Word: rite
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They would not describe themselves as disappointed, however. After all, the mixer is almost the only class-wide party for Harvard students until the Senior Soiree almost four years later. It is a one of a kind, an initiation rite, and the capper to a slew of activity that all will remember--some with fondness--as Camp Harvard...
Elsewhere across the nation the annual commencement rite climaxed a season of . other ups and downs in academe. Protest was up, including more than 1,700 arrests at Cornell and Berkeley in demonstrations over university investments in corporations doing business in South Africa. At some big state university systems, grades were down: tougher standards cut the number of A's more than 4% at Cal State and 3% at Penn State. Old-time values were up: University of Wisconsin-Madison students voted Mom and Dad their No. 1 heroine and hero (runners-up: Mother Teresa and Jesus Christ). Law school...
...episode of the classic Walt Disney film Fantasia, the dinosaurs take over the earth to the impassioned strains of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. An adorable clutch of baby tricerotopses hatches from eggs; sloe-eyed brontosauruses wade in marshes; a bony-backed stegosaurus struggles for its life against the meat-eating Tyrannosaurus rex. But as the years flash by, the world mysteriously grows hotter and more violent: swamps evaporate, earthquakes trigger giant tidal waves, and the princely reptiles crawl across an encroaching desert to meet their certain doom...
...Viet Nam was what we had instead of happy childhoods." Narcissism again. But there is a mature sense in which it is true. Viet Nam may have been a hallucination. It was surely a warning, though one not always easy to read. It was also a kind of national rite of passage, a great power learning Kipling's lesson the hard way. In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer describes how a tribesman chosen to be king must be enchained and thrashed before his coronation. The moral may be that a nation, like a king, needs a little chastening perspective...
...brought them back in the second Broadway installment of a planned autobiographical trilogy. Biloxi Blues sends Eugene to Mississippi for basic training in 1943. He faces authority and danger, anti-Semitism and assimilation. He methodically loses his virginity with a prostitute (Randall Edwards), less for pleasure than as a rite of passage, then rediscovers his innocence in the chaste embrace of a Catholic schoolgirl. He confronts the chasm between his diary jottings and literature. In perhaps his least anticipated experience, he meets an age mate smarter than he is, not only in literary learning but in his grasp of human...