Word: cocktailing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most of Face-Time takes place in White House offices or at ubiquitous Washington parties where the goings-on seem more like work than work itself. At one cocktail event, the President--a dashing former Senator from New Mexico named Chuck Sheffield--moves from group to group, chatting amiably, and as soon as he moves on, the people left behind disperse, "as if the real purpose of the group had now been fulfilled...and there was no longer any compelling reason to remain together." (Now that's Washington.) At another party, Sheffield becomes smitten with Gretchen, a radiant, low-level...
...Eleanor was unwilling to retreat to an inoffensive corner of the White House. Zealous in pushing her causes, she would interrupt Franklin's sacred cocktail hour with a sheaf of policy papers. When, in the last months of her husband's life, Eleanor still pursued her own agenda for good government--berating F.D.R. for the appointment of two Assistant Secretaries of State whom she considered reactionaries--his aides tried to limit contact between the sick, weary President and his wife. Of course she had her reasons for disengaging emotionally from the marriage--primarily the discovery in 1918 of Franklin...
Decades ago, Alfred Hitchcock said actors were cattle. Today celebrities are meat: junk food for tabloid headlines, canapes for cocktail-party surmise, fodder for Leno and Letterman raillery. Are the charges, whispers and gags true? Hardly matters; they need only be entertaining. Star tattle proceeds from two American impulses: cynicism and sentimentality. Sentimentally we imagine that a popular artist must have hidden depths. Cynically we suspect that every star must have a guilty secret; all that power, money and spare time allow them to act out any sick whim. Gossip has become the purest form of show biz, a story...
...anything less than perfect?" Robin looks disarmingly like Mia Farrow, with wavy hair and a disheveled Cantabrigian fashion sense. Things aren't looking too good for Robin; she has just been dumped (not for her daughter, though), and she can't quite seem to figure out how to attend cocktail parties and remain sober for more than ten minutes. She visits a professional whore (Bebe Neuwirth) for sexual advice. This unravels into a tasteless scene of two grown women simulating oral sex on bananas, the new Mia Farrow predictably performing less than swimmingly. Later on she remarks that...
...metamorphosis that transformed his healthy, young body into a skeleton too sick to get out of bed, Sullivan was slowly losing the battle. In 1996, just when it seemed that he was running out of defenses in the fight against AIDS, Sullivan acquired a powerful new arsenal: a cocktail of drugs called protease inhibitors. All of a sudden, Sullivan--and thousands of other AIDS sufferers--had a reprieve on what seemed like an inflexible death sentence...