Word: patly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Just before he is to go on, Pat peeks through a narrow door in the balcony, the veteran thespian appraising his audience. He walks to a holding room across the hall. From downstairs, the music of Pat's rousing fight song, with the refrain "Go, Pat, go!" fills the small room. He pantomimes a softshoe, smiles at his wife and says, "Come on, Shelley, they're playing our song." But Shelley, hugging the wall, resists his overture, and moments later, Pat Buchanan, the old-fashioned footlights throwing dramatic shadows across his face, is onstage declaiming his dark poetry...
...Feel like I should do a little Shakespeare," Pat says with a laugh, before telling his rapt audience just how he has come to be standing on this stage as the premier challenger to Bob Dole for the Republican presidential nomination. He recounts his achievements in Alaska, Louisiana and Iowa, ticking them off like battles from the Civil War. He pays tribute to "the rebels" of Lexington and Concord, "brave men who died for the idea of freedom." Buchanan, who loves costumes, is the only candidate who would not look strange in either Lincoln's stovepipe or Washington's tricorne...
...audience this night, he paints a picture of a Norman Rockwell America that never existed for most of them. "My father worked for the same company for 50 years," he says. "We lived in the same neighborhood." It is that ethnic Washington neighborhood that Pat describes in his memoirs as the setting for a kind of good-natured Catholic sitcom, The Battling Buchanans, with basement brawls and dinner-table debates over corned beef and cabbage. William Buchanan--always "Pop" to his seven sons and two daughters--was a successful accountant. But the model he set for his third son Patrick...
...proudly reminded his brood that they were the descendants of Mississippi Confederates who fought to save Old Dixie. Not for the Buchanans the Leave It to Beaver homilies of backyard-barbecue morality. Pop fostered a sense of clannishness, of us-against-them resentment that made his children ever vigilant. Pat attended Mass each day, prayed every night and made the sign of the Cross before basketball free throws. He studied hard and played hard and probably got into at least one fistfight a week. "I loved those years," Buchanan wrote in his 1988 autobiography. "Nothing since has matched the singular...
...Pat seemed to fight for the sake of fighting. During his senior year at Georgetown University, Buchanan was escorting a date home and picked a tussle with two cops. "I stuck a size 10 1/2 cordovan where I thought it might do him some good," Buchanan writes. In addition to receiving a broken wrist, he was booted out of school, his scholarship was revoked, and only a sharp criminal lawyer got him off with a misdemeanor. Pop Buchanan went to the Jesuits at Georgetown and pleaded to make his son's suspension temporary, and they agreed. Pat eventually graduated...