Word: queens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...receives a phone call inviting him to a dinner party in London being given by a wealthy American for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Theroux accepts and then, on the day of the occasion, conceives the idea that the Queen can somehow cure his malaise. At the party he hears and reports on royal conversations, including the Queen's comment on the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, whom she had recently met: "He had splendid hair. Fuzzy wuzzy hair!" As she is leaving, the Queen looks at Theroux and says, "You're in a frightful muddle, aren...
When this chapter of the novel appeared in the New Yorker last March, transatlantic eyebrows were raised, particularly after it became known that the real Paul Theroux had once actually attended a dinner given for the Queen. As a stand-alone piece in the New Yorker appearing under the rather puzzling rubric "Fact and Fiction," Theroux's account provoked justifiable confusion. In the context of My Other Life, though, the episode seems entirely consistent with the mildly plausible and cumulatively bizarre contents of the rest of the novel...
...course, there are dozens more types. The laid-back. The artsy. The nerd. The extracurricular king or queen. Come to think of it, the most interesting project of all might be to put seven Harvard people together in a house to find out what happens when they stop being polite and start being real. But there's one major flaw: Harvard people aren't polite to begin with. Let the auditions begin...
...shiny, Brady-ish, we-are-a-family theme was undermined in unintended and sometimes ironic ways. An opening-night song was from Rent, a musical featuring a drag queen with aids, which aggressively rejects middle-class platitudes. Jesse Jackson, who has spent three decades in public life acting almost as though he had no family, suddenly carted out some of his kids for an appearance on a Larry King show in which he praised the maternal attributes of his usually invisible wife. Gore, in his speech recalling his sister's death from lung cancer, neglected to mention that he continued...
Until the Dick Morris story turned the press into a gaggle of schoolchildren hearing the bells of the ice cream truck, the talk of the convention concerned the maudlin tone of the convention speeches. "This isn't a convention," went a common refrain, "it's Queen for a Day." There's no doubt that this year Democrats gave us not only a balloon drop and a confetti drop but a treacle drip of steadily increasing dosage as well. I found myself cheerfully ascending to high dudgeon--until it hit me that we in the television business bear much...