Word: coliseums
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They would be right. A certain mindlessness is required by these events. In a way, the entire Olympics constitute a ceremony. All the action is symbolic, inarticulate. What message was delivered in the Coliseum? At the ceremonies, Chief Organizer Peter Ueberroth answered "world peace and understanding," but that was merely a wishful guess. Our reaction is emotional, thus mysterious. All one really knows is the feeling of familiarity the ceremonies engender, the strange, abiding comfort that comes from recognizing that one has been pleased by these events before, and will most likely be again, in another time, in no particular...
Even the rehearsals had their heart-tugging moments. Day after wilting day in the Los Angeles Coliseum, during breaks in the strenuous practice of the opening ceremonies, a touching human exercise would take place. Tubas would be scattered across the grass like the wreck of a brassy train...
Across town another man might vicariously fulfill himself by stepping into Clark Gable's shoe prints on a Hollywood sidewalk, another woman might prove herself Lana Turner's equal in some way on the same boulevard. But these souls in the Coliseum had more action in their dreams: they had beaten the wind in the arena of the swift. Having achieved that, they would step back into the throng and go about their jobs...
...take off from the western rim of the Coliseum, soar down the field during the playing of the national anthem, and land on a perch built in the form of one of the Olympic symbols, five interlocking rings. Bomber, warming to the mission, "had a couple of crash landings," the trainer says, but it was game...
Wolper had wanted 50 convertible automobiles, their tops up, positioned about the Coliseum. The band was to strike up a dazzling dance number, the tops were to come down, and scores of gorgeous show, uh, women were to come popping out. The number got the hook, not for any concern for dignity but because it took too long to get the cars off the field. A journalist who had been watching remarked, "Maybe there...