Word: barnumism
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...what they wanted to see, No. 1 on their list was the Apollo. But after blacks broke into the mainstream and could play larger houses for larger fees, the Apollo declined. In 1976 it closed and lapsed into the realm of remembrance, like vaudeville at the Palace or P.T. Barnum's extravaganzas at the Hippodrome. Now it has been opened again by black businessmen, led by former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, who plan to install a state-of-the-art video center so the shows can be recorded for TV distribution...
There's one born every minute--and it's not a unicorn. At each performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, now appearing in New York City, the crowd is introduced to a coiffed beast with a single horn. The ringmaster calls him a living unicorn. Last week the ASPCA called him a surgical mutilation. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture called him a goat. But the horn, experts conceded, is his own. It apparently was produced at birth by surgically manipulating the two natural horn buds to the center of his head. A press inquiry...
...original vision of a defense that would banish the terror of nuclear war forever, by making the U.S. invulnerable to assault, then Star Wars almost certainly cannot work. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger characterizes the headier versions of a Star Wars plan as "half Buck Rogers, half P.T. Barnum," and even the most ardent proponents generally con- cede that no technology now known or foreseeable could be guaranteed to destroy every warhead the Soviets could launch. Some percentage would always get through, causing death and devastation beyond the mind...
Even though package store owners, who did $220 million of business in 1983, could face new competition from bars, "as a general rule, we're glad to see the change happen," says Dealers Association President Michael S. Barnum. "We were tired of the 25 years of hypocrisy. Besides, the only dealers who would be hurt are those who are selling illegally to private clubs." Barnum says he buys the argument that allowing saloons will increase tourism, which would benefiter package store owners and would provide a general shot in the arm for a state looking for business to replace shrinking...
DIED. Irvin Feld, 66, hard-driving impresario who in 1956 rescued the foundering Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus from ruin and eleven years later bought it outright and thereafter ran it extravaganzily and profitably; of a brain hemorrhage; in Venice...