Word: mask
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After reading the two letters regarding hotel fire safety [March 16], I believe the general public may have some misunderstanding of the subject. A "simple gas mask" would not provide oxygen or protection against carbon monoxide. And a plastic hose would surely not be a shield against fire roaring down a hallway at 2000° F. What is needed is the adoption of tougher building-and fire-code standards. Until then we will continue to have more fires and more deaths...
...around him--he seems to wait a split second too long before reacting, and even then all of this extremes, violent or boyish, flash out of those same, perpetually half-shut eyes. With his hairline receding and the lines of his face hardening now into some sort of death mask. Nicholson doesn't try to play Chambers as the twenty-three year old punk Cain envisioned. Instead he slouches around like a bored satyr. He seems to revel in his decay, in his unnerving ability to play an utterly reptilian Don Juan...
...find conventional discourse so predictable and boring that any deviation comes as a delightful relief. In his deeply unfunny Essay on Laughter the philosopher Henri Bergson theorized that the act of laughter is caused by any interruption of normal human fluidity or momentum (a pie in the face, a mask, a pun). Slips of the tongue, therefore, are like slips on banana peels; we crave their occurrence if only to break the monotonies. The monotonies run to substance. When that announcer introduced Hoobert Heever, he may also have been saying that the nation had had enough of Herbert Hoover...
...strain on the black man and woman, it shows in various ways. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the black dialect poet, explained, "We Wear the Mask." That is one way of surviving; as a con man, a common figure in black fiction. Another way is to "disappear," to pass for white or otherwise become anonymous. The Invisible Man disappeared altogether, forging a life of an existential fact: since he was invisible to the white world anyway, why not go whole hog? The third way-separation-brings America back from fiction to reality. In a sense, separation often seems the most reasonable choice...
...supplying a liberal amount of sympathy and imagination: and even the most accomplished contributions kept modest and self-effacing. It's a deceptively lumbering production, and not an inappropriate one. Aladdin in Three Acts is Mayer's wise and innocent paean to adolescence, that "state of grace" before the mask has been cemented to one's face, when one's body contains the universe and one's possibilities are similarly boundless. He has gathered his former classmates and collaborators--as well as a talented group of undergraduates--together in the Agassiz Theatre to mount not a slick adventure...