Word: sideshow
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Arena's basketball court the hometown Pistons were preparing to play the Washington Bullets. In that three-ring atmosphere, the management appropriately promised that costumed "clowns will perform throughout the game." The unintended reference ultimately proved embarrassing to the Pistons. Treating them like part of the sideshow, the Bullets won by 25 points and reinforced the claim that under the N.B.A.'s big top they are now the main attraction...
...arrives one day in the town of Abalone, Ariz., and delivers delights that even Barnum would have hedged at promising. "The world is my idea," says Dr. Lao. "As such I present it to you." The circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building stone, and an absent-minded magician performs a couple of genuine miracles, transforming wine into water and raising a man from the dead...
...ultimatum whose fulfillment made me guilty not just because the life style put a premium on success, but because I had been educated to feel that independent success was meant for men. For women it had to be a by-product of a male-centered life, like a sideshow they could be proud of as long as it stayed in the wings. When my body began to get big and muscled and hard in a way I thought unfeminine I stopped playing altogether. My athlete's walk was making me feel like I had gone over to the other...
...gestures may at times seem overlarge, but they are no mere sideshow to titillate the audience. Solti is all business on the podium, his energies totally focused on the orchestra. He eschews any useless movement. A purring passage that does not have any tricky entrances usually finds Solti barely conducting at all. Says Chicago Oboeist Ray Still, "When everything is going fine, he doesn't interfere with the orchestra by going into a lot of acrobatics to make the audience think it's his struggling which is producing such fine music...
Before he lost everything, including the all-important loyalty, he dreamed of becoming the architect of the greatest society in American history. The war was a sideshow, something which could blow up in his face if it became too important or too controversial, So he made the decision to hold the line in Vietnam. As the line became harder to hold, he kept hoping that a little more force would do the job. There were always wise men around him to reinforce the delusion. And thus he proceeded, propelled by pride and fear, to become not the great healer...