Word: rituals
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...Ritual Blessing...
...represented, in a peculiarly American way, a ritual of resurrection. For the U.S., the war in Viet Nam had gone ambiguously: the nation's longest battle had ended in nothing like glory but in a kind of complex suspension. The nation could at least find its consolation, even its celebration, in the return of the prisoners. Here, at last, was something that the war had always denied-the sense of men redeemed, the satisfaction of something retrieved from the tragedy. The P.O.W.s' return bore a tangible finality that the war itself, even in its negotiated resolution, could never...
...throw up after every practice (I didn't) and running the half mile for the next three years and feeling like I was going to vomit after every race (I did most of the time). I was willing to go through the agony of an 880 and the ritual throwing-up because I ran good times and won, while I wasn't really so thrilled about turning green after swimming because I was awful and never came in better than an occasional third...
...season ended with the notorious "O" club initiation, a ritual for all first-year varsity lettermen. The initiates were ordered to crawl backward for fifty yards with "grapes up our asses," forced to drink menstrual fluid, and constantly shocked with battery-powered cattle prods. Coaches observed these activities to ensure that the proceedings "didn't get too sadistic...
...heroine relates to the whole question mostly as a strategic matter of home economics. Barbra Streisand appears as Margaret Reynolds, an intermittently harassed mother of two and wife of an up-and-coming professor of political science at Columbia. For once Streisand dispenses with her ritual mugging and piercing line readings; her performance is generally subdued and rather good. The fact that she is never fully believable in the part is due largely to the mistake of casting a superstar as a woman who ought to be not quite anonymous but no more than average...