Ad Lib Quotes

I don't think I'd have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I'd known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.

They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines." "Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce." "We need more special effects and dance numbers.

Cracking his knuckles, Cary dramatically prepared to open his fortune cookie. “Let’s see. Will I be rich? Famous? About to meet Mr. or Ms. Tall, Dark, and Tasty? Traveling to distant lands? What’d you guys get?” “Mine’s lame,” I said. “In the end all things will be known. Duh. I didn’t need a fortune to figure that out.” Gideon opened his and read, “Prosperity will knock on your door soon.” I snorted. Cary shot me a look. “I know, right? You snatched someone else’s cookie, Cross.” “He better not be anywhere near someone else’s cookie,” I said dryly. Reaching over, Gideon plucked half of mine out of my fingers. “Don’t worry, angel. Your cookie is the only one I want.” He popped it in his mouth with a wink. “Gag,” Cary muttered. “Get a room.” He cracked his fortune with a flourish, and then scowled. “What the fuck?” I leaned forward. “What’s it say?” “Confucius say,” Gideon ad-libbed, “man with hand in pocket feel cocky all day.” Cary threw half his cookie at Gideon, who caught it deftly and grinned. “Give me that.” I snatched the fortune out from between Cary’s fingers and read it. Then laughed. “Fuck you, Eva.” “Well?” Gideon prodded. “Pick another cookie.” Gideon smiled. “Pwned by a fortune.” Cary threw the other half of his cookie.

Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a "T." I don't know what a "T" is (except a sixpenny one, which includes bread-and- butter and cake AD LIB., and is cheap at the price, if you haven't had any dinner). It seems to suit everybody, however, which is greatly to its credit.

A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It's all about them. They have mastered the Star Wars or Star Trek universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies. Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to.

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound. A sound you could smell. This man worked for the carnival,you dig? And to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. After a while, the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared... and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teethlike... little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it... but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street... shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags. Nobody loved it. And it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth. Finally, it talked all the time, day and night. You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up... beating at it with his fists... and sticking candles up it, but... nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him... "It is you who will shut up in the end, not me... "because we don't need you around here anymore. I can talk and eat and shit." After that, he began waking up in the morning with transparentjelly... like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands... like burning gasoline jelly and grow there. So, finally, his mouth sealed over... and the whole head... would have amputated spontaneously except for the eyes, you dig? That's the one thing that the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. Nerve connections were blocked... and infiltrated and atrophied. So, the brain couldn't give orders anymore. It was trapped inside the skull... sealed off. For a while, you could see... the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes. And then finally the brain must have died... because the eyes went out... and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk.

When one’s young, everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

God is not looking for incredibly high notes, intricate riffs or award winning ad-libbing. God is looking at the heart.

Confucius say," Gideon ad-libbed, "man with hand in pocket feel cocky all day.

Clyde, she said it’s fine. What? Really?” Mom huffed. “Your dad wants to know if ‘fine’ is code for ‘please come home, I’m being held hostage by hormonal maniacs.’” Pause. “And if said hormonal maniacs are listening he wants them to know he will cut off vital body parts and watch them bleed out a slow and torturous death then bury said body parts on different continents throughout the world so he will never be brought to justice and will revel in their excruciating demise for the rest of his life because they had the nerve to cause his daughter any discomfort whatsoever.” I grinned. “Mom, Dad didn’t say that.” “I may have ad-libbed that last part. But he did ask about the hormonal maniacs.

The only problem with the Angels' new image was that the outlaws themselves didn't understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common. Yet they were gaining access to a whole reservoir of women, booze, drugs and new action -- which they were eager to get their hands on, and symbolism be damned. But they could never get the hang of the role they were expected to play, and insisted on ad-libbing the lines. This fouled their channels of communication, which made them nervous ... and after a brief whirl on the hipster party circuit, all but a few decided it was both cheaper and easier, in the long run, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy.

Bernard: ... By the way, Valentina, do you want credit? - 'the game book recently discovered by.'? Valentine: It was never lost, Bernard. Bernard: 'As recently pointed out by.' I don't normally like giving credit where it's due, but with scholarly articles as with divorce, there is a certain cachet in citing a member of the aristocracy. I'll pop it in ad lib for the lecture, and give you a mention in the press release. How's that? Valentine: Very kind.

In gravitational fields there are no such thing as rigid bodies with Euclidean properties; thus the fictitious rigid body of reference is of no avail in the general theory of relativity. ... For this reason non-rigid reference-bodies are used, which are, as a whole, not only moving in any way whatsoever, but which also suffer alterations in form ad lib. during their motion... This non-rigid reference-body, ... might appropriately be termed a "reference mollusc,"...

It takes three weeks to prepare a good ad-lib speech.

You might start a new religion yourself, with the creed: 'There is no one so clever as Hercule Poirot, Amen, D. C. Repeat ad lib.'!

It seemed to me that because of things like car accidents and lost loves, life and death and broken hearts, we should grab every moment and absolutely devour the good parts. Wouldn't she want that? For me to ad-lib my life instead of living by some typed-in-twelve-point-Courier-New script?

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble.

Anyhow, hey ho, let's go…Fuck, there was a band. Punk meets cartoons. Glorious dumbfuckery, standing there, legs spread, guitars scraping the floor. Three chords, two minutes and one finger right up Simon Cowbell's arse. Auto tune this, ya cunt. And The Clash. Strummer, king of the ad lib. 'Fill her up Jacko!' Don’t mind if I do, Joseph, don’t mind if I do. Thrashing it out on stage in yer Brigade Rosse tee

We had expected to take losses," Colonel John Kane said, "but I never will forget those big Libs going down like flies." His radio operator, Ray Hubbard, added, "I looked through the open bomb-bay doors and could see flames from exploding gas tanks shooting right up into us. The fire wrapped us up. I looked out of the side windows and saw the others flying through smoke and flames. It was flying through hell...I guess we'll go straight to heaven when we die. We've had our purgatory.

On April 30. 1789, George Washington stood on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, the temporary national capital. He took the oath of office on a Masonic Bible, ad-libbing the words “So help me God,” which the oath of office as specified in the Constitution does not require.

She was the first close friend who I felt like I’d re­ally cho­sen. We weren’t in each other’s lives be­cause of any obli­ga­tion to the past or con­ve­nience of the present. We had no shared his­tory and we had no rea­son to spend all our time to­ gether. But we did. Our friend­ship in­ten­si­fied as all our friends had chil­dren – she, like me, was un­con­vinced about hav­ing kids. And she, like me, found her­self in a re­la­tion­ship in her early thir­ties where they weren’t specif­i­cally work­ing to­wards start­ing a fam­ily. By the time I was thirty-four, Sarah was my only good friend who hadn’t had a baby. Ev­ery time there was an­other preg­nancy an­nounce­ment from a friend, I’d just text the words ‘And an­other one!’ and she’d know what I meant. She be­came the per­son I spent most of my free time with other than Andy, be­cause she was the only friend who had any free time. She could meet me for a drink with­out plan­ning it a month in ad­vance. Our friend­ship made me feel lib­er­ated as well as safe. I looked at her life choices with no sym­pa­thy or con­cern for her. If I could ad­mire her de­ci­sion to re­main child-free, I felt en­cour­aged to ad­mire my own. She made me feel nor­mal. As long as I had our friend­ship, I wasn’t alone and I had rea­son to be­lieve I was on the right track. We ar­ranged to meet for din­ner in Soho af­ter work on a Fri­day. The waiter took our drinks or­der and I asked for our usual – two Dirty Vodka Mar­ti­nis. ‘Er, not for me,’ she said. ‘A sparkling wa­ter, thank you.’ I was ready to make a joke about her un­char­ac­ter­is­tic ab­sti­nence, which she sensed, so as soon as the waiter left she said: ‘I’m preg­nant.’ I didn’t know what to say. I can’t imag­ine the ex­pres­sion on my face was par­tic­u­larly en­thu­si­as­tic, but I couldn’t help it – I was shocked and felt an un­war­ranted but in­tense sense of be­trayal. In a de­layed re­ac­tion, I stood up and went to her side of the ta­ble to hug her, un­able to find words of con­grat­u­la­tions. I asked what had made her change her mind and she spoke in va­garies about it ‘just be­ing the right time’ and wouldn’t elab­o­rate any fur­ther and give me an an­swer. And I needed an an­swer. I needed an an­swer more than any­thing that night. I needed to know whether she’d had a re­al­iza­tion that I hadn’t and, if so, I wanted to know how to get it. When I woke up the next day, I re­al­ized the feel­ing I was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing was not anger or jeal­ousy or bit­ter­ness – it was grief. I had no one left. They’d all gone. Of course, they hadn’t re­ally gone, they were still my friends and I still loved them. But huge parts of them had dis­ap­peared and there was noth­ing they could do to change that. Un­less I joined them in their spa­ces, on their sched­ules, with their fam­i­lies, I would barely see them. And I started dream­ing of an­other life, one com­pletely re­moved from all of it. No more chil­dren’s birth­day par­ties, no more chris­ten­ings, no more bar­be­cues in the sub­urbs. A life I hadn’t ever se­ri­ously con­tem­plated be­fore. I started dream­ing of what it would be like to start all over again. Be­cause as long as I was here in the only Lon­don I knew – mid­dle-class Lon­don, cor­po­rate Lon­don, mid-thir­ties Lon­don, mar­ried Lon­don – I was in their world. And I knew there was a whole other world out there.

In every classic comedy duo, from Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello to Martin and Lewis, in order for the exchange to work, the quality of the straight man had to be as dynamic as that of the funny guy. Carl was the best at this. I could use a single question as a springboard to unplanned exposition and tangents that would be as much of a surprise to Carl as they were to the audience. Carl was a gifted partner: While he deferred the punch lines to me, he knew me well enough to follow along and cross paths enough to set me up for more opportunities. He also knew he could throw me a complete curveball and I’d swing for the fences. We were a great ad-libbed high-wire act, and like the best high-wire acts, ours was dependent upon complete trust and respect for each other. Carl once said, “A brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to behold.

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?” “Nah I had to go relieve myself.” After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.” After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.

As she decays, Eris hears a new track by the reformed Goose featuring Madlib that says the following ad lib in verse: 1. It is hard not to want to kill yourself because trans women are a joke in society; billed as crazed sex pervert pedophiles; and even trans women themselves reinforce this narrative. 2. Constantly thinking about killing yourself makes you constantly think about death causing the shattering of your resolutions in the face of your own thrown aloneness in the world and in the face of dying your own death. 3. The only authentic way, connected fundamentally to your own death and the fact that only you can die your own death, to ground yourself in the world is to choose people who have taken up the same type of destining as you and use their lineage to make your path easier to walk. Maybe the thesis is that there is no authentic consolation for the shattering and anxiety of the trans//sexual in society save for the ability to pick your hero.

If there was any consistency to his opinions, it was the consistent lack of consistency, and if he had a worldview, it was a view that proclaimed his lack of a worldview. But these very absences were what constituted his intellectual assets. Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things. He had nothing to protect, which meant that he could concentrate all his attention on pure acts of combat. He needed only to attack, to knock his enemy down. Noboru Wataya was an intellectual chameleon, changing his color in accordance with his opponent’s, ad-libbing his logic for maximum effectiveness, mobilizing all the rhetoric at his command. I had no idea how he had acquired these techniques, but he clearly had the knack of appealing directly to the feelings of the mass audience. He knew how to use the kind of logic that moved the great majority. Nor did it even have to be logic: it had only to appear so, as long as it aroused the feelings of the masses.

But interviews with [Margaret Dumont] reveal her to have been a perceptive and talented comic actress. “Many a comedian’s lines have been lost on the screen because the laughter overlapped,” she said in the 1940s. “Script writers build up to a laugh, but they don’t allow any pause for it. That’s where I come in. I ad lib—it doesn’t matter what I say—just to kill a few seconds so you can enjoy the gag. I have to sense when the big laughs will come and fill in, or the audience will drown out the next gag with its own laughter.” A much harder job, it must be stressed, onscreen than onstage. Margaret Dumont objected to the term “stooge,” with her usual dignity. “I’m a straight lady,” she insisted, “the best straight woman in Hollywood. There’s an art to playing straight. You must build up your man, but never top him, never steal the laughs from him.” She showed great insight into the Marx Brothers’ brand of humor: “The comedy method which [they] employ is carefully worked out and concrete. They never laugh during a story conference. Like most other expert comedians, they involve themselves so seriously in the study of how jokes can be converted to their own style that they don’t ever titter while approaching their material.

The fight spilled out into the press. Allen blasted the censors. “They are a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference. Their conferences are meetings of men who can do nothing but collectively agree that nothing can be done.” The thin-skinned network reacted again, cutting Allen off in the middle of a barb. Now other comics joined the fray. That week Red Skelton said on his show that he’d have to be careful not to ad-lib something that might wound the dignity of some NBC vice president. “Did you hear they cut Fred Allen off on Sunday?” That’s as far as he got—the network cut him off. But Skelton went right on talking, for the studio audience. “You know what NBC means, don’t you? Nothing but cuts. Nothing but confusion. Nobody certain.” When the network put him back on the air, Skelton said, “Well, we have now joined the parade of stars.” Bob Hope, on his program, was cut off the air for this joke: “Vegas is the only town in the world where you can get tanned and faded at the same time. Of course, Fred Allen can be faded anytime.” Allen told the press that NBC had a vice president who was in charge of “program ends.” When a show ran overtime, this individual wrote down the time he had saved by cutting it off: eventually he amassed enough time for a two-week vacation. Dennis Day took the last shot. “I’m listening to the radio,” he said to his girlfriend Mildred on his Wednesday night NBC sitcom. “I don’t hear anything,” said Mildred. “I know,” said Dennis: “Fred Allen’s on.” On that note, the network gave up the fight, announcing that its comedians were free to say whatever they wanted. It didn’t matter, said Radio Life: “They all were anyway.” Allen took a major ratings dive in 1948. Some

It’s my turn next, and I realize then that I never turned in the name of my escort--because I hadn’t planned on being here. I glance around wildly for Ryder, but he’s nowhere to be seen, swallowed up by the sea of people in cocktail dresses and suits. Crap. I thought he realized that escorting me on court was part of the deal, once I’d agreed to go. I guess he’d figured it’d be easier on me, what with the whole Patrick thing, if I was alone onstage. But I don’t want to be alone. I want Ryder with me. By my side, supporting me. Always. I finally spot him in the crowd--it’s not too hard, since he’s a head taller than pretty much everyone else--and our eyes meet. My stomach drops to my feet--you know, that feeling you get on a roller coaster right after you crest that first hill and start plummeting toward the ground. Oh my God, this can’t be happening. I’ve fallen in love with Ryder Marsden, the boy I’m supposed to hate. And it has nothing to do with his confession, his declaration that he loves me. Sure, it might have forced me to examine my feelings faster than I would have on my own, but it was there all along, taking root, growing, blossoming. Heck, it’s a full-blown garden at this point. “Our senior maid is Miss Jemma Cafferty!” comes the principal’s voice. “Jemma is a varsity cheerleader, a member of the Wheelettes social sorority, the French Honor Club, the National Honor Society, and the Peer Mentors. She’s escorted tonight by…ahem, sorry. I’m afraid there’s no escort, so we’ll just--” “Ryder Marsden,” I call out as I make my way across the stage. “I’m escorted by Ryder Marsden.” The collective gasp that follows my announcement is like something out of the movies. I swear, it’s just like that scene in Gone with the Wind where Rhett offers one hundred and fifty dollars in gold to dance with Scarlett, and she walks through the scandalized bystanders to take her place beside Rhett for the Virginia reel. Only it’s the reverse. I’m standing here doing the scandalizing, and Ryder’s doing the walking. “Apparently, Jemma’s escort is Ryder Marsden,” the principal ad-libs into the microphone, looking a little frazzled. “Ryder is…um…the starting quarterback for the varsity football team, and, um…in the National Honor Society and…” She trails off helplessly. “A Peer Mentor,” he adds helpfully as he steps up beside me and takes my hand. The smile he flashes in my direction as Mrs. Crawford places the tiara on my head is dazzling--way more so than the tiara itself. My knees go a little weak, and I clutch him tightly as I wobble on my four-inch heels. But here’s the thing: If the crowd is whispering about me, I don’t hear it. I’m aware only of Ryder beside me, my hand resting in the crook of his arm as he leads me to our spot on the stage beside the junior maid and her escort, where we wait for Morgan to be crowned queen. Oh, there’ll be hell to pay tomorrow. I have no idea what we’re going to tell our parents. Right now I don’t even care. Just like Scarlett O’Hara, I’m going to enjoy myself tonight and worry about the rest later. After all, tomorrow is another…Well, you know how the saying goes.

Canon 21. « Si quelqu’un dit que le juste ait le pouvoir de persévérer sans un secours spécial de Dieu, ou qu’il ne le puisse avec ce secours : qu’il soit anathème. » Canon 25. « Si quelqu’un dit que le juste pèche en toute bonne œuvre véniellement, ou, ce qui est plus insupportable, mortellement, et qu’il mérite la peine éternelle, mais qu’il n’est pas damné, par cette seule raison que Dieu ne lui impute pas ses œuvres à damnation : qu’il soit anathème. » Par où l’on voit, non-seulement que ces paroles, que « les commandemens ne sont pas impossibles aux justes, » sont restreintes à cette condition, quand ils sont secourus par la grâce ; mais qu’elles n’ont que la même force que celles-ci, que « les justes ne pèchent pas en toutes leurs actions ; » et enfin tant s’en faut que le pouvoir prochain soit étendu à tous les justes, qu’il est défendu de l’attribuer à ceux qui ne sont pas secourus de ce secours spécial, qui n’est pas commun à tous, comme il a été expliqué. Concluons donc que tous les Pères ne tiennent pas un autre langage. Saint Augustin et les Pères qui l’ont suivi, n’ont jamais parlé des commandemens, qu’en disant qu’ils ne sont pas impossibles à la charité, et qu’ils ne nous sont faits que pour nous faire sentir le besoin que nous avons de la charité, qui seule les accomplit. « Dieu, juste et bon, n’a pu commander des choses impossibles ; ce qui nous avertit de faire ce qui est facile, et de demander ce qui est difficile. » (Aug., De nat. et grat., cap. LXIX.) « Car toutes choses sont faciles à la charité. » (De perfect. justit., cap. x.) Et ailleurs : « Qui ne sait que ce qui se fait par amour n’est pas difficile? Ceux-là ressentent de la peine à accomplir les préceptes, qui s’efforcent de les observer par la crainte ; mais la parfaite charité chasse la crainte, et rend le joug du précepte doux ; et, bien loin d’accabler par son poids, elle soulève comme si elle nous donnoit des ailes. » Cette charité ne vient pas de notre libre arbitre (si la grâce de Jésus-Christ ne nous secourt), parce qu’elle est infuse et mise dans nos cœurs, non par nous-mêmes, mais par le Saint-Esprit. Et l’Écriture nous avertit que les préceptes ne sont pas difficiles, par cette seule raison, qui est que l’âme qui les ressent pesans, entende qu’elle n’a pas encore reçu les forces par lesquelles ils lui sont doux et légers. « Quand il nous est commandé de vouloir, notre devoir nous est marqué ; mais parce que nous ne pouvons pas l’avoir de nous-mêmes, nous sommes avertis à qui nous devons le demander ; mais toutefois nous ne pouvons pas faire cette demande, si Dieu n’opère en nous de le vouloir. » (Fulg., lib. II, De verit. praedest., cap. iv.) « Les préceptes ne nous sont donnés que par cette seule raison, qui est de nous faire rechercher le secours de celui qui nous commande, » etc. (Prosper, Epist. ad Demetriad.) « Les pélagiens s’imaginent dire quelque chose d’important, quand ils disent que Dieu ne commanderoit pas ce qu’il saurait que l’homme ne pourroit faire. Qui ne sait cela? Mais il commande des choses que nous ne pouvons pas, afin que nous connoissions à qui nous devons le demander. » (Aug., De nat. et grat., cap. xv et xvi.) « O homme! reconnois dans le précepte ce que tu dois ; dans la correction, que c’est par ton vice que tu ne le fais pas ; et dans la prière, d’où tu peux en avoir le pouvoir! (Aug., De corrept., cap. ni.) Car la loi commande, afin que l’homme, sentant qu’il manque de force pour l’accomplir, ne s’enfle pas de superbe, mais étant fatigué, recoure à la grâce, et qu’ainsi la loi l’épouvantant le mène à l’amour de Jésus-Christ » (Aug., De perfect. respons. et ratiocin. xj., cap.

In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word “unconditional” was discussed but not included in the official joint statement to be read at the final press conference. Then, on January 24, to Churchill’s surprise, Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib: “Peace can come to the world,” the President read out to the assembled journalists and newsreel cameras, “only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power. . . . The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.”1976 Roosevelt later told Harry Hopkins that the surprising and fateful insertion was a consequence of the confusion attending his effort to convince French General Henri Girard to sit down with Free French leader Charles de Gaulle: We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Lee—and then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it.1977

I can only assume that he must have dreamed it up at the last minute and ad-libbed it—and on just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies of us all.

His rap was fluid, on time, and in tune. He ad-libbed—or “freestyled”—using a range of poetic tricks, from rhyme and repetition to assonance and alliteration:

adlib. Deriving from the Latin adlibitum, at will, ad lib means to speak words or perform actions not in a script or speech being used. Ad libitum was first recorded in 1705.

Sean had never stared into as many blank-eyed faces before. Throughout the high school civics talk, he felt as if he were speaking to the kids in a foreign language, one they had no intention of learning. Scrambling for a way to reach his audience, he ad-libbed, tossing out anecdotes about his own years at Coral Beach High. He confessed that as a teenager his decision to run for student government had been little more than a wily excuse to approach the best-looking girls. But what ultimately hooked his interest in student government was the startling discovery that the kids at school, all so different—jocks, nerds, preppies, and brains—could unite behind a common cause. During his senior year, when he’d been president of the student council, Coral Beach High raised seven thousand dollars to aid Florida’s hurricane victims. Wouldn’t that be something to feel good about? Sean asked his teenage audience. The response he received was as rousing as a herd of cows chewing their cud. Except this group was blowing big pink bubbles with their gum. The question and answer period, too, turned out to be a joke. The teens’ main preoccupation: his salary and whether he got driven around town in a chauffeured limo. When they learned he was willing to work for peanuts and that he drove an eight-year-old convertible, he might as well have stamped a big fat L on his forehead. He was weak-kneed with relief when at last the principal mounted the auditorium steps and thanked Sean for his electrifying speech. While Sean was politically seasoned enough to put the morning’s snafus behind him, and not worry overmuch that the apathetic bunch he’d just talked to represented America’s future voters, it was the high school principal’s long-winded enthusiasm, telling Sean how much of an inspiration he was for these kids, that truly set Sean’s teeth on edge. And made him even later for the final meeting of the day, the coral reef advisory panel.

No commercials are heard on this broadcast. It is clear, from Harlow’s announcement about the end of the war in Europe before the program begins to the reminder by the Jordans in the tag that the job is not finished, that commerce and comedy take a back seat to the state of the world. Jim again shows his quick wit with an ad-lib

I have the track. It’s good. It’s awesome. It sounds somewhere between, like, Liquid Liquid and “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer. I played it for people; I remember people saying, “Oh my God, this will be amazing.” TIM GOLDSWORTHY: She had the icing off of two Magnolia cupcakes and four cans of Red Bull, did some really strange ad-lib vocal takes, and then just disappeared and was never heard from again.

Once the kiss ends, Steve ad-libbed a line. Under his breath he goes, “See, I’m still here.” That was not in the script.

You're fucking with a bad one You want it you can have some Mic's back son Captain of the ship Lift the anchor Tried to write me off But I'm on a different chapter They don't understand I got another plan Think I'm gone I just keep coming back Like cancer (uh!) I'm fucking active (ooh!) When you hear them ad lib's It's gang shit And again, the man again You're mad again I went missing like Madeleine They thought I'd never rap again But how about, no Bow down hoe Sticking 'round, in your house With the fucking liquor out The only competition Is the man that's in the mirror now Dealing with a different Kind of spirit in my lyrics I'mma fly away Kill the entire game I know you felt some type of way I'll lay them flowers by your idols graves

When a coach ad libs, it is easy to focus on the immediate rather than the most important

The most glaring example of this is the Greek account of Samson. The mythos of Hercules parallels the life of Samson, a heroic judge who lived before the Kings of Israel. Biblical commentator Adam Clarke researched the subject of Hercules and the connection to Samson. He wrote in summary of extended comments: The conformity between these adventures of Samson and Hercules is self-evident, and proves beyond a doubt that the fable of the one was composed from the history of the other. The remark of Herodotus respecting the impossibility of this last adventure, according to the Greek tradition, and the folly of attributing it to the Egyptians, serves to confirm the truth of its having been borrowed, and of its being but a disfigured copy, whose original must be sought for elsewhere. In fact, it appears that Samson, judge of the Israelites, particularly mentioned in the book of Judges, and by Josephus, Ant. lib. v., c. 10, is the original and essential Hercules of fable; and although the poets have united some particulars drawn from Moses and Joshua, and have added their own inventions, yet the most capital and considerable belong to Samson, and are distinguished by characteristics so peculiar to him, as render him easily discernible throughout the whole.13 One might argue that the Greeks had little connection with the history of the Judges of Israel.

Those who would cast obloquy on this doctrine, calumniate it as the dogma of the Stoics concerning fate. The same charge was formerly brought against Augustine (lib. ad Bonifac. 2, c. 6 et alibi). We are unwilling to dispute about words; but we do not admit the term Fate, both because it is of the class which Paul teaches us to shun, as profane novelties (1 Tim. 6:20), and also because it is attempted, by means of an odious term, to fix a stigma on the truth of God. But the dogma itself is falsely and maliciously imputed to us. For we do not with the Stoics imagine a necessity consisting of a perpetual chain of causes, and a kind of involved series contained in nature, but we hold that God is the disposer and ruler of all things,--that from the remotest eternity, according to his own wisdom, he decreed what he was to do, and now by his power executes what he decreed.

Wouldn’t she want that? For me to ad-lib my life instead of living by some typed-in-twelve-point-Courier-New script?

CARY GRANT IS THE MCCARTNEY OF MOVIE STARS—HIS STORY has much to tell us about Paul’s. They share a spiritual connection, beyond their pronunciation of “Judy.” (Paul described his “hey Judy-Judy-Judy” ad libs as “Cary Grant on heat.”) They dazzled Americans as the ultimate English dream dates—yet both were self-inventions, street guys who taught themselves to pose as posh charmers. Both grew up working-class in hardscrabble industrial cities; both lost their mothers at a young age. (Grant, whose real name was Archibald Leach, was nine when he was told his mother had gone on a trip; more than twenty years later, after he was famous, he learned she was locked up in an institution and got her released.) Both dropped out of school to fight their way into the sleaziest sewers of show biz—Grant joined a troupe of traveling acrobats, which must have been an even rougher scene than the Reeperbahn—yet to them it was a world of freedom and excitement. But both found lasting fame by turning on the charm for Americans who saw them as dapper gentlemen. “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” Grant once said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.

Costar Peggy Webber recalled that once, in the heat of performance, Lorre threw his script into the air and watched helplessly as the pages fluttered to the stage. Some quick work by the cast and judicious ad-libbing by Lorre got them to the midway break, at which point the script was retrieved and put in order.

My name be...Crisco, " ad-libbed Wade. " The Count of Monty Crisco, to be precise.

Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. The cool kids of the 1960s invited the old man who had been cool before they knew cool was cool to join them in a musical romp that nobody took particularly seriously. Crosby enjoys himself. He has nothing at stake, since he’s not the star who has to carry the film. He’s very casual, and appears to be ad-libbing all his lines in the old Road tradition with a touch of W. C. Fields’s colorful vocabulary thrown in: “You gentlemen find my raiment repulsive?” he asks Sinatra and Martin when they object to his character’s lack of chic flash in clothing. Crosby plays a clever con man who disguises himself as square, and his outfits reflect a conservative vibe in the eyes of the cats who are looking him over. The inquiry leads into a number, “Style,” in which Sinatra and Martin put Crosby behind closet doors for a series of humorous outfit changes, to try to spruce him up. Crosby comes out in a plaid suit with knickers and then in yellow pants and an orange-striped shirt. Martin and Sinatra keep on singing—and hoping—while Crosby models a fez. He finally emerges with a straw hat, a cane, and a boutonniere in his tuxedo lapel, looking like a dude. In his own low-key way, taking his spot in the center, right between the other two, Crosby joins in the song and begins to take musical charge. Sinatra is clearly digging Crosby, the older man he always wanted to emulate.*17 Both Sinatra and Martin are perfectly willing to let Crosby be the focus. He’s earned it. He’s the original that the other two wanted to become. He was there when Sinatra and Martin were still kids. He’s Bing Crosby! The three men begin to do a kind of old man’s strut, singing and dancing perfectly together (“…his hat got a little more shiny…”). The audience is looking at the three dominant male singers of the era from 1940 to 1977. They’re having fun, showing everyone exactly not only what makes a pro, not only what makes a star, but what makes a legend. Three great talents, singing and dancing about style, which they’ve all clearly got plenty of: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Dean Martin in Robin and the 7 Hoods

I wanna shoot you so bad my dick is hard!” Long after the movie came out, I saw cats wearing that on T-shirts, like it’s an actual slogan. The line wasn’t in the script; it was just something I ad-libbed in the moment. It sounded cool and crazy and believable for

Nunzio snapped his fingers in front of my face. “What the hell is going on? Is it about last night?” My train of thought screeched to a halt. “What? No! Why would I be upset about that?” “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe the part where I ad-libbed the porn script and shoved my dick in your ass?” “Ay

Double or Nothing endured because of the nimble ad-libbing of its hosts and because, over the years, the show gained a reputation for double entendres and unexpected embarrassment. By far the most sensational of these came to be known as the “waitress episode,” which was so shocking to audiences of that innocent late 1940s era that its content could not even be hinted in the press (reporter Shirley Gordon mentioned it in Radio Life years later without ever telling her readers what she was talking about). While interviewing a waitress, O’Keefe asked if she’d had any experiences she could share on the radio. Yes, she said, she once had a friend, male, who had had some psychological problems. She didn’t know what she could do for him, but a mutual friend had suggested that he “get a good-looking girl like you and take her home and just have a big screwing party.” O’Keefe hustled her through the quiz fast, but the damage was done: the show had been carried live to the East Coast, and CBS was inundated with angry calls. The network ordered all its West Coast affiliates (which had transcribed the show for broadcast in a later timeslot) to cancel it and destroy the transcriptions. Obviously, at least one was saved: the show exists on tape, a nice curiosity piece.

Ad lib. It’s out of our hands, and all we can do is react. That’s mostly what life is: reacting to what happens to us. We just like to delude ourselves that we are in charge. But we can choose how we react.

Growing up in a family is a lot like stepping onto that stage in which everyone is ad-libbing. You have a part to play, but it's difficult to say at first exactly what it is because no one receives a script at birth. So you spend years figuring out what your role is without stepping on anyone else's toes.