Word: skittering
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...tickled, the slapped, the taught, the scolded, teased, praised?and sometimes the shot at, and sometimes the decapitated and the killed for food. All that can be done to them is done, and they do what they are told. But not forever. One morning the streets through which they skitter now will be theirs to command. They will not think what to do; they will already know. Whatever becomes of them and of their countries will have been decided in some absolutely innocuous moment during these innocuous years, a moment they will not be able to trace. Their thinking done...
...string of boxcars parked on a siding, Bill Cameron, 17, of Orange, Vt., and his father Enoch, 71, are standing back-to-back in the wet grass, practicing their competition tunes. The two Koehler girls from Westfield, Mass., ten-year-old Gretchen and seven-year-old Rebecca, skitter about giggling until their mother Shirley tells them to get down to business and start practicing. They are astonishingly good. Shirley, who is a nurse, says that neither she nor her husband Jim, a welding engineer, is at all musical. The girls started playing the violin in a school program and learned...
...lungs of iron and feet that skitter like a sandpiper's. When he beams, the sun comes out. When he is troubled, the sky falls on Chicken Little. And when he leers, he is the naughtiest boy in class. Class is also the word for his partner and costar, Ann Miller. When haven't we missed her long, lithesome legs? The years have left them far sounder than most currencies. Her taps are tops, routines done with effortless style and sophisticated rhythms. Do we miss burlesque, which forms the substance of Sugar Babies (if sheer fluff has substance...
...comfortable, decked with the heterogeneous souvenirs of a long life?rows of Indian pottery, elegantly woven tribal baskets and a huge Chinese ceremonial drum. The piano player's head, a bald mass, gleams in the light. His hands, swollen from arthritis, hardened by decades of immersion in darkroom chemicals, skitter over the keys, assaulting the same phrase again and again. "Damn," he says, "I've lost it." But not altogether. Once you have practiced to concert discipline, even 50 years ago, the traces still show. "There used to be a relationship between my piano and my photography," says Ansel Adams...
...choice is their student government or back to the caves. "All or nothing, and we can change it next year." But when we're stuck with a constitution we spend all our energies amending, an Assembly that floats along on rhetoric, endless resolutions and ad hoc committees that skitter over the basic issue of our lack of influence, then we're really stuck...