Word: cactus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Riding into this prickly cactus patch are Presidential Contenders Walter Mondale, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson, for whom the May 5 caucuses loom as a High Noon. Actually, a more apt Texas metaphor for Hart might be the Alamo. Reeling from his defeats in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and, last week, Missouri, he vowed to start winning again in the West. A bad loss in the Lone Star State could start the vultures circling. For Jackson, the state's large Hispanic vote tests his ability to make his "rainbow coalition" a bit less monochromatic than it has been...
...wife's plea to wear a bulletproof vest because his buddies might laugh. Another pasted a coroner's snapshot of a riddled body in his scrapbook. "Think of it," muses the author, "ten little hardball lawmen, shooting down Mexican bandits where they stand, out there in the cactus and rocks and tarantulas and scorpions ... If that wasn't a John Ford scenario, what the hell...
...most novel stroke is to set his second act behind the scenes at a performance of Nothing On. While the players on the far side of the scenery invisibly sing out their lines, those on the near side conduct a frenzied pantomime with a wine bottle, a cactus plant, bouquets of flowers, a fireman's ax, shoelaces tied together and assorted other slapstick paraphernalia. It is a pas de neufso ingeniously choreographed that the antics in the back-to-back farces coincide precisely, while lines of dialogue interlock in midair...
...discontent in Texas at both ends of the National Football League seems to center on quarterbacks but may also relate to passing times. Dallas was "America's team" as the country went western and cactus came to flower, when the majority of Charlie's Angels hailed from Texas, like the trashiest pulp novels and soap operas, and Easterners put up their own Lone Star cafés for two-stepping in boots and Stetsons...
...phrase "Take a hike," taught to him by his San Francisco teammates in 1965, the year of his short, happy spin through American baseball, when his record was 4-1. Patriotism required Murakami's presence in Japan all the seasons since, but now he is back in a cactus camp, no more inclined to take a hike than his former teammate Perry, and no older than Seaver...