Word: vodka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Force-even brutality-is palpable in one of those Kremlin receptions, where the ranks of red-faced, beribboned generals and admirals step up unsmiling to the tables of food and vodka, casting cold eyes over all assembled, including their associates. Even in discussions of the weather, ideological inflexibility emerges, spawned by that Soviet sense of inferiority that suggests they are going to prove they are right, come what may. There are those who still insist that one reason for the success of the 1972 Moscow summit was that Nixon had bombed Haiphong and mined the city's harbor...
...cast of splendid variety. Ellello*u's foppish political opponents, his wispy and wisely degenerate king, his seductive and bitchy and monstrous wives, all create an atmosphere of debauched craziness tempered by childlike seriousness. This aura is, in turn, scientifically punctured by the sickeningly helpful middle-Americans and mysterious vodka-guzzling Russians who emerge from the shadows to help separate the dictator from his people. Blending caricature and truth, Updike thus manages a type of satire that helps heal over with humor what it has just incised--a satisfying trick...
...author of that authentic fake, the "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, prolific Writer Clifford Irving can be relied upon for verisimilitude. Here Irving teams with entertaining Novelist Herbert Burkholz (Mulligan's Seed) to write a suavely persuasive, anti-Establishment thriller with the bitter aftertaste of Campari and vodka...
...hotel has also recognized the F.F.'s paramount problem: What to do after 9 p.m.? Its cavernous eighth floor has been designated Cafe-Bar. Therein until midnight the visitor can eat watermelon or sherbet, sip his choice of poison, from tepid beer to fu-te-ka (vodka), and yak until yawn. Sorry, no floor show, dancing or Hangchow-panky, though such dubious distractions are doubtless only a few short years away...
...goings-on is explained by the fact that most people at the event had never before been to a bona-fide Toga Party, or so they claimed. Since no one was sufficiently familiar with the rites of Toga, participants behaved according to American '70s' custom. Beer and vodka flowed, the usual dislocated mutterings that pass for conversation at such gatherings coalesced into a dull roar, and the megaton stereo boomed out a never-ending series of syncopated disco thuds. Occasionally someone would chase a friend through the crowd threatening affectionately to straighten her (his?) toga or die trying, but onlookers...