Word: pageants
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Rice, a former South Carolina beauty pageant winner, denied in an interview Monday that she had spent the night with Hart or had sex with...
...apartheid had become so obsessively established that a white taxi driver refused to let a blind white girl and her colored nurse ride together in his cab; that white and colored children were forbidden to appear together in a Red Cross pageant; that Cabinet ministers refused to attend any receptions where blacks or coloreds might be present; that the Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach was denied permission to bring his Vietnamese wife into the country to meet his parents; that a black workman could hold two wires for a white electrician but was not allowed to join them together...
Somewhat rowdily becalmed, to be sure. Duane rather absentmindedly conducts affairs with two mistresses; at the book's end, he wanders through a centennial pageant in which 60,000 eggs are thrown, many of them by Duane and Karla's eleven-year-old twins, who, he says truthfully, "seemed as uninfluenceable as wild animals." But middle age is a predicament, not a journey, and thus essentially undramatic. At the end of The Last Picture Show, Duane, who had joined the service and was headed for Korea, left his secondhand Mercury with his friend Sonny, saying, "See you in a year...
...happened with surreal swiftness. One moment, the pageant of Reaganism was proceeding, with brilliant fireworks over the harbor. The next moment, the Iranian scandal burst up through the floorboards. Strange blackbirds of policy flapped out of the White House basement. The Reagan Administration, the phenomenon that had defined so much of the '80s, that had given the decade its agenda and style, seemed to collapse in a bizarre shambles...
...least as far back as Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, novelists have been interested in setting imaginary characters loose against a background of authentic, tumultuous events. Small wonder. History is, after all, drama readymade, an endless pageant playing at all hours in the public domain. Writers who elect to fuse their private inventions with the collective memory of an actual past can create electrifying effects. Witness the towering achievements of War and Peace or the enduring popular appeal of Gone With the Wind. The formula has its pitfalls, of course, in the hands of the inept: cardboard people posing stiffly...