I silently applaud (hands raised in the air, fingers spread apart, palms twisting from side to side) the efforts of the Miller family to establish an American Sign Language community in South Dakota.
And we might wonder why, the Mark Morrises of this world aside, we complicit audience members seem perfectly content to applaud male hands locked around female necks.
Eventually, the strapping young men and women, looking vibrant in fatigues of desert colors, filed in, with heads high and backs straight, as the rows of bent and paunchy veterans applauded, shook hands, and patted backs.
Yes, that's what they are doing with their hands — applauding.
Her palms were up among the hands applauding like the flight of birds rising.
Clapping Music reduces the process to the sound of four hands applauding with astonishing mathematical dexterity.
However sublime and rarefied the performance enacted on stage -- Strauss's "Rosenkavalier," Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations," the stone-softening magic of Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" -- it ultimately resolves itself into that simple, timeless web of upraised hands, applauding.
That Minnie Mouse voice was all wrong for the part, but she sailed through it triumphantly, and of course, we rose to our feet and hurt our hands applauding not so much for stage talent as her sheer self-dramatising, but nonetheless authentic guts.
A man who was standing in a crowd gathered at the side of the road called out to ask us if we were Americans, and when we said yes the whole group began cheering and applauding us, clapping their hands as if they were at a performance in a theatre.
