manginess

In fact, the scabbier and more flea-ridden the dog, the more we like to see it transcend its manginess and put one over on the bluebloods.

Bates' Kuzovkin is funny and often endearing: He plays the twitching, twittering man as a puppy eager for love but painfully aware of its own manginess. In the comic centerpiece of the first act, Kuzovkin is baited by the suavely sneering Flegont (Langella), snooping from a neighboring estate, into recounting the fantastic tale of his fruitless efforts to regain the inheritance he believes he's entitled to.

Wolfe describes them: "At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot." The itching and the manginess eventually began to vex the hippies, leading them to seek help from the local free clinics.