Word: lavish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trial want for drama. Bakker was led away for psychiatric evaluation, one witness collapsed, and Hurricane Hugo interrupted the proceedings. The usual details emerged about Bakker's lavish spending habits (motorized bedroom draperies, a $500 shower curtain). The prosecution's star witness turned out to be Bakker himself. Jurors endured eight hours of videotape showing his histrionic money pitches and then heard the ex-preacher describe himself on the witness stand as a "minister of the gospel," not a "professional businessman...
...qualify as a high roller, Painton could hardly have reported and written our story on one of America's gambling capitals without sampling a bit of the action. Estimated slot-machine losses in the course of two evenings: $50. But Painton did taste one of the luxuries the casinos lavish on their best customers. With all its regular rooms occupied, Bally's Grand Casino Hotel one evening assigned her to a suite with a Jacuzzi and a TV hidden in a marble plinth. Unhappily, the upgrade did not result in a night of rest. Explains Painton...
...helicopters believed to be used to smuggle drugs to the U.S., a number of yachts, and the mansions and ranches of the most prominent lords of the Medellin cartel: Pablo Escobar Gaviria and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. Colombian television showed viewers some indications of the drug lords' obscenely lavish life-styles. One of Rodriguez Gacha's spreads north of Bogota boasts several swimming pools, an artificial lake and a two-acre flower garden. Another Rodriguez Gacha mansion, inside Bogota, features a crystal staircase set amid pink marble walls and bathrooms equipped with gold-plated fixtures and rolls of Italian toilet...
...will trace the war up to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.) Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski spoke to John Borrell about his family's flight to Lithuania three weeks after the invasion, while Otto von Habsburg, son of Austria-Hungary's last Emperor, detailed for Gertraud Lessing the incongruously lavish meal he ate at the Ritz in Paris the night the government fled the city. Franz Spelman, who visited filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's famous propagandist, at her villa near Munich, discovered a well-coiffed blond who had just returned from scuba diving in the Caribbean and looked 20 years...
Still, the productions were mostly brief and small-scale, the livelihood far from lavish. "The least hint of the starving-artist routine," he recalls, "did not behoove my immigrant legacy of belief in education and upward mobility." In 1983, when he was 26, Hwang suffered the sort of crisis of conscience that comes to many people whose success was quick and easy. "I lost belief in my subject matter -- I dismissed it as 'Orientalia for the intelligentsia' -- and virtually stopped writing for two years. I thought seriously about going to law school." After the anxiety passed, Hwang tried to broaden...