Word: popular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Diana was a princess, but there are many princesses in Europe, none of whom ever came close to capturing the popular imagination the way she did. Princess Grace of Monaco was perhaps the nearest thing, but then she had really been a movie star, which surely provided the vital luster to her role as figurehead of a country that is little more than a gambling casino on the southern coast of France. The rather louche glamour of Monaco's royal family is nothing compared with the fading but still palpable grandeur of the British monarchy. To those who savor such...
...sense, the quasi-religious mystique of royalty came full circle with Diana. Monarchy used to be based on divine right. But just as monarchy used religious trappings to justify its rule, modern show-biz celebrity has a way of slipping into a form of popular religion. It is surely not for nothing that an idolized pop singer of recent times so successfully exploited her given name, Madonna. One of the most traditional roles of religious idols is a sacrificial one; we project our sins onto them, and they bear our crosses in public...
Realizing one is gay is usually cause for terror, or at least mortification, but Milk felt too great a sense of entitlement to let either emotion prevail. Born to a successful retail-clothing family on New York's Long Island, Milk was a popular high school athlete and jokester. According to the biography The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts, Milk had no trouble recognizing his desires; as a boy he would venture to a gay section of Central Park, where in 1947 he was arrested for doffing his shirt (he was 17). The experience didn't radicalize...
...century. She was the shy, self-conscious daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Together they were one of America's first celebrity couples in a media-crazy century. With his encouragement, she wrote memoirs of their life that made her one of the country's most popular and famous diarists. Early in the relationship, as Anne wrote ecstatically in 1928, when the couple were "together, alone--all gold, that extra golden bloom over everything!" But, as Lindbergh's biographer A. Scott Berg writes, "their 'storybook romance,' as the press always presented it, was, in fact, a complex case history...
Statements like these betray conventional perceptions of Anne Frank. The popular image that she was an optimistic light in a time of darkness is overturned and made more complex by the fact that she often wavered between moods. Upon every reading, something different, and even contradictory to previous reactions, stands out. I remember when I first read the book at age 12, what seemed most important to me was the relationship that Anne shared with her father. At 15, it was her friendship with Peter and her burgeoning sexuality. At 16, when I portrayed Anne on Broadway...