Word: pulsebeat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only simplifying history, not distorting it, to suggest that on May Day 1627, the struggle for the American soul was settled once and almost for all. Score: Ants, 1; Grasshoppers, 0. The devil had been unmasked as the imp of play, the demon who made song and dance the pulsebeat of life. And so the men in the gray Puritan suits went their unmerry way: sober, industrious, thrifty, starkly Protestant, with absolutely no use for Maypoles. For Maypoles meant not only untrammeled festivity but something of larger significance: rituals. And rituals meant not only feelings and passions but coded repetitions...
Farce is tragedy out for a good time. Its characters miss disaster by a pulsebeat (What if the husband had peeked behind the door? What if the policeman had knocked a minute earlier?). Its situations are improbabilities made tantalizingly possible...