Word: sideshows
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During the Reagan years, it seemed as if the American and Soviet First Ladies had decided to continue the superpower rivalry by other means. Raisa Gorbachev and Nancy Reagan's every tea, luncheon and photo op was another skirmish in their mutual assured destruction pact, a frost-filled sideshow of haute-to- haute combat. Reagan complained that Gorbachev lectured her mercilessly on Marx and missiles, compared the White House to a museum, and was given to an imperious snapping of her fingers to summon the KGB to fetch a chair for her. After one White House dinner where Raisa used...
Then there are the Lynchian touches of off-kilter characters and sideshow weirdness. A woman with an eyepatch has an obsession with drapes. Visitors to a bank vault find a stuffed deer head lying on the table. "It fell down," notes a bank officer blandly. The boyish FBI agent (Kyle MacLachlan) dictates every detail of his day into a cassette recorder and gets misty-eyed over Douglas firs and snowshoe rabbits. "Know why I'm whittling?" he says to the sheriff at one point. "Because that's what you do in a town where a yellow light still means slow...
...training. More than half the people screened at 71 sites had their fingers squeezed, or "milked," to draw blood. This is known to dilute the blood with other fluids and produce an artificially low cholesterol reading. Says HHS inspector general Richard Kusserow: "Sometimes these operations looked more like a sideshow at a carnival." When blood is drawn in a medical setting by trained personnel, such error is less likely...
Actually, I entered exercise hell at the Capitol Hill Squash and Fitness Club in Washington to avoid a tremendous lightning storm outside. It was either join the "Thursday Thumpers" aerobics class once or risk spending the rest of my life in a circus sideshow as "the man who was hit by lightning and now doesn't care what you put in his mouth...
...diplomatic ballet, however, was a mere sideshow to the drama of the border crossings. When the order came from Budapest at midnight last Sunday, Hungarian border guards blocking the 600-yard crossing at Hegyeshalom to the Austrian town of Nickelsdorf smiled and began to wave the refugees through. Across they came, on foot and bicycles, in German Wartburgs and Czech Skodas. Some drivers paused to put black tape over the first D and the R on their DDR vehicle-identification stickers, leaving a single D for Deutschland. "What a Monday!" cried an Austrian radio newscaster. "Boris Becker wins...