Scroll of Shame

Hark! Is it the rustle of a butterfly's wings the maiden hears brushing across the meadow? No, it is but the rustling of this month's Scroll of Shame. The papyrus, please.

And you ought to see him after it rains.

The final image of Striptease is a shocker and a beauty: [Mark! Morris front and center in a deep backbend, pelvis thrust up to our eyeballs, penis and scrotum blooming like pale mushrooms out of a dark forest of pubic hair. —Tobi Tobias, in New York

I'll bake Manhattan.

While I was living in France, writing my new novel, I'll Take Manhattan, I was tormented by the idea of the success that could be made of a bistro called Le Tuna Salad Sandwich.

—JUDITH KRANTZ TALKS TUNA, in Good Food Magazine

We wanna new bwana.

And had I not observed the elephant Deposit heaps of steaming excrement While looking wiser than Immanuel Kant More stately than the present Duke of Kent? You start to see why I was glad I went.

—Clive James, ' 'A Valediction for Philip Larkin," London Review of Books

Everybody's a critic.

Most people I've talked to—black and white—love The Cosby Show. My tennis instructor says it has more class than any other show on television.

—Mary Helen Washington, in TV Guide

The severed head makes a dandy night-light.

A dedicated family man, Saul realized that his children were upset by an El Greco St. Sebastian he had bought. "They were frightened by all the arrows in the saint's side; I couldn't keep it.'' Fortunately, his children were not put off by the late Titian painting Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist. . .

—Wendy Lyon Moonan, quoting Saul Steinberg in Town & Country

James Wolcott