Word: snaking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Angel of Lightning" -- and has had wings tattooed on his back. Benny also sees himself as the appointed savior of Catchprice Motors. Never mind that his relatives think him fit for nothing but pumping gas. "This is a family business," Benny tells a prospective salesman. "It's a snake-pit. They all hate each other. None of them can sell a car. If you work here, you'd have to work...
...story of a guy who made his living in the carnival world; he worked as a barker with small-time freak-show acts like "the two-headed baby" and "the snake girl," he told the Warren Commission. He bummed around looking for roustabout jobs, met his first wife at a Salvation Army mission. When she left him in the summer of 1963, he hitchhiked all the way from the West Coast to Dallas looking for her. Picked up some work at the Texas state fair in a carney sideshow called "How Hollywood Makes Movies," which featured some of Jack Ruby...
...realm of the miraculous sometimes lies just across the border from the fanatical or the tacky. Miracles may turn into roadside tourist traps, Fellini scenes. A revelation may go commercial and look like a snake farm beside the highway in North Florida. The transcendent moment falls from grace and spoils on the ground like rotten fruit. So the territory of the miraculous must be approached carefully, by stages, passing from the gaudiest, shabbiest outer display toward what may, occasionally, turn out to be a deeper truth...
...gaudier miracles are entertaining. A few of them may be authentic by Vatican standards. But a miracle without purpose is mostly a trick. Far from tourist trap and snake farm, there is the Ur-miracle from which all miracles derive. It is useful, simple, transforming and persuasive. It cannot be faked. It is love...
...minority faiths from pressure to conform. This is a far more diverse country than it was in 1892, when the Supreme Court declared, "This is a Christian nation." Millions of Americans attend worship services each week, but the locales range from Hindu temples in California to churches of snake- handling Pentecostalists in Appalachia. Baptist parents might like their child's school day to start with a Bible reading, but could a Muslim teacher choose a passage from the Koran instead? Do Satanists have the right to distribute materials at school? Would a santero football coach be allowed to sacrifice...