Word: stranglers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vedder has seen it all a thousand times before. Gazing into a jungle clearing, she watches as a lumbering group of gorillas approaches. Brushing through rain-forest shrubs, knuckle-walking past a strangler fig, they push their way into the open. While the adults forage, the juveniles climb the trunk of a fallen tree and play king of the mountain. From somewhere above, hornbills and blue monkeys sound an alarm...
...gorillas' patch of untamed forest is, like the stadium, located squarely in the Bronx. Recently built into the southwest corner of the sprawling Bronx Zoo, the 6.5-acre range is a magnificent exercise in environmental illusion. The leaves the gorillas are munching are willow, native to the U.S.; the strangler fig is really catalpa, a local species; the understory plant is butterbur, native to Japan; the fallen tree is made out of metal, mesh and layers of epoxy; and a few hundred yards from the recorded sounds of hornbills and monkeys, Latin music blares from a picnic on a sweltering...
...flat umbrella over the others. There is full employment. Trees support lizards and insects, which themselves support birds and monkeys. Army ants bivouac and hang from tree limbs in living nests, with their pupae asleep in the center. Sometimes the trees become food; they can be devoured by strangler figs, which grow from seeds dropped by birds, then rise and surround a tree like a parasitic vine, swallow it whole and take its place...
...bargain. But Cacheris is also a natural in the courtroom, "a maestro," as a fellow lawyer puts it, who cross-examines with laserlike ferocity and charms the jury with wit. ("My client is a fool, an ass, a boor!" he once thundered. "But he is not a cold-blooded strangler.") If he and Jacob Stein fail to win immunity for Lewinsky and she ends up in court, the two will probably split the role of courtroom defender--with Cacheris coming off more the showman. Even on the tennis court, he's the exhibitionist of the pair. "He wears white ducks...
...already seen "Scream." So pull that red Pathfinder up to your local video store and check out Rod Steiger's star turn in the 1968 thriller "No Way to Treat a Lady," as a mother-fixated, master-of-disguise strangler on the loose on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He's tracked by a young George Segal as a hangdog cop with some mother problems of his own. For extra currency, try Steiger's third incarnation as Dorian Smith, the swisher with a heart of stone who's been a very bad boy. Look for "Jaws" mayor (and The Graduate...