In simpler days, today's preener was warned that it could become tomorrow's cleaning utensil.

Ever the preener.

But Ms. Zimmerman can be a preener, and Leonardo fairly reeks of ingenuity.

While he's not a preener, Louie does love attention, from the seamstress pinning his jacket, to the salesman who compliments him, to his guest.

Theodore Roosevelt, neither a social preener of the right nor a touchy-feely member of the left but an O.K. guy in my book, would probably agree.

He is colorful, dapper and thoroughly deceitful, both a preener and a pretender, with the actor missing only the hints of a tragic dimension to the character.

Here, dressed in excruciatingly cool head-to-toe black, his Lloyd is a natural preener who loves to play God and finds the self-aggrandizing pose in every moment of catastrophe.

Lance (James A. Woods), the star of Rufus's "Unreasonable Truth of Butterflies," is a nitwit preener.

Of course, Leonard Bernstein was more than a calculating preener: John Weidman, Stephen Sondheim and Terrence McNally know that full well.