Word: pretzel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hospital, they eat rice, fried pork and bananas, and as their chopsticks dart from bowl to mouth, they seem almost normal-but they are not. When lunch is over, they do not stand up. Years of being shackled in the tiger cages have forced them into a permanent pretzel-like crouch. They move like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms...
...been simply a caricature of an absent-minded professor emerges as a warmly affectionate portrait of the last living humanist. And Rigg is lovely to look at, especially in the nude, and to listen to as she delivers her lines with a resolute intelligence that seems to unbend the pretzel twists of thought...
...pins with all the fervor of kids trading bubble-gum baseball cards. The indoor hot spot is the Bavaria Club, a shadowy discotheque in the village's recreation center. In the rear of the club, couples in their multicolored sweat suits lounge and embrace in a litter of long, pretzel-like pillows strewn around the floor. The play is also heavy on the center's pinball machines, pool tables, miniature golf course and toy-auto racing course. For the more reflective, there is a "quiet zone" for listening to classical music. Other diversions include a theater for such activities...
...assigning of absolute internal or external causes for suicide-from sheer loneliness to Freud's famous death wish-founders on the mysterious (and miraculous) fact that under similar stresses some people kill themselves and some do not. Counselors like Pretzel naturally worry less about absolutes and man's right to die than they do about the necessary conspiracy of the living to help one another carry on. An estimated 90% of attempted suicides who are saved by prevention centers are pitifully grateful afterward...
...Pretzel also reports that only 15% of the 9,000 calls that each year come into the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center (one of the nation's oldest) are rated high risk. The judgment depends on a number of things, among them age, economic and marital status. Not surprisingly, the single are more likely to go through with it than the married, the childless more likely than those with children. Also important for friends and counselors, says Pretzel, is a quick estimate of how strong the caller's death wish is. A rough measure is how specific...