Word: violet
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...returning sexual compensations. Two homosexuals enter, an Amos and Andy combination: a gawky farm boy from Iowa who is bicycling to Mexico and a Hollywood dandy with gestures reminiscent of the Oceanic roll. We also meet an alcoholic doctor who's lost his license but still practices clandestinely; Violet, a lachrymose bar girl whose only way to approach people is with her hands under the table; and a forty-seven year old short-order cook named Steve who says that he must make do with the scraps in life--Violet is one of the scraps...
Once this group is assembled, the play becomes a series of movements, each centered on one or two characters. There is no plot in the normal sense, no unity of action. The two homosexuals sit at one table, Violet and Steve at another, and the rest sit down at the bar, creating three self-enclosed worlds whose only thread of communication is Leona, moving about like some caged animal. Nervously boastful, muddled but penetrative. Leona is the great middle-aged screaming child who has been brought to perfection as an American theater type: a misty but lynx-eyed observer...
...tradesmen" and quarreled with them endlessly. Ford was fond of women and attractive to them, in part because he shared with his hero Tietjens the view that you seduce "a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her." Yet one feels he fully deserved Violet Hunt, the intellectual succubus for whom he broke up his first marriage in 1909 and who became the model for one of fiction's most ferocious females, Tietjens' wife Sylvia. Violet's real-life amours included pursuit by-or of -both H.G. Wells and Henry James...
...late in the 19th century in the collection of the first Lord Newlands of Mauldslie Castle, a Scottish industrialist with a taste for painting. It was vaguely attributed to the 15th century Flemish painter Quentin Massys. But nobody paid much attention, least of all the owner's heir Violet, Lady Baird, who kept it in her cottage at Bray mainly because it reminded her of a dear friend. Then, in December 1967, she decided to sell a trinket or two. David Carritt, a renowned art sleuth then working for Christie's, obligingly visited the cottage at Bray, expecting...
...staggering power of the scene in which Giovanni stabs his sister Annabella is due to a vaulting funnel effect achieved through intense turquoise lighting of the higher recesses of the set above her bed. Shades of rose, violet and pale turquoise give way in the lighting of the last scenes to the wild-set and dark-set of hues. If Ford's themes foreshadow Sade, Poe and Nabokov, the combined effect of Colacecchia's set and Jonathan Miller's lighting evokes the same sense of demented, striving sensuality found in the eighteenth-century etchings of Piranesi...