The aging actress played the role she played in her youth, as if to reprise it.

Decades ago comics like Yakov Smirnoff used to do “Russian Reversal” jokes: “In America you can always find a party! In Soviet Russia, party always finds you.”

There were a few people on the platform, among them two Indian police, and a station oflicial with a white topee.

In the nineteenth century, Twain was the know-everything traveller, who made his homeland seem doubly attractive by so engagingly representing its energy and creativity.