(Roughly) Daily

Posts Tagged ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner

“Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned”*…

 

presidents park

Presidents Park, near Williamsburg, Virginia

Birmingham-based photographer Leland Kent travelled the South to document “abandoned places”…

six flags

Six Flags Amusement Park, near New Orleans

jax

Jax Lanes, Jacksonville, Florida

See more of these three sites and many others, all with explanatory history, at Abandoned Southeast.

* Emile Durkheim

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As we forget to remember, we might send acerbic birthday greetings to Alexander Humphreys Woollcott; e was born on this date in 1887.   A critic and commentator for The New Yorker (and a member of the Algonquin Round Table), he is probably more easily recognized these days as the inspiration for “Sheridan Whiteside,” the main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and for the far less likable character Waldo Lydecker in the Otto Preminger film Laura .  (Woollcott himself was convinced that he was the inspiration for his friend Rex Stout’s brilliant, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe; but Stout denied it.)

220px-alexander_woollcott_(1939) source

 

Written by (Roughly) Daily

January 19, 2019 at 1:01 am

If I do say so myself…

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Lest readers’ lights be inappropriately hidden under bushels:  “Don’t Be So Modest“– a “humblebrag generator.”

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As we tune the horns that we’re about to blow, we might send curmudgeonly birthday greetings to Alexander Humphreys Woollcott; he was born on this date in 1887.  A critic and columnist, Woollcott was well known in his time as a radio commentator, a contributor to The New Yorker, and a member of the Algonquin Round Table.  These days, he may be better recognized as the model for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and for Waldo Lydecker in the 1944 film Laura.  (Woollcott himself believed that he was the model for Rex Stout’s famous detective, Nero Wolfe; but Stout suggested that his friend was flattering himself.)

The two oldest professions in the world — ruined by amateurs

– On actors and prostitutes, from his column, as republished in Shouts and Murmurs: Echoes of a Thousand and One First Nights (1922)

All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.

– “The Knock at the Stage Door” in Reader’s Digest (December 1933)

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Written by (Roughly) Daily

January 19, 2013 at 5:37 am

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