Word: pageants
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Being a veteran competitor, I found special meaning in my high school’s annual cross-dressing pageant. Not because I was finally a sophomore or because I had just turned 16, but because a week earlier I had been dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the closet where I had hidden with my sexuality since the sixth grade. I was secretly dating a senior, Joseph Ragsdale, the desire of many wistful females and the target of endless gay-bashing. In the past, students had spray-painted slurs on his car and adorned it with pornography. The student body...
...aversion to Cupid and his arbitrary holiday is rooted in the expectation that I participate in a nationwide romance-pageant, where my genetic desirability—or lack thereof—is shamelessly pitted against that of my fellow man when I have no say in the matter. I’m a sucker for romance, but no one asked if this particular Thursday works for me. No one cared that I lose my appetite when hundreds of couples giggle and coo on all sides and when the sexual tension at the neighboring table is enough to make me sweat...
...Snow Place Like Home” stars a hotel owner, Bill Igerant, who decides to hold a beauty pageant at his Catskills ski resort—where tabloid reporter Diane Comebacktolife is promptly murdered...
...police screamed to the people running from the towers, "Don't look back!"--a biblical warning against the power of the image. Terrorism is sometimes described (in a frustrated, oh-the-burdens-of-great-power tone of voice) as "asymmetrical warfare." So what? Most of history is a pageant of asymmetries. It is mostly the asymmetries that cause history to happen--an obscure Schickelgruber nearly destroys Europe; a mere atom, artfully diddled, incinerates a city. Elegant perplexity puts too much emphasis on the "asymmetrical" side of the phrase and not enough on the fact that it is, indeed, real warfare...
...police screamed to the people running from the towers, "Don't look back!" - a biblical warning against the power of the image. Terrorism is sometimes described (in a frustrated, oh-the-burdens-of-great-power tone of voice) as "asymmetrical warfare." So what? Most of history is a pageant of asymmetries. It is mostly the asymmetries that cause history to happen - an obscure Schickelgruber nearly destroys Europe; a mere atom, artfully diddled, incinerates a city. Elegant perplexity puts too much emphasis on the "asymmetrical" side of the phrase and not enough on the fact that it is, indeed, real warfare...