In fact, Booth's approach to
three-card monte is of a piece with a general approach to life he evinces throughout the play, one that values word over action, symbol over referent, appearance over essence.
And, as in
three-card monte, somebody is sure to lose.
In addition to relying on sleight of hand,
three-card monte works by creating confusion about what is real and what is part of the game.
The civic sports promoters are like a bunch of
three-card monte dealers.
When
three-card monte (the card version of the shell game) was rampant in New York City two decades ago, the house 'the dealer' usually won, and when he didn't, he didn't lose either because instead of paying out, he would intimidate the winner into relinquishing the money.
"Like the dealers in
three-card monte, the government always wins and the taxpayer always loses."
There was also
three-card monte to help innocents lose their money even faster.
version of
three-card monte and bought my ticket from a self-service machine, then boarded a waiting train.
Outcomes of mini-games such as
three-card Monte affect scenes in films, which get reviewed by pretend critics before being posted at Facebook.
His late transformation into the reborn
three-card monte hustler, all braggadocio and cruel self-interest, is all the more starting as a result.
This sort of morphological metaphor creates, in his words, "a
three-card monte kind of thing." But while other artists worry the problematics of mimesis, Hammons is concerned with the ways in which the essence of an object survives its aesthetic, physical, and, if you will, ideological transformation.
And, in New York, where one of my beats is education, Carl Campanile, the New York Post's education writer, painstakingly exposed the statistical
three-card monte played by city and state education officials as he revealed the many thousands of children left behind amid the rising (and hidden) dropout rate.