Word: aura
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dispossessed, from a desperate Southern sheriff no longer receiving a paycheck to college boys afraid to graduate into an unwelcoming world, from a ruined multimillionaire to a scrounging hobo. These are often archetypes, but just as often their circumstances have been drawn from historical record. The documentary aura is heightened by two dozen popular songs ironically interposed (The Joint Is Jumpin', How Long Blues, Sittin' Around...
...items came along on the troupe's first American appearance since 1948. Expectations for the visit ran very high. The company's school is considered one of the world's best, a preserver of both the French and Italian technique and dance vocabulary. The institution itself has an ineffable aura of glamour, and in three years as dance director, Rudolf Nureyev has earned a reputation for leading it energetically...
...conditions that impelled him and his teammates to take money from gamblers -- low pay, lack of security and a general feeling of involuntary servitude -- have long since been overturned. Free agency, binding arbitration and other Big Business behavior may have cost baseball its aura of boyishness, but these changes have also enriched players enough to insulate them...
...father and later for a friend of the family; in the evenings he cultivated those who could advance his name. Photography seemed the speediest escalator. His soft-focus portraits made the magazines, appeared on dust jackets and in galleries. Edith Sitwell posed for him, projecting a "haggish" aura but displaying her medieval ivory hands to great effect. Tallulah Bankhead postured against a background of balloons. He exuded charm: "Not only do I take photographs but I am an entertainer as well and this afternoon my performance was much appreciated and the audience laughed at all they should." By working assiduously...
...then Reagan has always been attended by an aura of amiable averageness. The producer Alfred de Liagre said that Reagan on film "always had the manner of an earnest gas-station attendant." Liberal writers have dismissed him as ideologue, cretin and airhead, or worse. They have thought of Chauncey Gardiner, the transcendentally brainless seer in Jerzy Kosinski's novel Being There. Gardiner, in the eloquence of his idiocy, becomes a national oracle. "How humiliating," the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote of Reagan in 1982, "to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our President...