Word: peacock
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Waldorf-Astoria hotel ("an understated and elegantly detailed composition") reports such esoteric details as the underground railroad station from which Franklin Roosevelt was whisked to his suite by a secret elevator. The books abound in learned footnotes and pleasant trivia (the pianist at the Waldorf's Peacock Alley uses an instrument once owned by Cole Porter, who lived in the hotel). New York restaurant critiques, by Daily News Food Editor Arthur Schwartz, are deft and sometimes devastating. At the toplofty "21" Club, the guide observes, "it is surprising how democratic the cooks and waiters are: no one gets terrific...
...multicolored Styrofoam and Fiberglas-mesh structure looks more as if it had been dreamed up in a Bourbon Street bar by the design team of Dali and Disney. Grecian urns and Roman busts sit among the rooftops; gilded cherubs toot their horns; alligators double as seats; a peacock spreads a vibrant tail. The wall's up and down hurly-burly has performing areas, water sculptures, flowers and 41 fountains...
...impressionistic, slapdash storytelling is in part about MacLaine's affair with a married politician, camouflaged as a British M.P. but speculated, depending on the continent, to be former Australian Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock or former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. The romance, however, is secondary to the book's mixed bag of metaphysics. MacLaine asserts that Jesus Christ developed mystical powers during years of study among holy men in India. She contends that "trance mediums" have enabled her to recall past lives. Although she privately acknowledges that she encountered a number of frauds, the book's exuberant...
...hills, the flame was delivered to Figure Skater Sanda Dubravcic. She ran the sparkler up a great white staircase, and the Olympic wok ignited instantly with a roar. But the highlight for some was the final duty of Lake Placid, the hosts of 1980, represented by Mayor Robert Peacock and the Norwood, N.Y., fire-department band. Appearing incomplete without a Dalmatian trotting alongside, the firemen oom-pah-pahed along the Bosnian Main Street, performing When the Saints Go Marching In, America the Beautiful and Baby Face...
Such uncertainty leads to eruptions of inappropriate behavior. In Feathers, a man named Jack and his wife Fran are invited to dinner at the home of one of Jack's coworkers. They arrive and find a peacock strutting about the front yard, a wife happily domesticated in the kitchen and their host offering them drinks in a room where a TV set is carrying a stock-car race. All of this is too much for Fran, who did not want to come in the first place. She eyes the screen: "Maybe one of those damn cars will explode right...