Word: elixir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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COMIC OPERA is a genre that glories in stylization. The simple joys of highly rouged prima donnas pouting with vanity, sighing village simpletons and cartoon-strip gestures flourish at Lowell House this weekend in Gaetano Donizetti's The Elixir of Love, a production which remains unabashed and comfortable in its use of devices that have pleased audiences for centuries--and balances them well enough to sustain its momentary lapses into camp and slang...
...flutter of duets and trios and sprightly choral spectacles, the rejected Nemorino turns for help to the traveling doctor Dulcamara. This quintessential quack provides him with the magical "elixir of love" (A bottle of Bordeaux) which will transfix Adina's attentions. Adina and Belcore prepare for a gala wedding, and Nemorino sells himself into the army to buy the elixir, and his rich uncle dies, and the elixir works or maybe it doesn't, and brightly garbed townspeople dance and sing about wine and romance...
...STORY, like so many American tales, begins with a California eccentric. Nurtured on the mysterious elixir of sunshine and smog, Californians serve as a national test-track, measuring fads, products and ideas by their unique--and often contagious--standards. The sage of the tax revolt, touchstone of the most important social and economic movement of our era, seemed to emerge half from central casting and half from the Bible--the prophet come to save a nation, live and in color. His Jeremiad condemned demon government and its lecherous grope for the tax dollar; the reverberations of Howard Jarvis's leap...
Today the same people incarnate modern Arab lore emerging from the magic elixir of oil. The oil price boom in 1973 began barely two years after seven gulf emirates-Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al Qaiwain, Ras al Khaimah and Fujairah-set aside tribal quarrels to form a loose federation. The cornucopia of oil money has yielded perhaps the highest per capita income in the world for Emirates citizens (in excess of $100,000 a year) and created a cradle-to-grave welfare state. But the Emirates face the most serious population imbalance in the region: of a population...
...Nixon Agonistes, Garry Wills called Ike "a political genius." Nixon, for his part, recorded in his Six Crises that Eisenhower "was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of those words." (Those phrases may be the purest elixir of Nixon's thought that was ever bottled...