"The Voodoo That They Did So Well" [.]

[fiefoe]

__ Lorenzo (Da Ponte) went on about the extravagances of Dante, the conceits of Petrarch, the plagiarisms of Boccaccio. He quoted the Bible in Hebrew and Latin;
__ Mary Rodgers, the daughter of Richard Rodgers, and one of Stephen's closest friends, sent him a gift. He wrote a warm note, ending, "Thank-you for the plate, but where was my mother's head? ..."

'The Voodoo That He Did So Well'

• The impresario Billy Rose had studied the lyrics of popular songs and found that the "oo" sound - as in June, moon, and spoon - showed up in more than half the hits. Inspired, he concocted the novelty number "Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly Eyes" and saw it rise to the top of the charts in 1923.
• His use of triplets dazzled: "I used to fall / In love with all /Those boys who maul / Refined ladies / But now I tell / Each young gazelle /to go to hell / I mean Hades."
• parody: "Night and day under the bark of me / There's an, Oh, such a mob of microbes snaking a park of me."
• a ballad entirely in the subjunctive ("Were Thine That Special Face"), used Elizabethan inversions ("Where Is the Life That Late I Led?")
• With the wife of the British embessida / Try a crack out of 'Troilus and Cressida' / If she says she won't buy it or tike it / Make her tike it, what's more, "As You Like It." / If she says your behavior is heinous / Kick her right in the "Coriolanus."
  

__ Two Jews decide to assassinate the tsar. They bring sharp knives and conceal themselves behind trees in a park where the Russian leader takes his daily stroll. Hours pass, and the tsar fails to appear. At sundown one of them worries: "I hope nothing happened to him."
__ One Jew sighs to another, "It would be best never to have been born." His friend agrees: "True, but how many are that lucky? Maybe one in a hundred thousand."

__ 'One can blow up a dream to be bigger than the night.'
__ Somerset Maugham's aperçu: "Money is like a sixth sense, without which one cannot make use of the other five."

Hostess with e Mostest;  mesomorph;   'hairy one'
(Leo Bloom sings, "I want to read my name in Winchell's column")
("Good evening Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press.")

<<