Wienerhoodwink Strasse

It has happened. Three weeks in Europe and I finally fall into a horrible tourist trap. I was taken in. Bamboozled. Hoodwinked. And Courtney, my little sister from Dallas who is now a bona fide adult graduate of Juilliard living full out in Munich and dancing in a professional company there, had never been to Vienna before. So she was taken in as well by the calm men in the Stephansplatz Square before the massive cathedral. They were decked in Amadeus wigs and Baroque clothing that would make one believe the music had not been composed centuries ago but right then instead.

We weren’t easy, mind you. Courtney is fluent enough in German to not be thrown by the word combining that shouted from the page: Wiener Residenzorchester. She had already explained that Wiener meant is German for Vienna, so I was hip. We eyed the brochure of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra’s menu of musical offerings, this time an hour of Mozart and Strauss for 25 Euros apiece. When the man promised us ballet, we looked at the pas de deux couple and searched for a point shoe, a nice line, an epaulement.

“What will you be playing?” I asked, not realizing that not only would this man not be playing anything, he also wouldn’t be there. He pulled out a huge notebook with crude typed pages in slipcovers that looked too muffed up to be part of the game. He was not ready for my question, and it appeared as if his answer involved delving into the equivalent of what would be my well-used tour book.

“Well, for tonight’s show, it’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Blue Danube Waltz…”

“Cosi Fan Tutti?” I interrupted, looking down the page. “Are you going to play Cosi fan Tutti from The Marriage of Figaro?”

“Yes.”

“Which one is that?” Courtney asked.

I started to approximate the coloratura soprano notes of Mozart’s insanely virtuoso aria.

“Yes, yes, that one!” the man screamed, excited that I knew it.

"How is the soprano?" I asked.

"Good."

“Then yes, we want to see this. Trust me, Courtney it will be worth a forty-dollar ticket to see anyone sing this live, up close and personal, and in the city where it was written at that. Sure we’ll do it.”

“Is it $25 for the concert only?” Courtney asked. She had become way too sophisticated at 23 to ask him if dinner was included.

“Yes, it is. You can come to the 7:00 p.m. show which ends at 8:00, or the 8:15 show which goes to 10.”

Courtney and I exchanged looks, our math creating new questions.

“Same price? And yet we get a longer concert the second time around?”

“Well, there’s an intermission and they do a little more.”

I should have known something was wrong right then. When we got to the venue for this concert, I saw no Baroque-clad hosts. The performance hall was attractive but understated in comparison to the places Courtney and I had been up to this point. It turned out that the hoodwinker’s instructions to get there half an hour early were bogus; the space had to be cleared of the first audience while the rest of us waited on the stairs to get in.

As I explained to Courtney the tragedies in the movie Troy, none of which had to do with the plot but rather the series of egregious back-to-back scenes, a man on the stair below ours included himself in our conversation by offering his undivided, unsolicited attention, much to Courtney’s irritation. It was the one thing that she had not conquered about living in Munich – the fact that people stare at her as if she’s one of the detailed facades of architecture, and that they get fully in her business. It made us look forward to the concert.

Thing looked good at first. We got to the Rosenkavaliersaal, a peach room in the Palais Auersperg with about five chandeliers, three huge windows with pulled navy curtains, and a portable rectangular stage with gray carpet and barely enough space for the two violinists, the cellist, the bassist, and the conductor that made up the Wiener Rezidenzorchester. (Um, dancers?) It was quite authentic. And the conductor/first violinist was pretty good in the preliminary chamber pieces. But the soprano was unimpressive, the tenor moreso.

The Mozart section ended and there was no Cosi Fan Tutti. I was heated immediately. And the second half, complete with a pas de deux (of a pas de don’t), featured mediocre dancers approximating ballet. The man (boy) of the couple helped to ruin a musically virtuoso, perfectly fine Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by attempting to pirouette with his leg a la seconde (to the side), a common coda crowd pleaser, and nearly knocked over the seated violinist. Fortunately, the leg only caught the music stand, and the violinist had to make an adjustment between bars.

This was funny and schizodendric all at the same time – we’ll get to the term schizodendric in another blog. The most hilarious moment, however, occurred when the pianist misplaced the sheet music for the following selection. The musicians waited patiently, trying to conceal their mortification, pursed lips, frozen jaws, bowed heads. She spent five minutes looking. I didn’t want to be tacky and laugh, even though this was the second performance of the evening and the artists were probably tired.

Courtney and I laughed later about it when recounting the fabulous day. We had already been to Mozart’s apartment, marveled at the ratty, dilapidated entry way and façade, and beamed at the beautiful layout and floor plan inside. We turned down the horse and carriage ride, much to the dismay of the animals bored with staring at the cathedral and shitting on the cobblestones.
We took instead a guided tour of the circle running on the perimeter of Stephansplatz, and made promises to visit areas we saw. Pizza Bizi is Vienna’s most amazing Italian restaurant, we decided, regardless that we ate at no others to compare. I was almost as impressed with the food as I was with Courtney’s skills with the German language. I could feel much less like a tourist with her, nevermind the Wiener Residenzorchester concert debacle.

Zurich
Account

When we have back-to-back shows, which happened once a week on the last American leg of the tour, it means a show, a drive overnight to the following city, an early morning check-in, more sleep, and another show. Usually, in the second city, I’m wont to lie in my bed until the 3:00 p.m. call.

But not in Zurich. Fortunately, because I slept well on the bus and we arrived at 8:30 a.m., it was the perfect opportunity to get the complimentary breakfast (full out, not continental) and then run about the city for about four hours. I needed to go shopping for a dark pair of sunglasses, a cheap briefcase (for the look), and any shoe that goes clack-clack. I had planned to walk into the nearest bank, approach the sternum-high teller counter, and say, “I’d like to open a Swiss account.” It didn’t matter that to say “Swiss account” would be redundant and idiotic since I was in Zurich. I wanted to actually say this and then proceed to get an account. This city is the banking capital of the world because their version of Calvinism and Lutherism, called “pray and work,” worked even better here. I planned to use only fifteen dollars. Not for any financial gain, but so that I could come away from here and insert obnoxiously in random conversations that I relocated funds to a Swiss account.

This was Saturday and the banks were closed though, so I had to settle for changing my dollars at the train station into the peacock colorful Swiss franc notes that made keeping them as appealing as spending them (especially since Switzerland has not yet joined the European Union).

This was Saturday, so there was a great outdoor market hidden behind the shop faces that bordered the bank of the Limmat River. First there was the handmade jewelry, masculine necklaces with agate and jade, bracelets with smooth amulets embedded. Seventy bucks. Then there was a North Indian merchant with purses I had to buy because her venture was to support the women in Ghana who made them and would do well if she succeeded. Thirty-five bucks. Then there was a pair of beechwood sandals with the perfect support in the foot, the right amount of give for its roof and the right amount of room behind the heel so that the edges of my too long pants had a place to rest. Seventy more bucks. Then there was the Japanese red and black thin throw that would be ideal for my I-Joy massage chair. Twenty.

All of this distraction on the journey to the Grossmunster Cathedral built in the 12th century. This was the secondary goal, right after opening a bank account. I did make it there to visit the home of the three patron saints of the town who, legend has it, went there to proselytize the laity to Christianity. The powers that be weren’t having it, and boiled them in hot oil to renounce their religion. When this wasn’t enough, because they survived you see, they were forced to drink molten lead. Later their captors gave up and simply cut off their heads. Miraculously, they picked up their heads and carried them to the top of the hill, dug their own graves and interred themselves. On this hill is where the modest Grossmunster was built.

After Notre Dame de Paris and the Dom of Cologne, the Grossmunster itself was hardly as impressive as the story of its creation. Charlemagne built it and the first Baptisms of the Reformation in German-speaking Switzerland happened here. All that’s interesting, but other than Giacometti’s stained glass, it’s a rather dull-looking place. The view was still rather splendid, making the tired painted faux medieval doors forgivable. I saw from the top the river opening into the mouth of the Zurichsee. It was wonderful, and the 200 steps less work for the thighs than Notre Dame.

A woman on the same corner of the tower asked me where I’m from, what brought me to Zurich. I explained and asked her the same.

“From here,” she said.

“Oh really? How long have you lived here?”

“All my life. I’ve just never been up here.”

It made me feel so much better about my lackluster attendance to most of the notable New York treasures that most people who live there have never been to (i.e., Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, certain museums). I told her this.

“I did not know you could come up here until I became an adult,” she said, laughing.

Yet another account of how people of the world are more alike than we are different.

***

I just found out that this venue here in Zurich, a velodrome on its last leg of existence, will be razed hours after the performance. There is very little hot water, and the promoters neglected to impede the shut down of much electricity. The signs in our dressing rooms from Bonnie, our costume mistress, told the story: "It's been a rough fucking day, so please be nice." Tonight will be the last performance here. There's a scene in "Dolores Claiborne" where Dolores is asked by her evil spinster of a boss to finish her off, since she was old, sick, and literally broken after the fall down the stairs. The woman begs Dolores and says, "I am sick of the smell of being old." This building has this same desperation. I only hope that the audience will fill it in so much that we won't hear its pleas.

Wrong
Cologne, Germany

One of my colleagues was dumbfounded when I came back to the bus yesterday with a six-piece meal from McDonald´s. She didn´t understand how I could want to eat anything other than the fine French cuisine of Paris, especially since I´m not one to eat McDonald´s at home.

Cologne has further demonstrated my point, however, that fast food chains in America are in fact different here in Europe. Take KFC for example...let me back up for a moment. In Paris, I spoke to a pair of black French twenty-somethings who noticed my scrutiny of a KFC and articulated the thoughts forming in my head: "KFC, all the black people eat there because we like chicken, right?" Stereotyping aside, the moment was hilarious. Here at the Cologne KFC, the employees were friendly, the food less hastily prepared, the mood more chilled than agitated. The guy taking my order was not only congenial, he seemed genuine with happiness to be working there. He didn´t serve the attitude we associate with folks who are in a permanent state of pisstration about their low places on the totem pole that is capitalitic America (you know, the people who basically throw the fries and nuggets at you and blurt to the next person "May I help you" before the grease finishes staining your shirt).

And this guy spoke fluent English. I want to go as far as to say everybody here in Cologne speaks English perfectly well, considering that 100% of the Germans I´ve questioned today about Cologne, particularly the four people at the waschsalon who helped me in my struggle to understand the laundry machines, spoke English. It was once again mortifying to romp, monolingual and clue free, around a European city where everybody is fine with my only option for communication. I know I'm beginning to sound redundant but it´s just wrong.

Whereas the people in Paris made me eat my words about the general snobbishness and disdain for non-French folks, the people here have made me eat my 2001 sentiments about the paleness of the skin and the funk layered on the surface. It hasn´t been an unbearably smelly city. I always found it odd that Lush, a wonderful store with naturally made soaps, bath balls, and massage bars is ubiquitous over in Europe, where it is acceptable to shower only twice a weak. Maybe people are patronizing Lush and Bath and Body Works and other such stores because people actually smell good.

I read not long ago that true blonde hair is such a recessive trait that it´s slowly disappearing and few true blondes exist. The Aryan look operates with the same phenomenon here in Cologne, where few Germans I´ve seen possess blue eyes and blonde hair, or even the ghostly, pallid coloring of the past. More melanin, more brunette, more brown around the pupil...it´s interesting to see. Or maybe my understanding was just wrong to begin with.

I had a fiendish moment today, a sort of "Stand by Me" delinquent happening that would earn me an ass-whipping from my mother even now. To walk back from the Dom, Cologne's magnificent cathedral, I had to cross a long bridge with sidewalks sandwiching a band a train tracks. In the nirvana of traversing the Rhine, I went to the wrong side and realized too late that to make it right meant a long walk down a long ramp to double-back, cross underneath, and go up several stairs to get to my hotel.

Or I could just vault over the steel guard rail and cross the tracks. It was a direct path. At first I thought, play it safe, and then I remembered what I do every night for a living, how I take my life (and Dreya's for that matter) into my hands and pray. The railroad tracks - cake.

But it's amazing what memories spew to the front of the brain when it commences to program something dangerous (and stupid) for the body. A young girl had gotten her foot stuck beneath a wooden slat perpendicular to the a track in Los Angeles years ago - the details are too tragic to discuss. The signs warning of electrical charges on railroads came to mind, informing my hops, skips, and jumps to land only on the wood and no conductors. And then I had to look both ways since trains were still operational this twilight period, although this proved easier than getting across any street in the United Kingdom without multiple looks to compensate for the right-sided drivers.

When I got to the other side moments later, a few people watched me pull a Jamie Somers and land, bionically of course, on the other side of the guard rail. Having not seen the climbing part, they looked at me with wide eyes, as if I were a Superhero. They were wrong, but I let them go right ahead and believe it.

I'm a little behind since I'm in Zurich now, but this was my second day in Paris.

May 24
Oui Oui

I think they always hire her because she´s gorgeous. Don´t get me wrong, the Tina tours she did, somewhere amidst the three Janets and two Chers, Stacey got a chance to let us hear the practical, sheer-quality reasons that the management of the aforementioned artists loves her so much. But besides that, you just want to look at her, catch the dimples that surprise from nowhere, try to find the intersection of the lines that separate her striking physiognomy with her cherubic cobbler-crust colored expression. And then there is the hourglass shape almost made for corsets and the normally giddy personality coming from beneath the main of hair, three tresses of which are dreaded.

All good reasons to keep someone around.

Needless to say, her girlfriend, ReLisa, has no choice but to be fitfully fetching with curves that would give Jada a run for her money. Like Stacey and the love of my life, ReLisa looks about 15 years younger than she is.

Still, the winner for the day is Relisa´s mother, Renee, whose enthusiasm, adventure-readiness, curly hair, and exceptional eyes remind me of Gail Anne, whom I couldn´t kidnap from her work schedule to come to Europe. I took over Renee from ReLisa and Stacey and toured Paris today with the three of them and I had such a great time that I forgot about the expense. I was happy to play son in moments when ReLisa and Stacey were too tired to do that natural thing that all children do when our parents pass 50__parent our parents.

We started off at the hotel bar, which makes the most exquisite hot chocolate I´d ever had on the Madonna Tour. I paid handsomely for it - Bailey´s is much more costly and shot my warm delight up to 24 Euros (30 bucks. Then we trekked to Musee D´Orsay and faced the burden of walking through the sculpture lined, finely manicured garden between the Egyptian obelisk and the Louvre. We enjoyed the sun and made our way across what was, as Stacey pointed out, a smartly constructed bridge over the Seine River.

Renee got us tickets and began the tour of this old train station converted into a museum. We swooped throught the Degas, Cezanne, Monet, and Van Gogh halls, ReLisa and I ogling over some of the same pieces of art, and then made it to the sculptures in the center of the museum. A few artists made impressive depictions of Venus´s coming into the world, and Monet had a brilliant series of five paintings of the Rouen Cathedral. It would take longer than we spent in the museum to comment on what we saw.

We walked along the rue bordering the Seine and found an outdoor shop with several reproductions of French works, none of which appealed to me. I did manage to find a wonderful original that spoke to me; it said to run to the nearest ATM and get the 75 Euros necessary to make the canvas spectacle mine. Obey I did, and stopped along the way in a book store whose display window featured a dance book. I flipped through the pages and saw none other then Michael Trusnovec, a friend and beautiful dancer who was sickeningly artistic even back in school. I left the store, even more delighted, and continued my errand. When I got back, Stacey and Relisa had found two paintings, and Renee bought a series of posters that were formidable in their attempt to do the Arc de Triomphe and other Parisian spots justice.


We then had to do something about the problem of eating. We ended up in Gaudium, an Italian restaraunt with carpeted walls, French translated menus, and Latin salsa music playing in the background. It was many things. Stacey ordered wine for the table and it acquiesced to my palette even more after the bruchetta and salmon appetizers. After we stuffed ourselves with pastas and watched our friendly, happy-to-speak-English waitress demonstrate the proper way to cut open a whole fish, further melting my resolve about French snobbery and disdain, Stacey decided we should do some Grappa.

"You have to try it. I'll just get a little shot glass for the table."

"Oh dear," I said, apprehensive.

"No, no. It's a must. It's like," Stacey began, her eyes darting with energy as if searching the air for the right comparison, "it's like the skin of grapes dipped in dirt before being fermented again. But it's really good stuff."

"It's like moonshine," Renee explained. "When you have it the first time it doesn't taste so good, but after a spell it begans to grow on you."

"You gotta have some!"

Stacey is convincing enough to sell a termite on the dangers of consuming wood. So of course I trusted her, took a sip of questionable liquid out of the curvy shot glass, a miniature glass chalice that I made a mental note to search for as soon as I get back to NY. It tasted like Nyquil with no flavor whatsoever. But it wasnt as bad as I thought. The Limoncello shot, on the other hand, was divine, and the richness of the Creme of Limoncello shot put my Bailey's to shame.

The strawberry glace tiramisu was the best I've ever had in life and I thought of how envious Kemba would be.

Fed, happy, and slightly intoxicated, we drunk up more of the daylight on our trek to Notre Dame, Stacey and I walking along the Seine obnoxiously singing tracks from "Yentl" (only Stacey sounded good). The cathedral was insanely massive, ornate with detail. I made a promise to myself that I would get up in the morning and climb the steps to the top.

We took the train back home and complained that our subway platforms don't have an LCD display to show the number of minutes before the next arrival. I bid the family adieu and then retired to my room.

For half an hour. Because it was only 10 p.m. and night had just dropped in...

Paris

Many of the folks on this tour seem to have a common platform about Paris: nobody is crazy about this city. It's predominantly because everyone has had bad experiences with the city's people, who, despite the huge Eiffel-Tower-based economy, display an obnoxious disdain for tourists. When I was here in 2001, I remember taxi drivers that looked at me like I had puke on my face when I would open up my mouth and ask anything in English. Merchants offered the same look when I tried asking anything in French. French-speaking friends of mine from outside of Paris who get the same look when they speak to Parisians.

I'm happy to report that I haven't had any of these dramas hamper my first day off here in the city. Dennis (my good tour Judy) and I happily cavorted around the Champs Elyssee, laughing at each other's idiotic attempts at pronouncing the words on the mostly closed shops and then complaining, "It's just too many letters if you're not going to use them all." We did the Louvre and visited the section of French paintings that hung on oak-tree-tall pomegranite-colored walls. It's my favorite section, a must-see. We rejected Mona, recounting our experiences of being pissed and disappointed that she didn't look as good in person as she did in books and magazines. We ran around St. Germain Des Pres and then the sleep caught up with me and it was time to catch up with it.

Six hours later, I called Dennis and we were back on the Champs finding a McDonald's to grab something quick to scarf before going to the movies. We could have done something else, but the French don't scarf, so this was the only fast food option. Much to our surprise, the McDonald's had the nerve to be a restaurant, giving us full architecture, listening stations with headphones, several clusters of wall-mounted televisions featuring MTV videos. The floors were special even. The local peeps, appreciating the ambiance, would sit and leisurely dine. In a McDonald's. It defied our expectations and we were so overwhelmed we got our food to stay, too. Well, we got it in to-go bags and then ate it there. Pitiful, huh?

When we made it to the movie theater, we didn't expect there to be a line. Unfortunately, there was one, and thanks to Dennis' bad cue karma, it moved with lethargy. The woman behind us demonstrated that intersecting all fingers at their tips and holding this point in the air above the hand is a universal physical expression of frustration. We agreed with her sentiments and then waited for the line to move. It occurred to me suddenly that "Passion du Christ," with an Aramaic track, would probably have French subtitles, being that we were in France and all. I mentioned this to Dennis but he didn't quite register it because when the woman at the box office said, "You realize this is not in English," I nodded and presented my eight euros only so that he could snatch me from the line. "Oh no we won't. Unh unh, I'm not trying to do the Aramaic in my ear and the French in my eye and then the visual and drama, no, no..."

The old French woman behind us cackled, and the line was thoroughly entertained. We went to a different McDonald's on the Champs, just as gourmet as the first, because their faux shakes are friendly for the lactose intolerant. The people were nice there to us, too, contributing to the undoing of my previously bad experiences here. Who knows, maybe they feel sorry for us because of our, uh, White House situation. Or maybe there are just a few nasty ones to create bad publicity for the whole. I only hope that tomorrow will be as pleasant. Oui, oui.

Hotel Royal Monceau
rm 229
+33 01 42 99 88 00

Learning

I learned the other day from my boss's chief of security that the Pai Mei character in "Kill Bill Vol 2" is based on a very real Chinese monk. When the church and state were completely at odds in ancient China, the government got pissed with the spiritual control the temples had over the people. When the temples were burned/destroyed, only five of the Shaolin monks survived; Pak Mei, the White-Eyebrow monk on whom the Pai Mei character is based, was one of them. He then went on to teach the laity the sacred and impressive fighting techniques we saw hinted at in the movie, many of which involved a grabbing approach especially useful for pressure point injury infliction.

They were powerful peeps, these Chinese exponents of the temple, and what bothered me as I walked through the Imperial War Museum in Manchester today is that they and other equally gifted spiritual forces in the world could not somehow obstruct war. I wanted them to have been included on the expansive time-line at the point where Japan invaded China for no good reason during WWII. I wanted them to turn out armies of Pak Mei juniors who could slaughter anybody wielding any mechanized weapon of the time. Anyway, I know it's sort of fantastic, wishful thinking but I couldn't help making the stretchy connection while watching ingesting history about the last 100 years of war. Of course, legend has it that Pak Mei killed the other four monks over differences of opnion in teaching traditional fighting techniques.

The only thing I needed was Mrs. Wargo to help me with the historical details. It was fascinating to brush up on my world history and marvel at the supreme architecture of this facility, which felt like a globe taken apart and put back together in the most non-linear way possible. The resulting walls, standing like shards in the middle of an exhibit hall that resisted the regularity of shape, were used to add design drama and screen the larger-than-life projections of the eight million slides/images the museum had archived. It was more than worth the trip, although I couldn't help noticing how much space there was left to continue the war timeline beyond the WTC disaster.

On the less hopeless side of the coin, I talked to a good friend about whom I had a really interesting dream - in it she had five kids and a brand new house. Upon calling her, I found out that I wasn't too far off the mark. She and her husband ARE getting a house. But the cheers need be made because this young, black diva of academia just got a post doc. No, no, she didn't stop at the several hundred pages of thesis on significance of web imagery in black literature going back to Anansi the spider; she decided to join the 159 other applicants who applied for a post doc at a notable university and then be one of only 20 admitted. Shanna Benjamin, and yes it's important that you know her name because you will see it again in somebody's publication about top professors/academics/writers, will soon do a tour of Europe conducting lectures at international institutions. Um, am I happy she's my friend? Yes. Is she even 30 yet? Hmm...

Her husband will miss out on the cooking unfortunately, because Shanna happens to be quite skilled with preparing a meal. Down to the greens, the cornbread, and the jambalaya. And the sweet tea...okay nevermind. I'm in the U.K. and there's none of that to be had here so why tease.

Titles

N. Makosso, minus the gossip tendency, is the Joan Rivers of the dance community: he knows EVERYBODY. What’s more frightening is that he remembers every dancer that has ever come through Ailey, taken class, worked with the first or second companies, or danced with any other black regional company in the country.

And the fact that his tooth had just been pulled and his upper lip was swollen when I saw him the other day didn’t change the fact that he knew my latest gigs and had an interview prepared. Interestingly, it is Makosso, this time, who has the change in position – he’s the assistant stage manager for the black ballerinas I’ve befriended, ballerinas he insists call him Don Makosso.

“Do you call him that, too? Has he always asked for that?” Rejane asked me the next day.

“Yeah, because when I first met him I thought he was saying his first name is Don and his last name is Makosso,” Alicia added.

“No, that fool has always been Makosso, or Nicaise if he’s wrong,” I told them.

The ladies, ever inventive, decided that they needed proper addresses, too, Queen Rejane the First, Diva Christiane, Princess Alicia (or is it Empress Alicia), among others. They went through and named the several other company members as well, and because I’ve been hanging around, I was dubbed, Sheik Jamal. Needless to say, I now shake every time I’m addressed.

Anyway, this evening, when I couldn’t get in touch with Akua, a quietly stunning ballet technician with hateful proportions and an ability to braid hair, I waited in Christiane’s and Rejane room and dug into Makosso’s restricted lower back; I called him whatever I wanted. In his thick, French accent, he would correct me for forgetting the Don and I’d dig a little deeper and ask, “What did you say Makossita?”

“Que feo!” he’d protest.

Between conversations about love, sexuality, and marriage, a happiness Christiane was very willing to testify about, we watched a two-hour special on a photographer who likes to decorate various cityscapes (usually streets) with hundreds of limp, nude bodies. We had great fun trying to pick out the one (and there was never more than one) black person interested in lying nude on concrete at six a.m. with 599 other folks who had no real business taking their clothes off. Needless to say, it was easier to look at Rejane in silk pajamas, hair out, plum Chablis lips the lovely place where her ever-tan skin to converge. Or Alicia, whose length can’t be contained with clothes anyway and whose gorgeous, cinematic faces probably won’t age. Or Christiane, whose lust for life and infectious spirit would keep her at eye candy level even if she had mud on her face.

Or maybe my hair is still all over my head, undone, but everything is fine. I needed the congregation with, as Miss Eulalia would put it, the intercontinental peeps. Besides, I am Sheik Jamal...

Random Insanity

Dancers are insane. To personally motivate yourself every day to get up and throw your exhausted body around a daylight-less theater for hours and hours and then hop on a bus to travel to the next city and be paid next to nothing despite homesickness and sometimes poverty to repeat the process is insane. And by the middle of the sixth week of an eight-week tour, you graduate from insane to appalling. So I wasn't surprised when I went to visit one of the other company members I've known since I moved to New York and found him going through cigarettes as if they were Doritos, and then emptying the butts into an ashtray that sat beside his air purifier.

"That's really an air purifier?" I asked later, digging into his aching semitendonosus attachment.

"I know it's crazy, but yeah that's mine," he said. And he went into a full-out ramble while I worked on him, which is par for the course because when you're being worked on and you know your body will feel better soon. You get happier and more conversant every minute. The roommate was unconcerned about the extra dialogue; he had his own ashtray and cigarettes.

The show was refreshing and I must admit that I enjoyed seeing "Return," a plotless, fun ballet to the music of Aretha Franklin, James Brown and others. Of course, since bosses wanted dancers to maintain the formality of classical ballet presentation - black music notwithstanding - dancers obeyed, holding back in moments that wanted to be gut-bucket, ghetto, funky, and...well, black. I always have an issue when directors place on vernacular movement restrictions that compromise the integrity of the stuff/flavor that makes it vernacular. I mean, the Running Man is the Running Man, and if a choreographer is going to insert it between pique arabesques and assembles with the cosign of the artistic director, the dancers should be allowed to do it with as much proficiency, the way they know how, they way they do it at the club. Same thing with the Nissan, and tipping, and the Soul Train Line. So I felt for the dancers. And I felt for them again in the slower sections of "Firebird" when the maidens come out and dance in pointe shoes pointlessly since they never have to get up on them the whole section.

Before the show, I had the pleasure of spending time with three of the four ballerinas who make up the Brazilian contingent of company. Alicia is an honorary Brazilian at this point. Last night she introduced me to Christiane, and today Rejane. To listen to these women say anything is as delightful as hearing the details of a paid vacation you've won. The Portuguese accent it perfect, just clipped enough to specify words of our less attractive language, just fluid enough to make it sound like we didn't know all this time that English is Romantic.

"The girls in the dressing room complain when we speak Portuguese, that it's rude," Rejane said. "I tell her, 'We will speak in English but only if you participate in the conversation, otherwise, we'll speak Portuguese." Who wouldn't want to be one of the girls in their dressing room? And forego the silliness, the insanity of ASKING them to please "say something" in their language?

We're going out now and I get to meet the third Brazilian, and hear them in together. My, the things that makes us giddy...

Rake

It's important to understand that at one point, nearly every stage in Europe was sloped, some pretty steeply, so that a tennis ball could roll quite easily from the back of the stage into the orchestra pit. This is why actors and dancers refer to the area near the pit as "downstage" and the area at the top (or at the place farthest from the audience) "upstage." Those terms are extremely literal, and very relevant when I arrived at the King's Theater to visit Kelly Saunders, Alicia Graf, and some other dancers I knew from Dance Theater of Harlem.

I had planned to take class, but this sloping stage called a rake gave me cause to pause. It's challenging if you've been in class every day, dangerous if you haven't. I hadn't taken a full ballet class in what seemed like months, and anytime someone new to the powers-that-be decides to take class, particularly if his/her resume is full and promising, it becomes an instant audition. I looked at the stage and saw__in my mind's eye__my happy-to-be-there self carefully approaching a pirouette and then falling slowly, ass pointing downstage and tumbling me to my humiliation. I kept my ballet slippers in my bag.

But it was fun to watch them successfully negotiate the rake. There they were, about fifty black dancers on stage taking class. Granted, I (as well as the rest of the world after this many years) know that black folks can dance classical ballet like no one else, and it's not something that needs to be proven. But it did my soul wonders to drink the energy of a dance company, to really spy on this world for a moment.

Okay, well I did more than spy. Before long, Akua, one of the more prominent, un-shy ballerinas asked if I could work on her hips, and I was happy to play physical therapist. My machinations worked out and she was fine after about ten minutes.

"You might as well just stay," Alicia told me, upon realizing that I was off for a few days. Alicia is the prodigious principal who left the company, got a degree from Columbia, and then bravely decided that she wasn't really done dancing. And she's the homey.

"Sure, I'll stay, why not?"

So I'm staying in Glasgow for a few more nights. I don't know where exactly, and I haven't worked out how I'm getting to Birmingham, our next city. But I do know that I'm not doing the rake...

Edinburg(er)

I was ebullient as I left the snazzy room of the Glasgow Radisson. The concierge directed me on the short walk to the Queen Street Station, where I’d be able to catch a train to Edinburgh and visit the local castle. But before I got there, I’d have to change over about $150 into sterling. When I bounced into the bank, I happily gave the teller my $159, scraping up any additional dollars to convert since I wouldn’t need them again until July. The teller happily gave me back 81 pounds, 14 pence. My toenails began to split.

“What’s the exchange rate?” I asked, my math skill suspended by the shock.

“One point nine per cent, not in your favor.”

I wanted to take my foot across our president’s face.

Not to be undone, I began walking down Argyle and realized with every step in front of every store that my dollar was so puny, it wasn’t even fun to do conversions. I managed to make it to the station without spending more than the four pounds that my iced coffee cost me. But when I got there, I walked nearly the entire premises trying to find a trash bin. Once it occurred to me that there wasn’t a single one, and I had to pay a pound to go to the bathroom, I asked someone what was going on. He told me that security issues preclude bathrooms. They didn’t want any bombs going off. Meanwhile, the Scottish are frighteningly considerate – there was no litter anywhere in sight, never mind the absence of wastebaskets.

The train ride was beautiful, easy, and most of it offered glimpses of the extreme mixture of natural colors in the pastures – chartreuse, Kelly green, burgundy Mother Nature assigned to the trees. None of it was as grandiose as the architecture of Edinburgh. The people had preserved the foundation of mortar-made buildings, thick-stone cobble roads, and cathedrals as ubiquitous as churches in any black community at home. I thought a lot about Salangi suddenly, wishes she were around to enjoy this with me. I didn’t make it to the castle before its doors closed to tourists, but I enjoyed the view nevertheless.

Even the Burger King was quite lovely. Yes, I had splurged the rest of the day buying little things in tourist trap stores disguised as random, casual, castle dwellings that, well, beckoned any touring professional. So I opted for Burger King, which looked truly gourmet at five pounds a meal (ten bucks, mind you).

When I made it back to Glasgow, I had the urge to see a movie. I had been walking from the train station trying to figure out whom to ask, then saw a handsome black couple approaching the intersection where I stood.

“Excuse me,” I began, addressing the man, “do you know where the movie theater is?”

“Yeah, if you walk up this hill and turn near the subway you should run right into it.”

“Thanks.” But I couldn’t leave it there because I heard the American accent and noted the reference to the “subway” and wondered for fun what part of the country they were from. “You aren’t from here, right?”

“No, but__”

“Wait, don’t I know you from somewhere?” I asked the woman.

“Yeah, I was thinking that, too.”

“Dancer right?”

“Yes.”

“Dance Theater of Harlem? Kelly?”

And it was. Kelly Saunders, a beautiful principal with DTH was standing before me in Glasgow with her husband, Keith. This is the second time this month. First it was Mark Morris in Ireland. Now it’s DTH in Scotland. We hugged and caught up for a while and I found out that they’d have a show Wednesday that I could stay over for. It’s just crazy that I’m able to see overseas performances of New York-based companies whose home seasons I’m never there for.

Speaking of performances, I went to see Kill Bill Volume 2 and loved it. It’s hard not to relate movies with strong relationship overtones to my love life, but it had so many parallels. It made me understand that my ex simply had not yet learned the five point palm exploding heart technique that would have solved all of our problems (kidding, just kidding). Plus, Beatrix Kiddo is my favorite assassin turned mother, a plot twist that made the first movie better and the second a must-see. It was shockingly human, so much so that I want everyone I know to see it.

I have 25 pounds left.

Cheers

No matter where I am in the world, I am determined to find one thing: a nearby cafe open 24 hours. In Dublin, I lucked up early in accomplishing this important goal, and none of the three intercontintnental people I hung with last night knew about the Coffee Dock, which had great tea, tasty fries, and long booths, all tucked into an obscure corner of the Jury's Inn hotel. It was our rescue from the party-infested, liquor overdosed Dublin, most of which was defaced by those who could not help hurling their insides on the otherwise kempt roads.

I, Ehouman, his girlfriend Sinead, and Leoni (whose name I'm probably certainly misspelling) plopped into the booth and begun an energetic conversation about, well, about everything. Amongst the things I learned, the Irish are as absurd with money as we are, or so Leoni tells it.

"It's because we're stupid, that's how we are. We're stupid asses. This country spent a million pounds researching to build a sports arena," she said.

"Researching what?"

"Exactly, I say we're stupid. To host the World Cup, Korea built an attachment to the coliseum and do you know what they did when it was over? They tore it down and took the concrete to build motorways. Can you believe that! Fucking fab. They built new motorways and broke even. We lost a million pounds and we still have no coliseum."

She's right of course, although I grinned the entire time listening to her Irishness spill into her vivid enthusiasm, even at 4:00 a.m. The festivity of the chrome lipstick and dark fuschia flaps jutting from her eyes was still not competition for her fun personality. She's a dancer/performer who clearly needs to be on stage, and I hope her studies at the Laban Centre in London take her places.

Ehouman later explained, without once using Sinead as a language crutch, that this European Union thing is all about the French and Germans wanting to make money and take over the world. I was so impressed with the fact that I was having this political discussions with young people who were so knowledgeable about their world. Here was this young black man who was now on his third country of residence, and he was so fervent in his beliefs that he would not allow language to impede the making of his point. Momentarily, I recognized again how behind Americans are. Ehouman must have read my mind because he also said, and the rest of the table cosigned, that the reason the U.S. is in the state of affairs it's in is that we don't take an active enough part in the government.

"It's true, you don't over there," Sinead said.

"They could not control us in France the way they do over there," Ehouman said, referring to the states.

Of course they were right. All I could do was offer that our current sovereign is only in power because the election was rigged, not because the majority voted for him. Needless to say, this type of thing only discourages people from believing in a democratic system of voting. Sinead, Leoni, and Ehouman nodded with understanding of the sad state of affairs.

Ehouman also gave me native insight on the Ivory Coast, his home country, where the people are too benevolent. It wasn't until recent years that I knew such a condition__too benevolent__was possible. But I wanted him to elaborate anyway. He told me that they hand over power to the wrong people and now they are broaching a civil war dividing, as usual, north from south.

"It is beautiful there. They have island with..." he began, and I could tell by the frown that he wanted to remember the word beaches. "Yes, beaches, and it is so nice there." Maybe I can fit in a trip to the Ivory Coast before the war hits.

In the car on the way home, Leoni and Sinead, also a hoot, spoke quickly and with more inflections than I knew possible in the English language. It was joyful to hear the volley of girl-talk, which was everything that "valley girl" linguistics wants to be but isn't.

I was up until about six a.m. and I arrived at my bed weary but fulfilled. These are the kinds of nights you can only have in Europe and I am complete with gratitude for the three who made it for me.

Last Night, First Performance

The show tonight, our 203rd, felt like the first time all over again. We did a new opening number, a complete medley which the Dubliners knew better than we did, word for word. They sang along to demonstrate their patriotism of our boss, and maintained more energy throughout the night than the audiences of our entire Vegas run. Catering is heavenly, so the new complaint is that the food is too good to resist and laxatives have been requested by many.

I have much more to say, but I'm having great fun running around my last night in Dublin with Ehouman, a 22-year-old college student from the Ivory Coast whose French is beautiful. We've been explaining to his girlfriend similar stories about racism - his in a central area of France populated by about 100,000, mostly elitest bastards who are smug and DL about their black hatred. Of course my stories are not new, but it's fun to give a young woman in Europe who thought racism was dead a historical perspective on what it means to be a light-skinned black person in a racist country. We're off momentarily to have some coffee...

Surrender

The weather here has revealed its schizophrenia, offering us sunshine and clear skies for 10 minutes followed by a barrage of rain-ready storm clouds that come from nowhere and attack the city. The day was difficult to survive; the mire in the sky and the exchange rate granted scant options for tourism.

I gave up the militancy that my wild, explosive hair suggested, agreed to satisfy both opposing sides and keep my hair because Dori loves it, braid it because Bonnie would be pissed trying to find ways to fit it into the elaborate headpieces for the show. The experience of getting it braided, though, was worth the professional surrender.

The shop, called Studio Zee, was affluent with Nigerian women and their children, mostly babies, most of them strapped with dutiful cloths to the backs of their working mothers, other in the wombs on the other side waiting for their turn. In fact, every woman in this salon was pregnant. The space was small, the ceiling low, the lighting poor. But to hear my hairdresser, Seun (pronounced Shoon), speak to her sisters, blood and country-men alike, was like listening to song. An Irish woman walked in and I knew right away that she owned the place. It made sense - here was an Irish-owned, African salon located in a would-be Chinatown in Dublin. How clever is that?

I went from there to the Abbey Theater to see a U.S. dance company that happened to be here (not by accident) and fell giddy all over again, not with the company of course, but with the tall handsome man that the distingusished lady to my left asked about, ironically. "He's so striking, I want to see more of him," she said. So did I. But I had to surrender again to the universe. God must have concurred and saw to it that his heart was ready for the visit I expressed an interest in, that I had invited him to with a card dropped off at the theater earlier. His yes was more urgent than my question and the night, filled with two years of catching up, was bliss.

Water Weaponry

The opposition by way of protests to the EU is much bigger than I imagined. Dennis told me last night between fries at Eddie Rockets (they're version of Johnny's burger joint) that the police broke out with water canons to ward off the protesters. We both decided that the Irish anti-EEC contingent here read the 60's chapter of an American History book and learned from the black folks how to do their thing. Of course, the consequences were much less severe here...the water canon did not upend people, send them hurling through the air like the way it did militant blacks in the day. But still, water canon indeed.

I have to take a moment to think about the consequence of a European Union where the presidency of the entire collective is rotated throughout every six months. It would be the equivalent of having California's government run the country from January to July and then handing it to Montana, only Czechoslavakia and Spain are more culturally different than California and Montana (I know, I know, it's debatable). All of this change and nobody is guaranteeing a socialistic approach to economics after all these countries have finished adding themselves to the collective. Meanwhile, Sweden has almost 100% literacy rate because the ENTIRE education of their children__through college too__is paid for.

Dennis and I didn't stop there. We had to also discuss my afro, which is quite a show even over here, where blue, green, and pink are only a few colors the natives like to throw on their scalps. For some reason there is novelty in black hair. Miraculously, one of the band members found a place where I can get my hair cornrowed, which is the saving grace for my bosses hopes that I not cut it. I'll go ahead and try out this African shop and do the braids__this time. I'm keeping the sheers ready though.

Attacked

Every now and then when I sit here in the internet cafe and check email, my ears are attacked by an Irish song, usually torchy, almost torture, that is sung in about five different keys with lyrics so bad I'm aghast that it was actually released: "...people take their clothes off, I just want to see them, okay!" Later "...I stumble out to find the bathroom, and instead I find her with another lover." To further make me question my sanity, someone will cosign on the madness by clapping and singing along. Still, even with the cab ride to the Temple Bar area, it's a far cry more endurable than the drama of paying the local phone fee plus connection charges to get on line in the hotel with my own computer, which I retrieved hours upon arriving. It doesn't surprise me at all; this country is more expensive than new York, 1.6 times more expensive.

That's about the exchange rate for the dollar, which means that after I shelled out my four euros to purchase a Newsweek, I realized I had paid about six dollars and some change. I walked into an Urban Outfitter and gagged at the costs of t-shirts - it translates into about sixty bucks. But before I could get past this, I had to realize that the army of protesters outside, so copious and convicted, have bigger concerns. They were not happy the other day about the addition of 10 nations to the European Union, a growing threat to ithe ndividuality of nations, the sanctity of cultural identities, and the last few threads of socialism holding certain places together. The reality is that most people would rather pay 60% in taxes (like the Swedes) and know that they have free citizen-granted health care and benefits, and adequate retirement versus the alternative, which is watching several immigrants run in and out of the EU, melt the inside of the pot and turn into another America (a nation that will have, ironically, less involvement as the EU grows). To watch the protest was intriguing. The folks yelled and chanted in sync and repetition in a way that worried even the extra guards imported for crowd control.

I wish I had a slogan to protest our weak ass dollar against these high prices. My wallet is attacked every day and the per diem is a flimsy weapon.

Today at rehearsal, our boss came in to run through a few songs. It reminded me of the first time this happened a few years ago (have we been touring that long), one of the only times we ever got to hear her sing live. Most people don't realize that because vocal feedback on-stage throws the artist singing, the monitors don't include her voice, we hardly ever experience what the audience hears. So today, when we had the opportunity, it was rather magical, and one can only feel privileged to hear in a casual forum a living legend sing.

HERBERT PARK
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