Word: packs
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Then I noticed one vehicle that had slowed next to me, rather than rushing with the pack. I looked up at the men's leering faces. They were licking their lips. There was nothing to do but shut my own tinted windows and switch into the fast lane, discretely trying to escape...
...would have guessed that a little baby-blue tablet designed to restore potency to the impotent would pack such a wallop? In June, Kaiser Permanente, the giant HMO with the imperial name, announced that it had decided not to cover the cost of the $10 erection pill for its 9 million members. Just three weeks later, the little pill had become a symbol of one of the nation's hottest political issues: what HMOs do and don't pay for. Viagra's role in the debate was heightened last week when the federal agency that administers Medicaid told the states...
Joey Bishop, 80 years old now, is not at all sentimental about the Rat Pack's renewed cultural currency. Nor is he pleased. On the phone from Newport Beach, Calif., where he lives with his wife of 57 years, Sylvia, he says he doesn't much like giving interviews (while graciously agreeing to this one). So, I ask, to what does he attribute the ongoing obsession with his early '60s apotheosis, the nights in Vegas clowning around on stage and off with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford? "Could it be anything else but money...
...problem, as he sees it, is that the Rat Pack's story has been corrupted by "so many lies" and a fetishistic--my word--tendency to make too big a deal out of trivia such as Rat Pack slang and haberdashery. "I don't understand this searching for things that weren't there," he says. "It's like a hunger." One senses that being a living legend--the others, of course, are no longer with us--is an awful kind of limbo. It is as if the world were telling him, "Roll over, let go already...
...issue Bishop is particularly sensitive about is his position in the Rat Pack. He was the pro comedian who anchored the group's anarchic stage performances and conceived much of its material--Sinatra called him "the Hub of the Big Wheel." He and Martin were also the only ones who could make jokes at Sinatra's expense. Yet Bishop is often portrayed as the expendable member, the one who was lucky to be along for the ride, the Ringo. In books he usually has fewer index entries than even Lawford. "One guy wrote that I worked with the Rat Pack...