Word: rituals
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Throughout this ritual, the gate remains closed, as it has always been closed, from the days before the Czars through a history that owes little to the West. As for the new gatekeeper, he will reveal himself when he and the state from which he is inseparable are ready. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov tells of awakening mornings in the Russia of his boyhood and glancing at the chink between the white shutters to see what the new day proffered: gloom or "dewy ( brilliancy." The West has no shutters it can open, and the glimpses it gets show almost nothing. This...
Once again the sad music, followed by the ritual, seen before, only speeded up and muted this time. The surviving leaders seemed so impatient to bury the departed one that they were almost rude to his memory. They were even more impatient to name his successor. In particular, this successor. Here, finally, was a General Secretary who could go on vacation to his native Northern Caucasus without the world wondering whether he was on a dialysis machine or a respirator. There would be no more jokes about George Bush having a season ticket to Kremlin funerals, and the programmers...
...Amfitheatrof, each ritual had its memorable moments. "Brezhnev's was the first of my Red Square state funerals, but I missed it," he says. "I chose instead to be one of 30 journalists permitted to go into the Kremlin's pearl white, czarist-era Hall of St. George to watch the world's leaders express condolences to Brezhnev's successor, Andropov." Amfitheatrof had armed himself with a strong pair of Soviet-made binoculars to monitor Andropov's expression as he greeted such disparate visitors as George Bush and Fidel Castro. "The binoculars were large and conspicuous," recalls Amfitheatrof...
Coca-Colas mixed with cherry syrup for years were as much a part of the courtship ritual as convertibles, sock hops and holding hands. Yet the bottling company has never marketed its own version of the fountain concoction. Now it has made a better-late-than-never decision to put cherry Coke in bottles and cans, in its first flavored variation of the soft drink. When the company measured the popularity of several cola mixtures at the 1982 Knoxville World's Fair, cherry was more popular than lemon-, lime- and vanilla-flavored Cokes. Nonetheless, Coca-Cola will continue test-marketing...
After a week of teas and tours, bashes and branches the freshman class next week enters the home stretch of the House lottery process, a ritual which has meant hysteria for some, but only mild anxiety for others...