Word: outlandish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ever since the first Yankee clipper set sail for Canton in 1784, China has held a compelling fascination for Americans. Traders and other early visitors to the Celestial Kingdom returned home with tales of teeming millions, exotic landscapes, seemingly outlandish manners and morals. Even today some Americans have a vision of China that is a fanciful montage of antithetical images: Confucius and Kung Fu; Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Mao's "sinister" widow Chiang Ch'ing; highborn ladies tiptoeing painfully on bound feet and unisex masses marching in bulky Mao jackets; delicately misty watercolors and propaganda...
...carnival air brightens California's San Jose market, one of the biggest in the U.S., with its 130 acres attracting 2.5 million visitors annually. Crowds pushing shopping carts stroll through the grounds, consuming heroic quantities of junk food and observing the outlandish garb that customers wear as part of the ritual. Henry Cortez, a robust Mexican American, sports a huge straw hat and tows Grandson Douglas around in a wooden wagon. "This is my flea-market hat," says Cortez, who has been going to the San Jose market almost every weekend since 1960. "And this is my flea-market...
...singers and actresses belting out "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" will bring down any house, so carefully honed are his Channings and Ellas. Co-star Hollis McLaren is inevitably overshadowed by Russell's stagewise presence, but the delicate treatment she gives her Crazy Liza perfectly complements her outlandish buddy...
...humor salvages their plight. Some of it is sheer vaudevillian antics - Dorothea doing body-wrenching calisthenics in her negligee, the half-deaf Bodey fidding with her hearing aid and trying to camouflage it with an outlandish flower, or Miss Gluck (Barbara Tarbuck), on whom coffee acts as an emetic, rushing to the bathroom to throw up. But more of the comedy springs from Williams' absurdist juxtapositions and mocking putdowns...
...excitement in recent years-with the exception of the brief Ford interregnum-and have come to require bigger and bigger doses of news intoxicants." Certainly neither Vance nor Brzezinski is as fascinating as Kissinger (their side comments are never as memorable as his), and Carter isn't as outlandish as Lyndon Johnson or as malignant as Nixon. What to do then...