This Mandy doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve…

Word count: 258 words

Reading time: About 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a couple of very funny metaphors about actor Mandy Patinkin.

I’ve been a Mandy Patinkin fan for almost 20 years. I first saw the actor on the TV show Chicago Hope but he really won my heart when I discovered he was a stage actor with a beautiful singing voice (a tenor). Although I’ve never seen Ragtime,  Yentl, or even The Princess Bride, in which he starred, I am the proud owner of his marvellous 1989 solo album, Mandy Patinkin.

The actor has had more than his share of troubles in recent years, including prostate cancer, a degenerative eye disease, and his much-publicized walk-out from the violent TV show Criminal MindsBut he has also redeemed himself with a starring role in the thriller Homeland

Writer Alex Witchel in the New York Times Magazine, offers an insightful and rousingly funny profile of Patinkin in the August 25/13 edition. Here was my favourite image from that piece:

If temperamental actors are referred to as “handfuls,” Mandy — as he is known in the business, not quite Cher, but close — is the motherlode…..This Mandy doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve, he slices it up and serves it on Triscuits.

I love the way Witchel is able to play with figurative language. It’s amusing to see him compare Patinkin to uber-diva Cher and then slice up the “heart on the sleeve” image with panache. The utter specificity of Triscuits makes the metaphor even funnier.

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