Word: leathering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ordinary feminist convention, this. The lesbians, sex kittens, Amazons and fashion models here pack the hotel; attired in leather and chains, gauze and spangles, disco Spandex and Southern belle white, they hang from the ceiling and leer out of doorways. Their cigarette smoke makes haze of the atmosphere; their singing and screaming and chanting and ranting produce an unholy, stupefying, din. They are painted like puppets; they contort and disport to uncanny visual effect...
...observes Biographer William McFeely with mordant pragmatism, "is a way out of a leather store." Certainly it was that for Ulysses S. Grant, who was clerking in a family shop in Galena, Ill., when the Civil War ignited the U.S. Grant was 38 when the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, and he had distinguished himself only briefly as a soldier: in combat, as an eager young West Pointer in the Mexican War, and as an enterprising peacetime quartermaster who led a hapless party of California-bound travelers across the Isthmus of Panama...
...never so thoroughly. In the beginning, there was luck. A Liverpool performance attracted the interest of Brian Epstein, a wealthy young record-store owner and an agonized closet homosexual. Although drawn to what he saw onstage, Epstein sensed that the world was not waiting for four sweaty boys in leather suits. After talking himself on board as their manager, Epstein literally cleaned up their act. Next came timing. The British press and public were growing weary of the Profumo scandal and its sleazy aftershocks; what was needed was a little innocent fun. The newly fluffed and tailored Beatles stumbled into...
...toast, so does just about everyone in the audience. Wooroo! Such synchronized celebrations take place nightly at a growing number of movie bars in the South and Northeast, where patrons may chase a good flick-or drown a bad one-with beer, wine or cocktails. Seated in executive-style leather swivel chairs ranged around butcher-block cocktail tables, customers have only to beckon a waitress for refills or to order sandwiches. They manage thus to combine the comforts of home with the fillip of a night out. Indeed, sipping cinemas may be a shot to stimulate the film industry...
Inside the main building, we walked down long corridors, dimly lit by the grey light sifting in through high windows, toward classrooms and small studies. There was mahogany and cracked, reddish leather. The floor creaked grandly as we moved slowly around corners, fully expecting the current generation of the hereditary janitor class of the realm to leap out from a closet and drive us off with flailing push brooms. Every room seemed to have a fireplace, and we wondered what it would have been like to fall asleep in an over-stuffed armchair, Milton on your lap and a monogrammed...