Word: pageant
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...upmanship. But there was more -- much more. Religion in the Soviet Union was suddenly a hot topic for TV reporters, as were Soviet rock music and the effect of glasnost on the Soviet press. There were tours of the Moscow subway, a visit to the first Miss Moscow beauty pageant and an interview with artists who, in honor of the summit, made plaster casts of people shaking hands...
...pageant was slated to be the city of Beijing's first beauty contest since the 1949 revolution, and students, dancers, even nurses from the People's Liberation Army rushed to sign up as contestants. Communist Party hard-liners, however, apparently felt that bourgeois tendencies were getting out of hand. Television coverage of the event was canceled. Instead, 40 quarter-finalists assembled last week before a sprinkling of spectators in an austere union hall for what was dubbed a tea party. Rather than choose a single Miss Beijing, the pageant organizers honored twelve "outstanding contestants who left a relatively deep impression...
Inside the coliseum, spectators can watch snake handling by professional snake wranglers. There is also snake milking, butchering, gutting and skinning, the last done with the help of visibly squeamish volunteers from the beauty pageant dressed in blood-spattered lab coats. Three-dollar bus tours for those who want to see the snakes in their natural habitat leave every hour. A cook shack is busy producing corn dogs ($1) and deep-fried rattlesnake meat ($1). Take a bite; it tastes like turtle...
Wilbur's "Leaving," for example, moves adroitly from the specific to the universal. A couple depart from a garden party at dusk and stumble slowly into a perception of the pageant of humanity...
...Games begin, and in the pageant' s glow even the most professional of athletes becomes an ebullient amateur again...