Word: waldorfs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Thomas Monetti, Waldorf-Astoria catering executive: "People eat more mousse in crisis situations. Maybe it's easier to spoon up than pie or cake...
...Shostakovich's symbolic value had accrued so dramatically that he was used to add luster to Generalissimo Joseph Stalin's postwar policies. In 1949 Shostakovich was dispatched to New York City as the star Soviet delegate to a Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, an event sponsored by such luminaries as Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman and Charlie Chaplin. The conference was part of a vast Soviet-sponsored peace campaign that was conveniently distracting attention from Stalin's resumption of hostilities against his own people...
Seen close up at the Waldorf in the wake of these events, Shostakovich scarcely looked fit for his assigned role as Stalin's propagandist. He cut a surprisingly frail figure on the dais at the Starlight Roof, where he was seen to light cigarette after cigarette with trembling hands. His face was at the mercy of twitches and tics, his lips were drawn in an unconvincing smile. A translator read his speech for him; it attacked both U.S. warmongers and Igor Stravinsky, and praised the "unheard-of scope and level of development reached by musical culture in the U.S.S.R...
...even after Kennedy's death there were recurrent jitters about the Vatican. Lyndon Johnson approached Pope Paul VI as though he were a Republican. In 1965 the President went to the Waldorf Astoria to pay a brief call on the visitor from Rome. There is no record of L.B.J.'s asking the Pope to the ranch for barbecue, one of few celebrities so snubbed...
Statler and Waldorf, the old geezers who heckle the TV show, pop up long enough for Statler to say, "I've seen detergents that leave better films than this." This is too harsh, though even an addicted Muppet fan must admit that the movie has draggy stretches. The transition from the yank-'em-off-if-they-bomb lunacy of the TV show to the coherent narration of the film is not a complete success. Muppet magic remains a bewildering succession of wonderful bits, and perhaps the movie's best occurs when Rowlf...