Monday, March 27, 2017

A man of many roles

[Lord Ickenham] was a man who in his time had played many parts, and he took a pride in playing them right. It was his modest boast that there was nothing in existence, except possibly a circus dwarf, owing to his height, or Gina Lollobrigida, owing to her individual shape, which he could not at any moment and without rehearsal depict with complete success. In a single afternoon at The Cedars, Mafeking Road, in the suburb of Mitching Hill, on the occasion when he had befriended the pink chap to whom he had alluded in his talk with Albert Peasemarch, he had portrayed not only an official from the bird shop, come to clip the claws of the resident parrot, but Mr. Roddie, owner of The Cedars, and a Mr. J. G. Bulstrode, one of the neighbors, and had been disappointed that he was given no opportunity of impersonating the parrot, which he was convinced he would have gone on broad, artistic lines.

(from Cocktail Time, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

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