Word: bacchanalia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kelly does his best to be fair to all. Of Clement VI (1342-52), who proclaimed that his predecessors "had not known how to be Popes" and then began staging bacchanalia for his "niece" and his courtiers, Kelly says judiciously, "The charges brought by contemporaries against his sexual life cannot be explained away, but he was personally devout, a protector of the poor and needy who showed charity and courage when the Black Death appeared at Avignon in 1348-49, and defended the Jews when they were blamed for it." So he did know something about how to be Pope...
Until the nineteenth century, when the Fourth of July caught on as a holiday, Commencement was the seasonal excuse for feasts and New England-style bacchanalia, much to the chagrin of past Harvard President Increase Mather...
Never, in particular, underestimate the diamond studded bacchanalia that is the Pudding show's opening night Especially if you aren't used to counting your champagne bottles by the square yard and pushing your way between velvet shoulders and clustered TV cameras just to see other people ogling Man of the Year Sean Connery. It could be considered decadent or glamor-mad, a bit peculiar--the audience's vast delight in hairy cleavages and falsetto love scenes--or, in years when the show is lousy, altogether pointless...
...dancers, however, are getting restless. We are still marathon innocents, and are actually anxious to end the speeches and start the music. And at last, once children from Jefferson Park have performed a choreographed dance to the theme from Fame, the disco bacchanalia begins...
...Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski and Truman Capote do not come to their party. They miss quite a scene. Among the uncelebrated guests is a Holocaust survivor who literally levitates the living room with horror stories. Lucy also rises to the occasion with a Christian-pagan vision rooted in agriculture, bacchanalia and fertility symbols. The reader is left suspended with images of unreachable men locked in "the glory of their martyrdom," and of the Holocaust as multiple Crucifixions in which "every Jew was Jesus." Not since Elaine dined alone has there been a stranger tale of literary New York...