Word: ducking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Iraq, as the Pentagon's conventional strategy suggests? Those are the least likely contingencies: cross-border invasions and highly visible aggression are increasingly rare. Civil wars, ethnic violence and disintegrating states now produce most of the bloodshed and agony that shock viewers on the evening news programs. Will America duck the new, more common battles? The answers that emerge from the Bosnia debate are likely to set precedents that will channel America's course for years to come...
TIPTOEING PAST THE DANK AND murk of the Manhattan neighborhood called Hell's Kitchen, you walk into a huge tent where Pomp Duck and Circumstance is performed and enter a different world. Inside the bordello-red lobby area, tuxedoed giants and midgets say hello. In an alcove, T shirts and robes with a Matisse monogram are for sale. So are the pieces of Rosenthal china on which you will dine. A bartender pours you a glass of the house Chardonnay. Nine bucks...
...that is sissy stuff compared with the shenanigans at Pomp Duck, self-described as "a restaurant out of control." The staff (actors, mostly from Germany) are nuts. They steal your bread, feed you soup, mummify you in packing tape, give you a quick shampoo. When waiters announce the fish course, beware--you will get damp! There are also fat ladies in skimpy costumes, a man who plays Vivaldi on liquor bottles, an opera singer treated rudely by the maitre d' and a food critic who can't stop complaining. "It's like eating at Denny's!" he shouts. The whole...
Punctuating the chaos are three fine acrobat acts, in the Cirque du Soleil mode, of which trapezist Helene Turcotte, a muscular beauty, is the champion enthraller. But these oases of grace only underline the frenetic naivete of the rest of Pomp Duck. After 3 1/2 hours of the chef chasing the chanteuse, visitors rush out to inhale that acrid New York air as if it were attar of roses. Even Hell's Kitchen is preferable to hell's kitsch...
...been John Travolta's peculiar fate to personify our desperate hope that a certain modern delinquent type--the grammatically challenged guy wearing tight pants and sporting a duck's-ass haircut--may not be quite as dangerous as he appears to be at first appalled-bourgeois glance. It is what made him a star almost two decades ago in Saturday Night Fever and Grease. And now that he's 41 and finally able to play grownup versions of the punk that was, it is what's making him--after a long season of neglect--a star again...