Word: rollered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...self-interested strivings of wild-eyed nonconformists, each fur-laden Daniel Boone pursuing his independent errand into the wilderness. The term is fairly precise. More aggressive than mere individuality, less narcissistic than the "me" decade, it does not refer to people who live in health clubs or on roller skates, or to the hotly cultivated yuppies who have come to mean so much to themselves. The "rugged" saves "rugged individualism" from shabbiness by implying not merely solitary but courageous action. Look. Here comes America. Davy Crockett, Thomas Edison, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford. Those fellows built a nation with their hands...
...took place. (Here is a yellowed card, signed on Feb. 12, 1911, confirming membership in the "Abstinence Department of the Anti-Saloon League." It pledges abstinence, saying further that intoxicating beverages are "productive of pauperism, degradation and crime.") Faded photographs are particularly difficult to reject (this one has them roller-skating in Central Park during the Depression), as are imperfect potteries, one's own juvenilia. Each visit becomes a sort of "This Was Our Life" program, and not uncomfortably so. Afterward, the wires sing between siblings...
...been pursuing a rather whimsical rediscovery of its home-grown past: flimsy roadside commercial buildings are regarded as significant folk design, for instance, and turn-of-the-century housing styles are now being absorbed into the postmodernist aesthetic. When Conservative Columnist George Will calls Rock-'n'-Roller Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A.) an exemplar of bedrock American values, as he did in a column last week, who will deny that the country has become infatuated with itself...
...Richard Stilgoe, is (surprise!) the season's hottest ticket. It is also just about a total bust. For this multimedia combo of Rollerball and The Little Engine That Could, Designer John Napier has ramped and revamped the huge Apollo Victoria Theater, allowing the young cast room to roller-skate through three levels of the audience. But all the amplified sound and whirling energy cannot hide the show's vacuity. The story line is repetitive and inconsequential; Trevor Nunn's staging is an elephantine parody of his wondrous work on Nicholas Nickleby and Lloyd Webber's Cats...
Atlantic Richfield, Occidental Petroleum, Getty Oil and Union Oil have their headquarters in Los Angeles. At the beach you see seals and oil pumps, as well as men, too dumpy and too old to be making fools of themselves, on roller skates. On the freeway you see an oil pump in a bend where, elsewhere in the nation, there would most likely be a fruit stand. There is a camouflaged oil pump on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. Just as you begin to understand there is sensible, sound, big commerce in this vast polyglot a sign looms...