Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Accompaning (for Accompanying)

You've all heard the expression Two's company, Y's a crowd? Well, perhaps that's not exactly how it goes, although that is essentially what's going on with our typo of the day, which is crowding out the letter Y. Today's typo was found 33 times in the OhioLINK database. The night that Peter Pan flew in through the nursery window in search of his shadow, and invited the Darling children to accompany him to Neverland, he might have been hoping for Wendy, and not John and Michael too. But as things turned out, the three pajamaed neophytes made for fine company. And the celebrated Maude Adams made a fine Peter Pan when the James Barrie play opened on Broadway in 1905. "Maudie" Adams made her stage debut in her mother's theatrical company at the tender age of nine months and was a seasoned actress by the time Barrie tapped her for the part of Peter Pan. Many other women have played the unchanging boy throughout the years (in fact, the role was the exclusive domain of grown-up gamines until the early 1980s), but Maude Adams remains the one who "never grew up" in our collective imagination.

(Maude Adams as Peter Pan, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

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