Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Journey of the Fifth Horse and Cold Storage, has conjured up the Richelieu, a baroque spa somewhere in the mountains of Europe, and he has populated it with a selection of guests who have the cultural and ethnic diversity of a World War II movie bomber crew: the French gigolo; the Levantine low-life; Mimosa Klein, the Jewish poet from Wellesley; and more, including Cesare Bottivicci, the Italian mutant prognosticator. The physical and emotional excess of these characters matches their surroundings, particularly the immense sweet table itself, laden with creamy goodies and attended by bewigged and powdered servants...
...most frustrating thing about Sweettable is that it contains the seeds of a good play--or several good plays, for that matter. Ribman never decided whether he was composing a metaphor for modern Europe, a guilty-secrets melodrama, a French philosophical play or an English drawing-room comedy. So he tosses elements of all these genres into his pot, and serves up the dramatic equivalent of broccoli cheese pasta--limp, stringy, with an occasional lumpy mass that may once have been a theme or plot twist now rendered unrecognizable by incompetent writing. Sweettable is talking-head drama of the worst...
...Tuesday, is March 3 this year, so mark your calendars. New Orleans, the ultimate party town, starts celebrating about two weeks early. The exclusive balls have long been out, but it's not too late to join in the drinking and gallivanting that goes on every night in the French Quarter...
Louisiana is truly a country to itself with a unique culture. Aside from the Cajun food, which is top-notch in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and in many of the small towns en route between the two, Louisiana offers an eclectic mixture of French and Spanish culture, a view of the Old South, and temperatures in the 70s in February...
...year after the bubonic plague, or black death, had begun its devastating rampage through Europe. In a famous medical treatise French Surgeon Guy de Chauliac of Avignon recalled his impressions of the horror around him: "The father did not visit the son nor the son the father. Charity was dead and hope abandoned . . . For self-preservation there was nothing better than to flee the region before becoming infected...