Word: calcuttas
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Starting with a shelter for dying street dwellers in Calcutta in the early 1950s, Mother Teresa has built her Missionaries of Charity into an organization of 2,000 sisters and 400 brothers who reach out to the homeless, hungry and sick in 52 countries. Yet it took all of the Roman Catholic nun's prestige to provide a New York City hospice for patients in the terminal stages of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. At the facility's Christmas Eve dedication, Mother Teresa was on hand. Of AIDS patients, she said, "Each one of them is Jesus in a distressing disguise...
Think for a minute of some of the things that have happened since June 17, 1969, when Oh! Calcutta! opened to almost universal boos from the critics: the first moon landing, Watergate, gas shortages and surpluses, the breakup of the Beatles and AT&T, the demise of miniskirts, the birth and death of the yuppie, Rocky I, II, III and IV. A changing world, you might say, and shake your graying head. But calm down. There is some stability. In Manhattan and São Paulo, audiences are still paying to see Oh! Calcutta! and watch eight actors and actresses take...
...world's longest-running erotic stage musical," as it is now billed, has changed little since those Pleistocene days, and today's critics would probably make the same judgments as their predecessors. "With all my heart, I recommend staying away from the slick and repulsive come-on called Oh! Calcutta!, "wrote Brendan Gill of The New Yorker. "Voyeurs of the city unite, you have nothing to lose but your brains," added Clive Barnes in the New York Times. "Far from being a sexual stimulant, Oh! Calcutta! is an anaphrodisiac," declared TIME's T.E. Kalem...
...audiences, who sometimes show an ornery independence from critics, apparently disagreed. In nearly 17 years, the show has been performed more than 15,000 times in 15 countries, and it has titillated, shocked and outraged roughly 86 million people. "There is always some reaction to Oh! Calcutta!," says Norman Kean, its producer and promoter. "Its message is theatricality--outrageous theatricality--which goes beyond the twilight zone into a territory that had never been explored onstage before...
Still, there was relief that one of India's worst crises appeared to be coming to an end. As the Calcutta daily Telegraph put it, "We pray that from today the history of Punjab will once again be written in gold--not in blood.'' --By Marguerite Johnson. Reported by K.K. Sharma/New Delhi