Word: patronizers
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...patron saint of the cult of the body: the almost mystical belief that we have the power to overcome adversity if only we submit to the right combinations of exercise, diet, meditation and weight training; that by force of will, we can sculpt ourselves into demigods. The century began with a crazy burst of that philosophy. In 1900 the Boxer rebels of China who attacked the Western embassies in Beijing thought that martial-arts training made them immune to bullets. It didn't. But a related fanaticism--on this side of sanity--exists today: the belief that the body...
...sets out to see how many attractive women he can pick up. It's an experiment to determine the relative superficiality of gay females vs. straight males, or something like that. The punch line: well, there isn't one, really. Our social scientist is eventually recognized by a patron as Toby Young, a 35-year-old writer for the men's magazine Gear. Young denies being on assignment ("Not me. My name is Jennifer"), makes an abrupt exit and goes home to recount his experience in a piece titled "I Was a Lesbian for a Night...
...passion, her resistance to change, her assertions of power in a male-dominated religion and male-dominated world and her constant struggle to find beauty in a harsh and unforgiving terrain. The saints that Carmen addresses have given her solace and guidance through the years, from Saint Liberata, the patron saint of abused women represented as a crucified female martyr, to Saint Theresa of Lisieux, who teaches Carmen to find beauty in adversity...
...unsure of what the dread acronym stood for (for the record, both repetitive strain injury and repetitive stress injury are correct) knew enough to tremble at the slightest twinge in our wrists. Idle hands would lapse unconsciously into the aptly-named "prayer stretch" as we invoked our various patron saints to protect us from the debilitating disease. These days, however, as the "RSI Action Group" mousepads at email terminals start to fray at the edges, the former scourge of the keyboard seems about as threatening as scurvy to most of us. In the words of one anonymous senior...
...watch Momma's Little Girl, Jacqueline, pass through. We watch the Playpen patron pass through. It's our turn. At this point we have stood on a Manhattan sidewalk for five hours in the freezing rain and have accomplished absolutely nothing. If Aaron and Josh are turned away, our entire odyssey will be for naught. Our bouts of pneumonia--which we already feel coming on--will be in the name of no higher cause. In short, we will have to return to Harvard, cold, wet and beaten...