Word: iconic
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Sneakers -- or what some people still call tennis shoes and most everyone now refers to as athletic shoes -- are an American icon. The sneaker is not so much an object as an idea, a symbol of values that America has always taken pride in: social and physical mobility, practicality, informality, even rebellion (such as when Woody Allen wore a pair of Converse high-tops to escort First Lady Betty Ford to the ballet in 1975). It has only been since the 1960s that sneakers have become the shoe of everyday life, the U.S. form of mass transportation. Worn by bums...
...patron saint of peace, but last week her image provoked an unseemly squabble. Two days before Christmas, thieves stole a small jewel- encrusted painting of the saint from St. Irene Greek Orthodox Cathedral, which is located in Astoria, a predominantly Greek neighborhood in New York City. The icon, which congregationers say began to shed tears at the prospect of the Persian Gulf war, is valued by the church at $800,000. Church leaders went on television to plead for the icon's return. New York Mayor David Dinkins -- and the Mafia -- joined the appeal. On Dec. 28 the icon showed...
Then a representative of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America suggested not only that the icon had never wept, but also that the purported theft had been an inside job. St. Irene's bishop, Vikentios of Avlon, who belongs to a breakaway branch of the church, retorted that he would file a $50 million defamation suit against the archdiocese. The police say they have no evidence of fraud. If St. Irene was not crying before...
...pathways it has taken -- than John Paul II. Devotion to Mary was ingrained in the Pope in his Polish homeland, where over the centuries the Madonna has been hailed for turning back troops of the Muslim Turks, Swedish Lutherans and, in 1920, Soviet Bolsheviks. The precious Black Madonna icon was a mobilizing symbol for the country's efforts to throw off communism, and is still a unifying image for the entire nation...
...Costner's coiled heroic presence is one more source of controversy, for the liberal icon of Dances with Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is playing Jim Garrison, who as New Orleans district attorney in the late '60s prosecuted the only Kennedy assassination case that ever went to trial. And, quickly, out the window. The jury found the defendant, businessman Clay Shaw, not guilty in less time than last week's West Palm Beach jurors took to exonerate William Kennedy Smith. For the past decade, Garrison (who appears in JFK as Chief Justice Earl Warren) has been part...