Word: padding
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Instead of soaring 200 miles out over the Atlantic as it was supposed to do, the Redstone roared a few inches into the air and then settled lumpishly back onto its launching pad. Adding to the absurdity of the scene was the wild behavior of the small "escape rocket" perched atop the Mercury capsule. The function of the escape rocket is to save the astronaut's life by blasting off in a hurry, taking the capsule with it, if the main rocket malfunctions. But this time the electronic signals got scrambled and the escape rocket blasted into the blue...
...with Social Climbers. From that launching pad, Bagwell became a sought-after speechmaker (about 50 per year), joined every civic and scholastic organization in sight. He got into the charmed circle of the Republican Party by phoning friends, who phoned other friends, and their powerful support sent him to the G.O.P.'s county and state conventions. While Republican mossbacks shunned him, Bagwell became the heretic hero of liberal young Republicans, went on to head the state's Citizens for Eisenhower in 1954. He ran for auditor-general in 1956, lost by 32,000 votes...
Though professional repairmen are a notably independent lot, they flocked to sign up with the home-repair clubs, seldom try to pad their bills to make up for the 10% club fee. Reason: they save more than 10% by using the club since it assumes the costs of advertising and billing, keeps nonpayment of bills down to 1% v. sometimes as high as 10% for nonclub clientele. Moreover, the ready-made market shoots up business. TV Repairman Kenneth Daniel's business has doubled in the year that he has been affiliated with San Francisco's Homesmith...
...conditioning has helped the better offerings in the little theaters to survive as well. Among them: The Balcony, French Playwright Jean Genet's dramatic thesis that the world is a brothel and vice versa; The Connection, an awesomely naturalistic study of junkies in their pad; Krapp's Last Tape, a single-actor tour de force about youth and age, on a double bill with The Zoo Story, wherein Playwright Edward Albee creates a critical mass by clanging together a beat with a square; A Country Scandal, an early play of Anton Chekhov, produced professionally...
...Still fresh and unwilted by the heat are Little Mary Sunshine, a crisp, straight-faced spoof of the Grand Old Operettas; The Balcony, Jean Genet's surrealist universe ensconced in a brothel; The Connection, a pad full of Pirandelloish characters waiting, not for Godot, but the heroin fix; and a neat double dose of disenchantment-Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in which a defeated, Proust-like writer plays back his own past, on the same bill with Edward Albee's Zoo Story, which stars a lonely beatnik trying to communicate with an awful square...