Word: backyard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...young Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were making a movie about stagestruck kids today, they probably wouldn't mount a musical in the backyard and wait for lightning to strike. Nor would they necessarily look for a summer-stock barn or tent, like so many fledgling players of times past. Instead, the tyro tap dancers, crooners and thespians would probably hie themselves to the nearest theme park or cruise ship to audition for a job. Theme parks may be more conspicuous for flume rides and cotton candy, and cruise ships may be best known for bingo and buffets. But they...
...opposing tugs of making money and doing good works, but they refuse to get caught up in the passion of either one. They reject 70-hour workweeks as yuppie lunacy, just as they shirk from starting another social revolution. Today's young adults want to stay in their own backyard and do their work in modest ways. "We're not trying to change things. We're trying to fix things," says Anne McCord, 21, of Portland, Ore. "We are the generation that is going to renovate America. We are going to be its carpenters and janitors...
...country. Such a trip unreels a documentary about smokestack America that pans across abandoned factories, stockyards, waste dumps and prisons. It is also a voyeuristic voyage more real than Roseanne, crazier than A Current Affair. For the train catches the nation in its undershirt, unguarded in its backyard after work, quarreling amid rusting engine blocks, scrawny chickens and mail- order guitars. But a train trip is more. It provides a window on majestic nature that is often inaccessible by other means. That's not Busch Gardens out there in the Alaskan outback, nor are you riding past the robotic...
Croquet as played in this stretch of paradise is a far cry from the backyard game forced on kids to keep them from killing one another before the hot dogs are served. The grownup version is a maze of complicated tactics, arcane terminology and bizarre rules played against a ticking stopwatch. A good player must have the wrists of Jack Nicklaus, the concentration of Bobby Fischer and the eye of Minnesota Fats. Ricocheting at precisely the right spot off the steel wicket is one way to get the grapefruit-size ball through the narrow hoop, anchored an unforgiving...
...serious audience. The U.S. Croquet Association, in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., boasts that sales of high-quality mallets and sets have doubled in the past three years, while the number of croquet clubs has grown from five in 1977 to over 300 this year. More people are buying backyard sets, and public courts are springing up in Tulsa, Phoenix and Rockford, Ill. The final round of the New York Championship Croquet Tournament was played on June 17 at public courts in Manhattan's Central Park before a hushed crowd...