Word: bacchanalian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Harvard parties is finding yourself dancing ferociously with someone whose usually upright demeanor only prompts idle fantasy. The room was--except for the intervals when 72 churning legs had been disappointed by burntout equipment (and the hosts had scrambled into the boiler room to bring back the music)--a Bacchanalian sink...
Alumni also save their biggest Bacchanalian feasts for this game. Maybe it's the warm weather, but there are usually more tail-gating parties for Dartmouth than for any other game. And the orgiastic fervor of the Harvard alumni is more than matched by their Dartmouth counterparts. The Big Green legions will be there Saturday, all in green jackets with Dartmouth pennants tied to their car atennae, all getting incredibly drunk. I remember one guy who seemed to be near us every year next to Newell Boathouse, and I swear half of his party were too loaded to make...
...thanks to a slick mouthpiece, Billy Flynn (Jerry Orbach). This scarcely matters. What matters is the erotic poetry in motion that uncoils whenever Verdon and her sister in crime Velma Kelly (Chita Rivera) do their solos and duets. They pace the show with spunk incarnate. The chorus is jazzily bacchanalian, and Patricia Zipprodt's eye-riveting costumes swirl right out of a decadent Brechtian Berlin. Chicago is a cinch to take a bite out of the Big Apple...
Reed himself admits that he has more in common with Calvin Coolidge than with Dionysus. Bacchanalian plots and extended riffs of funky prose scarcely disguise the conservative folksiness within. Born in Chattanooga and raised in Buffalo, Reed had an early ambition to become a concert violinist. His writing talent surfaced at the University of Buffalo. One of his admirers is another musician-writer, the ranking wizard of experimental fiction, John Barth. After sampling the edges of New York literary life in the early '60s, Reed headed west to Berkeley where he teaches writing at the University of California...
Perhaps because Lent is no longer so austere as it used to be, the European Catholic tradition of carnival time -a brief spasm of bacchanalian indulgence that ends abruptly on Ash Wednesday-has virtually died out in Italy, France and even in Southern Germany. Munich's once-orgiastic Fasching, for instance, has dwindled to a single parade and a few tame costume balls. One area where the annual urge to let it all hang out is as strong as ever is the Rhineland with its century-old tradition of blowing off steam as a form of political expression. Last...