The New York Fair: PAVILIONS

PROTESTANT AND ORTHODOX CENTER. For a wordless but eloquent little film called Parable, Writer-Director Rolf Forsberg chose a setting much like the fair itself. A sad-eyed clown in whiteface trails behind a circus troupe, collects a host of friends and a slew of enemies. Finally, when he frees some human puppets from their cruel manipulator and takes their place, he is slain. Forsberg’s film is thoughtful and beautifully handled.

SPAIN. Old World elegance in breezy modern decor. Murals by avant-garde artists grace the interior, a bronze monk by Sculptor Pablo Serrano stands in the garden. The art gallery displays old masters, modern masters and, perhaps, future masters. Three Picassos, a Miro and two Dalis counterpoint Goya’s majas and works by El Greco, Ribera and Velasquez.

JAPAN. A striking alignment of the old with the new in Japanese culture: Masayuki Nagare’s magnificent hand-carved stone wall encloses motorcycles, microscopes and a model of the world’s fastest train; the delicate arts of the tea ceremony and flower arranging take place alongside an impressive array of technological savvy.

UNITED ARAB REPUBLIC. Gold amulets and toe stalls found on mummies fill the small museum, but the most beautiful Egyptian treasure is a tiny (15.6 in.) gold coffin inlaid with lapis lazuli and carnelian that once contained the entrails of King Tutankhamen. A snack bar serves gawalfa juice, lamb kabob and Egyptian coffee.

SUDAN. Some shoebill storks imported from the Sudan make like clowns, but the main attention-getter here is a fragile Madonna and Child painted on the mud walls of a church around the 8th century and discovered last year by U.N. archaeologists scurrying to preserve antiquities from the Aswan Dam backwaters.

VATICAN. Some 70.000 people daily have been filing past the Pieta. That its monumental tenderness manages to penetrate the frigid atmosphere is a tribute to Michelangelo’s genius. In the chapel upstairs is The Good Shepherd, a magnificent early Roman sculpture lent by St. Peter’s.

GENERAL MOTORS. G.M. takes the long-range view: fantastic models of future machines fell, slice and eat trees, and extrude four-lane highways; cities spring from the bush; hotels float underwater; moon hostels house whoever gets there. FORD. Instead of a Ford in your future, you can put one in your past—on the Magic Skyway, a superb bit of showmanship. In a Ford, you will scoot around Disney dinosaurs, watch a two-story Tyrannosaurus rex getting the best of a tough old Stegosaurus, and pop in on a happy household of hairy Homo sapiens.

ILLINOIS. Honest Abe sits somber and silent in a high-back chair, rises, bows, and delivers a 10-min. oration. Disney’s Lincoln is a little stolid, but then he is stuffed with things like steel, air tubes and hydraulic valves.

UNITED STATES. Charles Luckman designed a massive blue-green beauty that sits like a big square donut on four pylons. The movies inside are a little less impressive. Voyage to America depicts waves of immigrants hitting the shores, a Cineramic ride glides past a 130-screen montage of U.S. history, and a narrator tells of some problematic feats (“You didn’t like the mountains, so you reared them up in skyscrapers”).

COCA-COLA. In this delightful walkthrough exhibit, Coke turns up in the darndest places: hidden in a Hong Kong fish market, along the Taj Mahal’s jasmine-scented promenade, tucked in a Bavarian snowbank, cooling in a Cambodian rain forest or gracing the captain’s table on a cruise ship to Rio.

IBM. A huge hydraulic mechanism grinds away and whisks you 53 ft. up into IBM’s huge egg nesting in steel trees. There you can peek 90 ft. down to the ground or settle back and be assaulted by a plethora of images flipping onto nine screens faster than you can blink, showing how IBM, and all of us, solve our problems.

GENERAL ELECTRIC. Seated in six auditoriums, 1,428 people revolve around a talking-dummy, four-act show that divulges what electricity has wrought in the home. Then, up an escalator to the stars, down a corkscrew ramp to see nuclear fusion. Snappy from start to finish.

JOHNSON’S WAX. In the copper-colored bowl suspended over a limpid pool, 500 people at a clip see the 17½-min. movie, To Be Alive! Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid traversed three continents to produce it, and the triple-screen montage is fast, fresh and fun.

ENTERTAINMENT

THE AFRICAN PAVILION is the swingingest —and the noisiest—place at the fair. For $1 you can walk past monkeys, poetry, and native objets d’art into a gravel clearing surrounded by African huts flying the flags of 24 small nations, there watch red-robed Royal Burundi drummers, Olatunji and his passion drums, and gaily garbed Watusi warrior dancers.

MEXICO. With a little luck, almost any time of the day you will be able to catch five Mexicans shinnying up a skinny 114-ft. pole. One dances while his four companions, tied to ropes wrapped around the pole, drop head first and descend in dizzying, accelerating circles as the ropes unwind, righting themselves just in time to land feet first on the pavement.

OREGON. For city slickers who think they’ ve seen everything: a logger jubilee on the banks of the Flushing River. Husky lumberjacks like “Big Bad John” Miller saw and chop through giant timber in jig time, logrollers joust each other into the amber waters, and a death-defying tree-topper climbs a Douglas fir to do the Charleston 110 ft. up—without a net.

LES POUPE’ES DE PARIS. The adult puppet show features doll versions of Pearl Bailey and Frank Sinatra—but Frankenstein is the most convincing. It doesn’t pay to sit too close because he comes clomp, clomping right down off the stage.

CHILDREN & TEENAGERS

SINCLAIR. For the kids, Disney and dinosaurs practically carry the fair. It’s the reptiles that have invaded Sinclair’s ginkgo tree grove. The saurus family—Ankylo, Stego, Tyranno and big brother Bronto —stand around as if they couldn’t believe that mammals had inherited the earth. While the others gnash their teeth, Bronto —all five tons of him—just stands there and blinks.

MOBIL’S ingenious game puts 36 people at once in the driver’s seat, sends them on a mock cross-country race to see who is the best driver. With a steering wheel, an accelerator and a brake to operate, the participant looks through his “windshield”—a 21-in. TV screen—onto a highway, soon finds himself swooping around curves, skidding past a train, then crash! smack into the truck ahead. The scores? Twenty-three is tops, but one fellow, who can’t even drive a hard bargain, rated 19.8 just by sitting there too mixed-up to move.

PEPSI-COLA. A gallimaufry of Walt Disney’s latest prodigious puppets, which also perk up the pavilions of Ford, General Electric and Illinois. Here a waterjet whips through a dreamland dollhouse filled with belly dancers, French cancan girls, Cossacks and slinky Egyptian beauties, singing, twisting and kicking like crazy.

LOG FLUME RIDE. “There are thrills by the hundred on this you can bet, but we can’t be responsible when ya come back wet,” warns a sign at the turnstile. After some tame swerves and curves through serpentine, sky-blue waters and up a steep lift—one big splash and some spray in the face.

RESTAURANTS

TOLEDO. The Spanish pavilion’s posh pad is not for hoi polloi, but it has the best food and service at the fair. An armada of waiters hovers around to keep the diner happy. Though the Toledo specializes in fine French cuisine, it will cheerfully give you the works in Spanish too. Start with an andaluza, follow with gazpacho soup (muy bueno) and fill up on paella. Don’t forget the sangria, a red wine with soda.

FESTIVAL OF GAS. Its blue and green color scheme adds to the cool beauty of the glass-walled room, from whence the diner can look out over a flower-sprinkled moat. For an appetizer, the soft clam pan roast is hard to beat; it is best followed by tasty mignons of tenderloin flared in bourbon or stuffed broiled lobster and wilted dandelion greens with bacon. Fine fare at Fair prices, which means quite high indeed.

INDONESIA. The royal-looking pavilion shaped like a crown houses another favorite fair feeding spot for potentates and VIPs. The dinner menu is a table d’hote Indonesian feast (Kambing Masak Bugis, A jam Panggang) served by candlelight, the entertainment Balinese and Sumatran dances performed to the twangs and gongs of the gamelan orchestra.

FOCOLARE. Midst elegant accouterments, including thick wine-colored carpets, long, flowing cerise draperies and pillowed armchairs, rather ordinary Mexican fare (chicken, tacos and enchiladas) gains a magical allure. The mariachi music from the Cafe Alameda below and a tequila-spiked margarita add to the enchantment.

LE CHALET. From a little fresh-air balcony in the Swiss pavilion you can watch the aerial gondolas coast overhead, sip cool rose wine, sample Swiss cheeses, and cook bite-size cubes of filet mignon (Fondue Bourguignonne) right on the table. Dipped in five sauces, they are delicious.