Word: raconteur
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Dwight Fiske, 67, nightclub raconteur-pianist, whose bawdy songs in free verse derided and titillated cafe society in the '20s and '30s, once caused the entire Albuquerque Rotary Club to walk out on him; in Manhattan. Fiske made pretentious women his special target (Queen Anne, Miss Elaine of Boston, Gretchen Goudonofi, Malaga the Grape Girl), but he was also unkind to Marc Antony ("Cleopatra thought this was so swell / She had the Fig Newtons passed around, / Which only gave Marc Antony a case of hiccups / She misconstrued this for emotion...
Garrulous Raconteur. London's critics hail Bratby as the brightest and best of the Kitchen-Sinkers, and London art buyers snapped up all but a handful of his new paintings. "He can be visually greedy, slightly coarse-grained, literal, shocking in a good-humored, terrier sort of way," says the Times, "and all these qualities tend to be accounted to him as virtues." The Guardian's Eric Newton likes the way "his gluttonous eye devours his surroundings in huge optical mouthfuls, and his restless, untiring hand transfers them to canvas with the garrulous enthusiasm of a born raconteur...
With this story and with countless others, Sam Behrman--playwright, author and raconteur--has amused and entertained his Kirkland House hosts this past week. His Evening with S.N. Behrman ("I feel like Beatrice Lillie") in the Junior Common Room Monday night, was the highlight of a "marvelous, but exhausting" week in Cambridge--a week of pre-dinner sherry, after-dinner brandy, and constant conversation...
...Ustinov is a sort of Orson Welles rolled into one. He has 13 produced plays to his credit, two of which have reached Broadway (the first: The Love of Four Colonels), has acted in dozens of plays and movies, directed half a dozen more. A brilliant raconteur, ad-libber and dialectician, he speaks French, German. Italian and Spanish (plus devastatingly accurate American of several regions), gives funny, plausible imitations of languages he does not speak, e.g., Russian with a Japanese accent, can make noises like a talking dog. a bugle, a violin, flute, bassoon or harpsichord. He is halfway through...
...Woke Up Wicked, is the tale of an unheroic cowboy who inadvertently becomes a member of a gang of badmen called the Rough String. Up to the last line, "I went home to Pennsylvania and took up plowing," she sustains perfectly the self-derisory note of the campfire raconteur. Her shorter stories are her best, and in tales of Indian, settler, miner and badman, she subtly suggests the tragedy of collision between aborigine and invader, and sometimes the more complicated tragedy of their collusion. Such a story is Lost Sister, a tale of a captured white child who became...