or mean. He kept a police whistle at his desk, which he'd blow whenever a line or bit of business crossed the line. He remained old-fashioned that way, as well as in his stubborn refusal, unlike Carson and almost everyone that followed, to do "savers" when a joke bombed. He might strip to his shorts onstage for an ice-water bath, but he never lost...
...mother sound nervous was last July, and by then she had been dead for two years. I was at the L.B.J. library in Austin, Texas, listening to a telephone call she had placed to President Lyndon Johnson more than four years before I was born. "Nancy Dickerson is on line two," begins the White House operator. Johnson picks up: "Yes, honey." She tries to start with a joke, but it warbles out: "The next time I need a new swimming suit I'm going to consult you." The President is silent, having forgotten a quip he made about her fashion...
...story she wants to do for NBC News about Johnson's special assistant. "We want to follow Jack Valenti all over with whatever he does and take pictures," she says, trying to make it sound fun. With her faint Midwestern accent it sounds like she's delivering a line in a musical. "No," Johnson comes back quickly. "You'll have more jealousy here than I can deal with now." She tries again for several more minutes, but Johnson shoots her down...
...admire her stride, but that's because I am following in her footsteps. (Though, of course, she did it all in heels.) I've been on the other end of that phone line, tap-dancing to bring a source around. And this year, I've been shuttling from Washington to Austin, stuffing myself at age 32 into the Bush campaign jet the way she did into those drafty prop planes in the same town, at the same age, 40 years ago. I too have drinks at the Driskill hotel and send a postcard to my dad on a slow afternoon...
...Gore of making America vulnerable to nuclear attack from "communist red China" (reminding voters under 45 what "red" means). A new pro-Gore ad assailed Bush's policies in Texas, but its real message was the visuals - a clueless-looking Bush standing at a microphone - and the tag line, "Is he ready to lead America...