Word: twirls
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...orange shirt spins and dips. An elderly woman executes a scampering step with the help of her cane. An open-shirted youth leaps to the hood of a car and, after a flurry of steps, floats down to earth without breaking his rhythm. Here and there gaudy umbrellas twirl in the air. Faces gleam with sweat and exuberance...
...practice moving a make-believe "president" through crowds (composed of other agents) to a waiting car, sometimes under fire, as well as through specially built auditoriums, hotel foyers and offices. In a weapons course, computer-controlled cutouts of possible assassins and harmless citizens pop up from the ground and twirl past windows on a Hollywood-like back-lot street of mock buildings. The agents must fire and hit a threatening target but refrain from shooting at an unarmed figure-or at the image of a woman wheeling a baby carriage, who may quickly slide in front of an armed figure...
...everyone connected with it to participate in a short-play contest. The winner who created Twirler has chosen to remain anonymous. A pity: he or she is dramatically gifted. In a ten-minute monologue, the author moves from the mundane ("People think you're a twit if you twirl") to the realm of a mystical religious experience ("Twirling is the throwing of yourself...
...drill on the athletic fields only occasionally--"you'll get less in one year than in a single day at basic training"--but there is the "strictly extracurricular" possibility of drill team. Or even color guard. "If you really enjoy it, you can learn to get out there and twirl those fancy rifles and all," he says...
...hoods with mesh eye holes, wail for baksheesh outside rug stores. Turbaned tribesmen from the mountains stride along shouldering huge bundles. Boys offer sticks of lamb shashlik grilled over charcoal at street corners. Outside moviehouses there are garish posters of Afghan-made westerns in which ersatz Omar Sharifs twirl six-shooters in each hand. But the cinemas are open only in the afternoons, and ticket sales are slow because, it is said, people fear grenade throwing. Next to the movie posters are government placards showing a turbaned official Afghan hero thrusting his bayonet at a Chinese "hegemonist...