Word: porcelains
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Collectionitis is as pervasive as inflation, as euphoric as a drug high. Its grip reaches far beyond the roseate world of Rembrandts, Sèvres porcelain and Georgian silver. A vast subculture of acquisition is feeding on scarce objects of every conceivable description. Britons are busily unearthing-and auctioneers as busily selling-such objects of dubious virtue as antique typewriters, gramophones and biscuit tins. Americans, with more catholic taste for trivia, have enshrined such unlovely objets trouvés as old flyswatters, orange reamers, apple parers, Kraft cheese jars (a.k.a. "swanky swigs"), Mickey Mousiana, player pianos, Coke bottle tops, beer...
Meryl Streep could obviously have made it to the screen on looks alone. Says Director Michael Cimino, who worked with her on The Deer Hunter: "The camera embraces her." Lucky camera. Many women would kill for her slender, fashion-model figure, for that ash-blond hair, oval face, porcelain skin and those high, exquisite cheekbones. Her eyes mirror intelligence; their pale blue sparkle demands a new adjective: merulean. Only a slight bump down the plane of her long, patrician nose redeems her profile from perfection...
...turned to the theater, and the result is On the Lam, a two-hour "comedy" revue starring Chris Clemenson, Grace Shohet, Brian McCue, and Fred Barton. Now we can get the same ten laughs we used to get in ten minutes, skimming the Lampoon during a tenure on the Porcelain Throne, spread out over a full two hours in the congenial Adams House Junior Common Room--this truly is the miracle of what the Poonies call "the living theater...
...look beyond the blue chip stocks and bonds in which they have traditionally invested. In June the Government eased the rule limiting pension fund investments to only those that a "prudent man" would make. Now pension funds can invest in real estate or gold or even Picassos and Chinese porcelain. Eastern Air Lines pilots have almost 10% of their $250 million pension fund in Atlanta warehouses, Kansas City shopping centers and Southeastern forests. Such investments seem attractive at a time of rising prices for tangibles of all kinds, but they could also fall quickly in some future speculative collapse...
Last week President Carter selected the most symbolic-if least utilitarian-present Brezhnev has yet received from his American counterparts: a pair of porcelain "Doves of Peace." The sculpture, made by the New Jersey studio, Cybis, ordinarily would cost $3,500 to $4,000, but this was a special and more costly design; the turtledoves were passing an olive branch from one to the other. Brezhnev's 'return gift to Carter? A surprise, said the secretive Soviets. And so it remained as the meetings began...