calmly in his seat, listening to me with interest.
At certain times I have no race, I am me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of mixed items proppedup against a wall—against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow.
Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a pile of small things both valuable and worthless. Bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since decayed away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still with a little fragrance. In your hand is the brown bag.
On the ground before you is the pile it held—so much like the piles in the other bags, could they be emptied, that all might be combined and mixed in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly.
A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter.
Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?
Unit_passage_english_b
When I casually mentioned to a colleague that I was looking into skin cream that claimed to beat back the destruction that comes with age, her worries poured out.
A month ago, she told me, she had suddenly noticed wrinkles all over her face.
Fingering her beautiful but finely lined features, she explained that, although she knew that her discovery had more to do with the shock resulting from the sudden end of a six-year relationship than early ageing, she just had to do something about it.
Giving her the painful facts concerning her chance to renew herself, I told her I thought the claims of such miracle cures were ridiculous.
Despite my remarks, however, she begged to know where she could get the treatments I had mentioned.
When it comes to beauty, who wants to know the truth?
Our ability to believe what we want to has, in the past, made life easy for the beauty industry. Fuelled by the immense value attached to youth, it has made millions out of vacant promises of renewing faces and bodies.
To give skincare scientific authority, beauty counters have now stolen a thin covering of respectability from the hospital clinic.
Sales staff in white coats \skin types on \and blind customers with the science of damaged molecules and DNA repair.
Providing the \don't just sit on the surface but actually interact with the cells.
Is this really just a harmless game, though?
The increasingly exaggerated claims made by manufacturers about their products' ability to get rid of wrinkles have worried doctors.
The advertisements declare that active ingredients stimulate cells deep in the skin's layers to
divide, so replacing old cells and effectively renewing the skin.
If these claims are true, could the effects be harmful?
If normal cells can be stimulated to divide, then abnormal ones could also be prompted to multiply, so causing or accelerating skin cancer.
A new arrival on the anti-wrinkle front claims to be a more natural way to avoid those terrible lines.
As a pill rather than a cream, Imedeen works from the inside out, providing the skin with nutritionaland chemical support to encourage the body's own selfrepairing process.
First developed in Scandinavia, it contains extractsof fish, marine plants, and shrimpshells, which provide a formula including proteins, minerals, and vitamins. According to a published study, visible improvements appear in the skin textureafter two or three months of treatment.
The skin is softer, smoother, wrinkles decrease but are not eliminated, and marks and fine brow lines disappear.
One woman admits she was doubtful until she tried Imedeen herself.
Women, she believes, should take responsibility for the natural balance of their body chemistry. Careful care of the body chemistry, she says, not only improves looks but also enhances energy processes and even expands awareness and mental function. Imedeen fits this concept by providing for the skin's needs. But can shrimp shells really do the trick with wrinkles?
Offering a more scientific interpretation, Brian Newman, a British surgeon who has studied Imedeen, explains that the compound has a specific action as food is digested, preventing the destruction of essential proteins in the diet and allowing them to be absorbed in a state more easily utilized by the skin.
On the other hand, a different doctor who specializes in the study of the skin is unimpressed by the data and questions the methods used in the study.
In addition, the medical journal in which the study of Imedeen is published is a \—one in which any studies can be published for a fee.
According to the doctor, any attempt to play by the medical world's rules of research has been a failure.
Such controversy is familiar ground to Brian Newman, who used a type of oil from flowers for years before it was generally accepted.
In no way discouraged, he insists the most important point to establish is that Imedeen actually works.
Ultimately, however, the real issue is why we are so afraid of wrinkles in the first place.
Sadly, youth and beauty have become the currency of our society, buying popularity and opportunity.
The value of age and experience is denied, and women in particular feel the threat that the visible
changes of ageing bring.
According to one psychological expert, when men gain a little gray hair, their appeal often increases because, for them, age implies power, success, wealth, and position.
But as a woman's power is still strongly perceived to be tied up to her ability to bear children, ageing demonstrates to the world her decline, her uselessness for her primary function. Wrinkles are symbolic of the decline of her ability to reproduce.
Until we appreciate the true value of age, it is difficult to do anything but panic when the signs of it emerge.
While the media continues to show men of all ages alongside young, smooth-skinned women as a vision of success, women will go on investing in pots of worthless rubbish.
Let's see more mature, wrinkled women in attractive, successful, happy roles and let's see men fighting to be with them. Unit_passage_english_a
Does Mickey Mouse have a beard? No.
Does this mean that French men seeking work with the Disney organization must shave off their moustaches too?
It depends.
A labor inspector took the Disney organization to court this week,
contendingthat the company's dress and appearance code—which bans moustaches, beards, excess weight, short skirts and fancy stockings—offends individual liberty and violates French labor law.
The case is an illustration of some of the delicate cultural issues the company faces as it gets ready to open its theme park miles ( kilometers) east of Paris in five months' time.
The Disney management, which is assembling what it calls a \argues that all the employees, from bottle washers to the president, are similar to actors who have to obey rules about appearance.
Anyway, a company spokesman says, no one has yet put his moustache before a job.
As one new \terrible time here.\
But what do people think of Euro Disney?
People everywhere are wondering whether Europeans would like this form of American recreation.
For all its concern about foreign cultural invasion and its defense against the pollution of the French language by English words, France's Socialist government has been untroubled about putting such a huge American symbol on the doorstep of the capital and has been more concerned
about its economic effect.
It made an extraordinary series of tax and financial concessions to attract the theme park here rather than let it go to sunny Spain.
The theme park itself will be only part of a giant complex of housing, office, and resort developments stretching far into the next century, including movie and television production facilities.
As part of its deal with the Disney organization, the government is laying and paying for new highways, an extension of Paris' regional express railway and even a direct connection to the high speed TGV railway to the Channel Tunnel.
The TGV station is being built in front of the main entrance of Euro Disneyland, and is scheduled to come into service in .
If Euro Disneyland succeeds—theme parks already in France have so far failed—a second and even a third park is likely to be built by the end of the century.
Financial experts say that Euro Disneyland, the first phase of which is costing an estimated $. billion, is essential to Disney's overall fortunes, which have been hit by competition and declining attendance in the United States.
French intellectuals have not found many kind things to say about the project. The kids, however, will probably never notice.
Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio all come from European fairy tales or stories and are as familiar to children here as they are in the United States. To a French child Mickey is French. To an Italian kid he is Italian.
The Disney management is stressing this tradition in an apparent response to suggestions that it is culturally insensitive.
Although the concept of the theme park is closely based on the original Magic Kingdom in California and Walt Disney World in Florida, \Disneyland will be unique in a manner appropriate to its European home,\
\legends and fairy tales which come from Europe figure prominently in the creative development of the theme park.\
Officials point out, for example, that Sleeping Beauty's castle, the central feature of the theme park, is based not on Hollywood, as some might think, but on the illustrations in a medieval European book.
Also, a -degree movie, based on the adventures of Jules Verne, features well-known European actors.
Asked to describe other aspects of the effort to make the park more European, a spokesman mentioned that direction signs in the theme park will be in French as well as English, and that some performers will chat in French, Spanish and English.
\—and at the same time making it different,\the spokesman said.
On the other hand, this effort is not being taken too far.
Another Disney spokesman said earlier that the aim of the theme park is to provide a basically American experience for those who seek it.
In this way, he said, people who might otherwise have contemplateda vacation in the United States will be happy to stay on this side of the Atlantic.
The Disney organization does seem to focus a bit too much on hair.
\Barber Shop\—and perhaps even offending moustaches. One difference from California or Florida: Parts of Main Street and waiting areas to get into the attractions will be covered over as a concession to Paris' rainy weather.
Euro Disneyland's short distance to Paris is a definite attraction.
Anyone tiring of American or fake European culture can reach the Louvre art museum by express railway in less than an hour—from Minnie Mouse to Mona Lisa in a flash.
Communications figured largely in the Disney organization's decision to site its fourth theme park near Paris.
The site is within a two-hour flight of million Europeans.
The opening of Eastern Europe is another prize for the company, which thinks that millions of people will put Disneyland at the top of a list of places to visit on their first trip to Western Europe.
Unit_passage_english_b
The Euro Disney Corporation, acknowledging that its elaborate theme park had not performed as strongly as expected, announced Thursday that it would sustain a net financial loss of unpredictable scale in its first financial year.
At the time of the April opening of the park, which stands on a ,-acre site kilometers ( miles) east of Paris, Euro Disney officials said they expected to make a small profit for the financial year ending September .
But since then the park has been hit by a number of problems.
\were geared up for a very high level of operations,\John Forsgren, the company's chief financial officer said in a telephone interview.
\
\revenue level.\
The parent company, Walt Disney Corporation, said Thursday that its income rose percent in the quarter.
But it warned investors against expecting profits soon from Euro Disney, of which it owns percent.