Word: relaxers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Inside the spa building, in a small windowless room, an uptight, burned-out, more-fat-than-fit East Coast Type A female is submitting to an herbal wrap. A cup of alfalfa-mint tea precedes mummification. She sweats to the faint chimes of "music to relax and meditate by." The East Coast Type A resents being told to relax. The ranch's resident psychotherapist, Richard ("Bud") Murphy, will later tell her, "Many people come here seeking withdrawal from something-food, a bad marriage, personal problems, smoking-but they feel ambivalent and resist change...
...right again. To a large extent, this is a movie about that great American theme of just finding a place to be. Ever since Huck Finn set off on his raft to leave the complications of civilization behind. Americans have been searching for a place just to relax and be themselves. The diner is just such a place...
There are no women in the diner, or at least none with any speaking lines. Crammed into a tight booth and certain of their terrain, the guys can relax and laugh at the world around them. At the weird kid who memorizes all the lines from the movie Sweet, Sweet Success and recites them to no one in particular. At the enormously obese man who manages to consume all of the items on the left side of the menu--"that's not a human," someone exclaims, "it's a building with legs...
...also reflects on the dual dilemmas of defense and détente and on the bitter debate about relations with the Soviet Union that developed during Richard Nixon's second term. Any U.S. President, says Kissinger, "must embrace both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions." Yet an America weakened by Watergate found this balancing act all but impossible to maintain. Finally, TIME presents some of Kissinger's observations on politics, bureaucracy and diplomacy. ("Civil wars," he writes, "almost without exception end in victory or defeat, never in coalition governments-the favorite American recipe...
...nuclear age compels us to coexist. Rhetorical crusades cannot change that either. A President thus has a dual responsibility: he must resist Soviet expansionism, and he must be conscious of the risks of global confrontation. His policy must embrace both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions...