Word: facing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Steve Martin perfected this persona in the early '70s. Then he waited until they got it. And suddenly, in 1976, they went crazy over his silver hair, his B-movie-star face, his phosphorescent white suit -- the whole look so neat, so sensible, so . . . Phil Donahue -- and the sublimely silly uses to which he put them. Phrases like "Well, excuuuuuse me!" and "Naaaah!" became schoolyard mantras, and his concerts were eliciting rock-idol squeals. "He was performing to audiences of up to 20,000," recalls David Letterman, the late-night commissar of '80s comedy. "I think that's a record...
...sits alone in a white suit, in a white room, staring ahead, perhaps at another painting. The silhouette of a devoted woman shimmers to one side. At his feet are neat piles of scripts, art books, 3-by-5 cards from a pristine youth. His face shows no emotion or thought; all the wild wit and inquiring intellect are hidden inside. It is the face that says, "Go away." But some mad fan has tampered with the portrait. On the man's head he has drawn nose glasses, bunny ears and a hat with an arrow through...
...woodcutter who lives near West Plains, Mo. He is 58 years old. He is 6 ft. 1 in. tall, a handsome man with a weathered face and a small mustache. He is in physical trim that a weight lifter would envy. Ray cuts wood every day, stacking six tons on his truck and unloading it inside one of the kilns at Craig's Industries in Mountain View, Mo., before the sun gets too high. He figures he lifts...
While the country fretted over the continuing strike, State President P.W. Botha announced that parliamentary elections scheduled for 1989 would be postponed until 1992. The move was presumably aimed at giving Botha a chance to press ahead with what he regards as his reform program before having to face another challenge from far-right opponents...
...idiocies of everyday life. In an agitated, high-pitched voice that could pierce the din of the loudest bar, he takes off after everything from convenience stores (where "$20,000 worth of cameras protect $20 worth of Twinkies") to slasher movies ("Woman opens the refrigerator, gets hit in the face with an ax. There's a common household accident, huh?"). Leno's P.G.-rated material is witty, accessible and firmly anchored in bedrock middle America. "I'm hopelessly American," he confesses. "If something doesn't come in a Styrofoam box with a lid on it, I'm lost...