Word: quills
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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California, as always, is someplace else again. Donating its services, Walt Disney Productions has created a mascot for the state's celebrations, Bisontennial Ben: a bison carrying a quill pen, just right for signing important documents. "We are making the Constitution user-friendly," says Peter Paul, executive vice president of the California Bicentennial Foundation, speaking in the argot of Silicon Valley. "We have taken California innovation and creativity and directed them to selling an important message...
...called, copying it out at an elegant angle in large, legible script. The four sheets of parchment were vellum, the skin of a lamb or a calf, stretched, scraped and dried. The ink, a blend of oak galls and dyes. The light, an oil lamp. The instrument, a feather quill. All nature contributing to the assignment, human nature in the form of Jacob Shallus, ordinary American citizen, son of a German immigrant to Philadelphia, soldier, patriot, father of eight and, at the time of the Constitutional Convention, assistant clerk to the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The convention handed Shallus the documents...
...from city to city as the nation's capital moved, went into hiding during the War of 1812, was transferred from federal department to department until it wound up in the National Archives in Washington, sanctified in helium and watched over by an electronic camera conceived by NASA. The quill age to the space age, and at every stage, a nation full of grateful believers making a constant noisy fuss over a piece of writing barely equivalent to a short story: much theme, no plot and characters inferred...
THERE'S REALLY not much in Cambridge for the social critic. Where Oscar Wilde had the stuffy yet elegant mannerisms of the Victorian British upper class to sharpen his quill against, his Cantabrigian counterparts have nothing more than faded rebels and pseudo-punks as the objects...
Most journalists hoping to interview a rock star must first surmount a human barricade of dyspeptic press agents, surly managers and beefy bodyguards. Not Monaco's Princess Stephanie, who recently added the quill to a quiver of part-time professions that include swimsuit designer, model and singer (her debut album, Besoin (Need), is a hit in Europe and will be released in the U.S. next year). It seems that the dilettante Princess was smitten with Rod Stewart at a show during his latest tour and, after a photo shoot that will appear in the December issue of the American Elle...