Word: pedaled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What the movie folks have noticed is a grim specter haunting all of yuppiedom. No matter how furiously they pedal their Exercycles, no matter how earnestly they chomp through their radicchio or how desperately they try to drown their anxieties in wine coolers, the yups cannot escape this terrible fact: procreation is the enemy of recreation. Not to mention carefree getting and spending. Recently we have seen one mini-hit (Baby Boom) and one maxi-hit (3 Men and a Baby) offering implausibly sentimental reassurances that there is life after surrogate parenthood. Now comes that prolific chronicler of youthful crises...
...what did it all really mean? Sexually, European dramas were less fettered than the Hollywood stuff; an art-film lover could get both stimulated and aroused. They were wonderful pictures too, some of them. Movies have never been so daring as when Bergman & Co. were pushing the existential pedal to the cinematic metal. For a while, in the Viet Nam years, Hollywood directors made European-style films, but that was just one more American dabble in radical chic. Soon, with Star Wars and Animal House, Hollywood was again playing to the eternal adolescent...
Even the leading Republicans have learned to soft-pedal hawkish rhetoric in Iowa. Bush's first Iowa TV ad, aired last month, stressed his strong support for the President's INF treaty with the Soviet Union. Similarly, no epithet hurled by the Bush campaign has irked Dole more than the label "Senator Straddle" for his awkward stutter-step on the INF treaty...
...Soon, it may prove to be even more shocking. Cabbies, alarmed by a recent wave of attacks by passengers, are eyeing a device called le siege qui brule, the hot seat. Wires beneath the rear seats are connected to the taxi's battery. The driver can step on a pedal to deliver enough electricity to stun even a crazed gunman...
...clap, and put them in your lap, lap, lap . . ." On cue, 19 mothers seated in a circle on the floor grasp the wrists of the toddlers before them and dutifully push and pull tiny arms and hands. Rubenstein changes her tune, tykes are settled on their backs, and mothers pedal little limbs bicycle- style. Then to a third ditty, with youngsters in their laps, mothers inch their hips forward to the center of the ring where they lift the children and make like airplanes...