Word: person
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Prelude to a Kiss Beneath Craig Lucas' wry Broadway comedy about a magical identity swap is a haunting metaphoric response to AIDS. It asks the unanswerable question: What do you do when the young person you fell in love with becomes overnight a dying...
...market forces play. While the goal is set -- if still unstated -- the manner of execution is not. Those planning for New Kuwait hope for fiat but are prepared for the slower course. "If, for example, the welfare system is cut back," says Fawzi al-Sultan, "if a person who has three servants, which is not unusual, suddenly has to pay the medical bills of those servants in place of the government, then that person is going to think twice about having three as help. So market forces can do the job. It takes more time, but it may be less...
Adjustments of the tax codes are usually better than regulations as a way to discourage polluting or wasteful practices and to reward efficiency. If a person wants to drive a gas guzzler, it makes sense for him to pay higher gas and sales taxes. Farmers would quickly look for alternatives to chemical pesticides if they were taxed according to the cost of cleaning them out of the environment. Regulations are most useful as a last resort for dealing with problems, such as nuclear waste, that are too dangerous to be left to the marketplace...
...later years a person sometimes visits his childhood home and circles it with a sort of alienated wonder. Someone else's lights are burning inside upon someone else's Christmas tree, and the child that once lived there is now a stranger in the skin of a middle-aged man. It seems a sort of obscure outrage that the windows and doors are not all open at once, telling stories. The home, like the mind, is a time capsule. Where are the stories and jokes of the house? Its old animation has become a ghost and gone into memory...
...phones kept working. We worked out systems for calling one another, three rings, hang up, then three more rings. The person called never spoke first. To take our telephones into more soundproof rooms, we extended phone lines with lamp wire. At safer hours we slipped up and down corridors to meet together in different apartments. On the hall floor outside my apartment, I positioned a piece of broken mirror against the wall so that the entire length of the corridor was visible from my partly open door. It was a group rule that everyone checked the mirror before stepping into...