Word: barnumism
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...leave Conrad Rooks's filmed Siddhartha without gingerly reaching for one's wallet to make sure it's still there. This unspeakable insult to the cinema and to the India it depicts has all the imaginative variety of a Hare Krishna marathon in Harvard Square, and the P.T. Barnum mentality lately put to profitable use by a noted fifteen-year old mob leader who drives a Rolls-Royce. Never has the search for eternal cosmic wisdom been so short (an hour and a half), seemed so long (an eternity), and revealed so little...
...together the world of Pogo, an inspired amalgam of bogs, hollow stumps, hog-jowl dialect and cheery absurdity. There, over 150 anthropomorphic critters gnawed away at the English language, baring kernels of political meaning, and carried on not-so-innocent satires of human pomposity. Phineas T. Bridgeport, the Barnum of bears, orated in billboard letters that burlesqued hucksterism everywhere. "Nuclear physics ain't so new and it ain't so clear," declared Rowland Owl, a bedraggled Perelmanesque pedant. Churchy LaFemme, a poetic turtle, reveled in alliterative aubades: "Whence that wince, my wench?" At Christmas time, Albert the cigar...
Pumped up with enough hot air and hard dollars to start a respectable Balkan war, the big evening maintained its P.T. Barnum air-at least until the principals squared off across the net. Workaday Texas fans mingled with celebrities who had jetted into Houston for the occasion. Before the match, such diverse names as Andy Williams and Claudine Longet, ex-Football Star Jim Brown, Heavyweight Champion George Foreman, Actor Rod Steiger and Actress Jo Ann Pflug (in a clinging blue jersey with I'M A BILLIE JEAN KING FAN Stenciled on the back) swirled through a champagne party...
...boasted a nine-hole golf course, 10,000 potted plants, and well placed sand that enabled the family pooch to visit the trees without getting his paws dirty. House guests received a list of activities each morning, new movies were shown at night, and once the entire Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus was brought in for an afternoon...
...dies and gentillllmen: the Greatest Show on Earrth!" Charlton Heston, dressed in black boots, white pants, scarlet coat and top hat, was kicking off the celebrity-filled first night of Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey in Los Angeles. Walter Matthau turned up as one of the clowns. "I was raised in an orphanage, and I went to the circus for the first time when I was twelve," Matthau recalled. "It was one of the happiest times of my childhood." Matthau's son Charlie, 10, was crowned King of the Circus. Then came the grand parade of elephants with spangled...