Word: tiers
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...readily agree that eschatology-the doctrine of death and the afterlife-owes more to superstition than to supernatural wisdom. "The traditional views of heaven and hell are about 95% mythology," says Notre Dame's Jesuit Biblical Scholar John McKenzie. Except among some fundamentalists, the concept of a three-tier universe with heaven above, hell below and mankind in the middle struggling for divine judgment is recognized as a complete distortion of God's cryptic revelation on eternity...
...with realistic sets. William Schroeder has designed a complex series of small platforms which start off as a standard stage, then are stacked to form one tier and then two. As the stage gets higher it gets smaller, and the play ends with the last man on earth pacing on a tiny square, rubbing his head against the ceiling of the Adams House Dining room. This is the most comically un-Faustian act since the nose tweek...
...takes about ten minutes of carpentry to put each tier in place. The time is used as a quasi-intermission: the play isn't really going on, but there are high-jinks on stage. A movie of rhinoceroses in motion was projected against a flat accompanied by a medley of Elvis Presley songs; another time animal cookies were distributed to the audience. Mine was a bit tart, but eating it, I confess, was the highest synaesthetic...
...NATO's Greece and Turkey ought to have much in common. The Iron Curtain, however, was arranged to suit Moscow's liking. Rumania and Bulgaria were assigned the role of "market gardens" within the Red bloc to feed and fuel the industrialized satellites of the Communist northern tier -East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. It was a role that the southern ers resented, and now that a measure of independence suffuses Eastern Europe, they are reaching out to fill the Balkans' natural pattern...
When Luci finally got around to trying to cut the 13-tier wedding cake, it balked. The President of the U.S. brought his considerable pressure to bear, but the cake still would not cut. Luci cried, "I quit," but Pat suggested trying the fifth layer. The knife finally cut through, and Pat submitted to the bridegroom's traditional cake-eating indignity. Before the couple made their farewells and departed on an unknown honeymoon about 6:45 p.m., Luci made a last speech from the south balcony, then tossed her bouquet. It wound up, with a little sisterly collusion...