Word: smith
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...returning to Vietnam for McCain is like dipping into his life-force. Saying John McCain could have succeeded as he has in politics without having been a POW in Vietnam is like saying George W. Bush would be the Republican nominee for President if his name were George W. Smith. It's not that it's impossible; it's just impossible to imagine...
Like Anna Deavere Smith, Kaufman is pioneering a new genre of theatrical reportage. But where Smith's one-woman shows (Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992) showcase the performer as much as the journalism, Kaufman is aiming for a more radical redefinition of what theater is capable of. The project, he says, "taught me something about theater that I had never really felt. And that is the origin of theater is a community talking to itself. It was a striking experience to think that perhaps in Greek times, when this started happening, it was about 'us,' or an idea...
...know her yet, but British novelist Zadie Smith, 24, is such a phenomenon on that side of the Atlantic that she has even reviewed herself. At 21, she scored a reported $400,000, two-book deal on the strength of 100 pages that she churned out while cramming for finals at Cambridge University. That initial effort became White Teeth (Random House; 448 pages; $24.95), a book that has finally made it to the U.S. side of the ocean and that Smith describes in the British arts magazine Butterfly as "the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired, tap-dancing...
...there is no childish frivolity on display as she navigates her newly acquired apartment in a leafy suburb of northwest London. (Her home is a five-minute drive from Willesden Green, where her novel is set and where her mother and two younger brothers reside.) Smith strides past the living room, which is cluttered with half-opened boxes and iconography (a portrait of Billie Holiday, another of Marilyn Monroe and magazines featuring Madonna on the cover--"It's my life's ambition to meet her," she explains). Entering a tiny study, she plops herself down and begins rolling a cigarette...
...same can be said of Smith. She planned to be a tap dancer ("I got too fat") or a jazz singer ("I wasn't as good as Aretha"), despite a lifelong interest in writing. She grew up in an irreligious, working-class household in London. Her father, a onetime photographer, and her mother, a model turned child psychoanalyst, divorced when she was 12. Smith took to writing short stories and poetry during an adolescence she describes as "pathologically angst ridden." She hasn't outgrown the angst: her manner is painfully serious, even defensive, despite the success of White Teeth, which...