Word: pageants
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...discovery that an Arab street mob could jeer his name, Nasser in Damascus ordered up what his press unblinkingly called "the largest Arab anti-Communist demonstration ever seen." The crowd had been whipped up by Friday sermons in the mosques. It was given a martyr's pageant of its own, similar to the one in Baghdad: a lugubrious cortege for a wounded Iraqi captain who had fled Mosul when the revolt failed, and died in a Damascus hospital. Nasser crowed that "the banners of Arab nationalism" would fly one day over the land now ruled by Kassem: Mosul would...
...greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling," said Cecil B. DeMille in a speech a few months before he died. Few men had changed that art as drastically as he. Story and song, play and pageant have always demanded that the audience's imagination fill out the scene; DeMille and his Hollywood disciples left nothing to the imagination. His life was dedicated to manufactured magnificence; the "epic" was his trademark in a world that would never match its image on his movie screens...
Henry V, which last night opened and closed its sold-out Boston engagement, emerged in Michael Benthall's production as a great big simple-minded heroic-comic pageant. Shakespeare is actually the least simpleminded of dramatists, and even this frankly jingoistic exercise in banner-waving is also a subtle, even ambiguous, study of kingship and the attributes required for it. The pep-rally ambience, however, is much more vividly dramatized, and probably tends by its nature to overshadow the "deeper" element. At any rate, the wooing scene was delightful in the Vic version, and the rest was at least pretty...
...question was left unanswered. Fact is that in 13 years, the Miss America Pageant has turned from a leering pressagent's dream into a sort of solemn, deep-breathing Rorschach test, as stickily wholesome as Atlantic City's famed saltwater taffy. The girls are the chosen mascots of local civic and service clubs, are told to keep their eyes not on glamour but on more than $150,000 worth of scholarships contributed by business firms, and are constantly surrounded by ulcerescent chaperons, without whom they may not speak to any man, "including male members of their own families...
Climactic scene of the pageant was Moroni's appearance, in the form of an angel, to Joseph Smith, 17-year-old son of an upstate farmer, which Smith reported in 1823. Moroni, he said, told him about the tablets and informed him that he had been appointed by God to lead the world back to the true church. Joseph translated the tablets (said to be about eight inches square and covered with fine writing in "reformed Egyptian") with the aid of a pair of spiritual spectacles buried with them; the spectacles consisted of two stones called Urim and Thummin...