Word: missing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...MISS FIRECRACKER...
Movies are show; plays are tell. Here's one difference. In Beth Henley's 1984 off-Broadway hit The Miss Firecracker Contest, a seamstress named Popeye Jackson explained that as a child she "used to make little outfits for the bullfrogs that lived out around our yard." In this expansive adaptation, Popeye (Alfre Woodard) displays one such frog, cunningly coutured in a nurse's gown with matching stethoscope. Ah, the glamorous realism of the cinema! It's cute...
...screenwriter, Henley has dramatized elements only hinted at in her play, but the story is the same. Sweet, just slightly trampy Carnelle (Holly Hunter) determines to win the Miss Firecracker Contest as a way of standing up to the mocking townspeople and claiming some of the limelight that illuminates her chic, snooty cousin Elain (Mary Steenburgen). Two men, Carnelle's sometime lover Mac Sam (Scott Glenn) and Elain's wild brother Delmount (Tim Robbins), act as a geek chorus to the drama, but, typically in a Henley play, the real conflict is between young women clawing each other for respect...
That could mean a direct hit or, more probably, another nerve-jangling near miss. But even if 1989FC never strikes earth, a similar asteroid is destined to do so eventually. It has happened so many times before, in fact, that the earth's surface would be as pockmarked as the moon's were it not for the cosmetic effects of erosion caused by the oceans and atmosphere. Half-mile asteroids are a dime a dozen in the solar system, and they run into the planet once every 100,000 years, on average. That means the next one could strike...
...simply break the rock into pieces that would hit the earth anyway. A better plan, proposed by concerned scientists in the early 1980s, would be to use explosives to deflect an asteroid rather than destroy it. Properly positioned, a bomb could nudge a threatening object enough to make it miss the planet. The catch, says Harris, is that there would not be much time to react to an approaching celestial body. "With an asteroid like this one," he says, "you'd probably get a day's warning at best." In short, the most sensible thing to do about earth-grazing...