"You brought that on yourself," I said, washing my prize and turning to see Joyce smiling tearily at me.

There was also something in Nam that apparently rotted out your heart, Henry told him tearily.

A few may have been recalled tearily by the officers on regimental mess nights, the way a man in drink remembers a good bird dog.

Elizabeth giggled tearily and dabbed at her eyes before lifting them pleadingly to Whitney.

After we'd tearily hugged, I suggested it was time to lighten up and plug in the iPod.

One bounded back to the scene of the crime voluntarily, if tearily; one was dragged back, fuming.

Amy cried tearily.

"We'll get back to Seattle," Mr. Hamlin said, smiling tearily on three hours' sleep because of the noise outside his hotel.

Unposed, in person, she is giggly and sweet and tearily effusive about the man she, too, calls Hef.

Linda J. Wood spent the afternoon tearily scanning her property for keepsakes like a beachcomber searching for sharks' teeth.

Julia, in total disregard for the precepts of "Ibsenism," begins to behave like a woman, tearily refusing to accept that her affair with Leonard is over.

Smoke wafted across, stinging Ivy's eyes, forcing them shut-and when it passed and she opened them again, tearily, both Glory and Hardy were gone.

At the end, when he reveals Scrooge's grave, Scrooge grabs onto the Ghost's robe, saying tearily that he is a changed man, and pleading for another chance.

One day, the seneschal's wife tearily asks the king if she will one day be set aside in favour of another, more highly-born woman who can become his wife.

And I wish Mr. Fugard had not included a perfunctory passage in which André tearily bemoans a life that had to be lived in the closet.

When the manor is alerted to his presence, Magil throws Riddel over his shoulder and dashes off into the morning sun as her proud father Lynx tearily bids goodbye.

Most of the principals are rewarded with lengthy soliloquies in which they reminisce tearily about their departed spouses, and Mako, an actor capable of both delicacy and bite, delivers his the most persuasively.

Yesterday, they read from an alphabetized list - at times tearily, at times awkwardly as they stumbled over names they had trouble pronouncing, at times haltingly as they added their own postscripts.

When the plane went down on April 29, leaving no survivors, all of Zambia went into mourning, and when the bodies were flown back, thousands tearily lined the road from the airport to the burial site just outside the national stadium.

Imagine Groucho Marx being tearily sincere or that lordly drunk W. C. Fields owning up to his alcoholism: no, it wouldn't feel right to watch these champions of one-upmanship stripped of their comic masks.

Soon Ms. Irving-as-Bishop is tearily apologizing for her drinking and imploring her lover to forgive her, in passages made more off-putting by structural awkwardness that the director, Richard Jay-Alexander, hasn't managed to finesse.

And Liza Minnelli gave Mr. Jackson a true diva tribute: at the end of "Neverland" (the song that named Mr. Jackson's California retreat), she tearily sang a few lines from "Over the Rainbow."

BEST OPRAH MOMENT - Angela Bassett brimming in stereo with, well, Oprah, in 2002 (the year Halle Berry tearily accepted her award for "Monster's Ball").

Afterwards, he tearily confessed this was the greatest moment of his career, a statement that might have appeared disingenuous until you realise that this was a man who broke from his busy World Cup schedule to visit Ramakant Achrekar, his schoolboy coach, in hospital after the old man had broken a hip.

Its contrived side shows up most clearly in the three awkward things Mr. Bacon has to do: tell Patricia he has always loved her, tearily admit that he isn't such a big success in Hollywood after all, and regale the others with "that 'Ordinary People' song" - the Pachelbel Canon - at dawn.