The Nicholas Brothers were a team of dancing brothers, Fayard (1914–2006) and Harold (1921–2000), who performed a highly acrobatic technique known as "flash dancing".  With a high level of artistry and daring innovations, they were considered by many to be the greatest tap dancers of their day.  Their performance in the musical number "Jumpin' Jive" (with Cab Calloway and his orchestra) featured in the movie Stormy Weather is considered by many to be the most virtuosic dance display of all time.  Growing up surrounded by vaudeville acts as children, they became stars of the jazz circuit during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance and went on to have successful careers performing on stage, film, and television well into the 1990s.  The Nicholas Brothers grew up in Philadelphia, the sons of college-educated musicians who played in their own band at the old Standard Theater—their mother at the piano and father on drums.  At the age of three, Fayard would always sit in the front row while his parents worked, and by the time he was ten, he had seen most of the great African-American vaudeville acts—particularly the dancers, including such notables of the time as Alice Whitman, Willie Bryant, and Bill Robinson.  The brothers were fascinated by the combination of tap dancing and acrobatics.  Fayard often imitated their acrobatics and clowning for the kids in his neighborhood.   Neither Fayard nor Harold had any formal dance training.   Fayard taught himself how to dance, sing, and perform by watching and imitating the professional entertainers on stage.  He then taught his younger siblings, first performing with his sister Dorothy as the Nicholas Kids, later joined by Harold.  Harold idolized his older brother and learned by copying his moves and distinct style.  Dorothy later opted out of the act, and the Nicholas Kids became known as the Nicholas Brothers.  As word spread of their talents, the Nicholas Brothers became famous in Philadelphia.  They were first hired for a radio program, The Horn and Hardart Kiddie Hour, and then by other local theatres such as the Standard and the Pearl.  When they were performing at the Pearl, the manager of The Lafayette, a famous New York vaudeville showcase, saw them and immediately wanted them to perform for his theater.  In 1932 they became the featured act at Harlem's Cotton Club, when Harold was 11 and Fayard was 18.  They astonished their mainly white audiences dancing to the jazz tempos of "Bugle Call Rag" and they were the only entertainers in the African-American cast allowed to mingle with white patrons.  They performed at the Cotton Club for two years, working with the orchestras of Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Jimmy Lunceford.  During this time they filmed their first movie short, Pie Pie Blackbird, in 1932, with Eubie Blake and his orchestra.  In their hybrid of tap dance, ballet, and acrobatics—sometimes called acrobatic dancing or "flash dancing"—no individual or group surpassed the effect that the Nicholas Brothers had on audiences and on other dancers.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Brothers

-jur-, root.  -jur- comes from Latin, where it has the meaning "swear.''  It is related to the root -jus-, meaning "law; rule.''  This meaning is found in such words as:  abjure, conjure, injure, juridical, jurisdiction, jury, perjure.  WordReference Random House Learner's Dictionary of American English © 2019  https://www.wordreference.com/definition/-jur-



Lupini are common in Spain where they are known as altramuces, and Portugal as tremoços.  Lupini beans are extremely bitter before being prepared, and must be soaked overnight, cooked the next day, then rinsed several times a day for the next 5 or 6 days.  You can just eat lupini beans as a healthy snack, antipasto or also after a meal, as they do in Italy.  With an Italian style preparation, olives are mixed with the lupini at the end of the process, which lend their salty flavor to the beans.  It’s a fabulous combination.  Christina  https://www.christinascucina.com/lupini-beans-and-olives-italian/

As a literary device, an allegory is a metaphor in which a character, place or event is used to deliver a broader message about real-world issues and occurrences.  Allegory (in the sense of the practice and use of allegorical devices and works) has occurred widely throughout history in all forms of art, largely because it can readily illustrate or convey complex ideas and concepts in ways that are comprehensible or striking to its viewers, readers, or listeners.  First attested in English in 1382, the word allegory comes from Latin allegoria, the latinisation of the Greek ἀλληγορία (allegoría), "veiled language, figurative", which in turn comes from both ἄλλος (allos), "another, different" and ἀγορεύω (agoreuo), "to harangue, to speak in the assembly", which originates from ἀγορά (agora), "assembly".  See examples of allegories and graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory



At the start of the 16th century the Opera del Duomo—the committee of officials in charge of the decoration and maintenance of the Florence cathedral—had a tricky unfinished project on its hands.  A document from 1501 refers to a massive barely begun statue, “a certain man of marble, named David, badly blocked out and laid on its back in the courtyard.”  The stone was a leftover from a long-running decorative project:  in 1408 the committee had decided to decorate the roofline around the dome of the cathedral with massive statues of biblical prophets and mythological figures.  The first two, put into place in the early 15th century, were a statue of Joshua sculpted in terra-cotta by Donatello and painted white to look like marble, and a statue of Hercules, sculpted by one of Donatello’s students, Agostino di Duccio.  A statue of David, the Biblical hero who slayed the giant Goliath, had been ordered in 1464.  This commission went to Agostino, and a huge slab of marble was extracted from the Carrara quarries in Tuscany, Italy, for the project.  For unknown reasons Agostino abandoned the project after doing only a little work, mostly roughing out around the legs.  Another sculptor, Antonio Rossellino, was hired to take over the project in 1476, but he backed out almost immediately, citing the poor quality of the marble.  (Modern scientific analyses of the marble have confirmed that it is indeed of mediocre quality.)  Left without a sculptor but too expensive to throw away, the massive slab sat out in the elements for a quarter century.  In the summer of 1501 a new effort was made to find a sculptor who could finish the statue.  The 26-year-old sculptor Michelangelo was chosen and given two years to complete it.  Early in the morning on September 13, 1501, the young artist got to work on the slab, extracting the figure of David in a miraculous process that the artist and writer Giorgio Vasari would later describe as “the bringing back to life of one who was dead.”  In 1504, as Michelangelo finished his work, Florentine officials concluded that the statue was too heavy to place in its intended location on the roofline of the cathedral.  A committee of artists, including Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci, met and decided that the statue should be placed at the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.  In 1873 it was moved indoors to the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence and a replica was erected at the original site.  https://www.britannica.com/story/how-a-rejected-block-of-marble-became-the-worlds-most-famous-statue



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2157  September 20, 2019