Word: toga
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...COLOSSEUM BANQUET and Function Room, where Ronald Reagan brought his presidential campaign last month, is a curious restaurant. Squatting in the middle of a glass-strewn parking lot overlooking a smelter, the Colosseum is a little bit of Italy in West Springfield, Mass. After all, there is the Toga Room. And the Julius Room, and the Caeser Room. And the place is curved, in stucco appreciation of the real thing. And there's marble in the bathrooms, except it's peeling near the sinks, where the water has soaked off the backing...
...after convention, speech after speech, they'd release the balloons, each weighted with a drop of water, at the climatic moment. Today, the balloon drop is a dying art form. But for Reagan it looks appropriate; the huge plastic bag, pregnant with balloons, hangs from the ceiling of the Toga Room, waiting to deliver on cue. Nowadays, though, it's hard to find anyone who can engineer the spectacle. Reagan brought the audience to its feet at his close, looked skyward--nothing. Half an hour later, they were still trying to shake the balloons down...
There couldn't be a better setting for Ronald Reagan--like the Toga Room, an imperfect relic of a different age. Reagan outlines for the crowd his solution to the Afghanistan crisis--a blockade of the island nation of Cuba, nothing in and nothing out until the Soviets withdraw from the Afghan nation. "All we've been doing is reacting. Why don't we give them something to think about, like Cuba?" he suggests, to cheers. "I think it's time we quit telling the enemy what we won't do, and letting them go to bed at night wondering...