Word: legging
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...music scene in the States at least since the '50s, when Xavier Cugat dished out some slicked-up, watered-down rhythms that had made their way north from the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Legend has it that the merengue was inspired by a Dominican general who trailed a disabled leg behind him as he navigated a ballroom. Another myth says the dance originated with slaves brought from Africa to work the fields. The slaves, in chains, would move off the ships by lifting one leg and dragging the other...
...dressed in a threadbare overcoat and a small boy in rags stand in a sewage-clogged shantytown street just outside Luanda. The man has no right leg, the boy no left. As the boy hammers out a rhythm with a stick on a battered tin can, the man begins to swing his shortened limb in time to the beat. Others join in. Some waggle truncated arms, others hop on withered stumps. Soon nearly 100 cripples are shaking their mutilated bodies to the beat of the weird tin drum...
...there was very little humor in the Nixon White House, and much of what there was was inadvertent." For example: Nixon's comments to reporters at the Great Wall of China ("It's truly a great wall"), to a motorcycle policeman who had just broken his arm and leg in an accident at the head of a presidential motorcade ("How do you like your job?"), to French dignitaries gathered for the & funeral of Charles de Gaulle ("It's a great day for Paris"). Buchwald noted that the presidency always provides good material. "Just when you think there's nothing...
...spectacular sequence, a C3PO-style robot is reconstituted into a rock band -- the leg becomes a guitar, the torso a drum set -- and Jackson kicks into high gear with his We Are Here to Change the World, an up-tempo anthem. Laser beams shoot into the theater; orange light splashes off the rear wall. It is quite a workout. Or, as Producer Lemorande notes, "it's a very dense 17 minutes. It's like desserts. They're so small because they're so rich...
Inside his office, Bok leans back in an easy chair, a leg draped over one of its arms, and reflects on his duties. "My biggest job," he says, "is to create the atmosphere where creative people can do well. There are a lot of people running hard in this institution, and there has been a remarkable absence of smugness and self-satisfaction." Only a cynic would find in that statement a faint touch of self-satisfaction...