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 view optionsfont: A A size: - 12 +book reviewspeoplemystic fiction health identity music/moviesjazzgrrlsmovies rantrrrampage
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Although one wonders what's so damned happy about it... I spent the night of Dec 31st with a buncha crazy, wodka lovin' Ukrainians. Well, most of them were Ukrainians. Then there was my friend Irina -- pet name: Ira -- who is Russian, and her Russian friends, and one Jewish guy, and me. The celebration took place in a dingy basement of a long-neglected community center in Mile End. It was one of those places where the bathrooms are freezing cold despite the dust encrusted, burning hot water radiators, and the paint is peeling off the walls. Where the transition from one architectural period to another has left the building with a profound sense of vertigo. When you're walking past it, it has a grand look, kinda art deco. Inside it looks like every other abandoned community center. I had asked Ira if there would be any good looking Ukraininan men there. Ira, who is always brutally honest, replied: "They vill be homely, like awll ourr men. "
So I was not looking for any Goran Visjnic's, buuuut I did think possibly that she might be wrong. Better safe than sorry, I dressed up. (Well, I dressed up for me -- I wore heels and lotsa jewelry). We were all supposed to bring our own food and vodka. If you got fed or drunk on this night, it had to be on your own stuff. I arrived with a roast chicken tucked lovingly under my arm, and Ira was already there with her friends, lugging duffel bags out of the car.
A brief word on the unspeakable nature of Russian cooking: There are many things wrong, just plain wrong with Russian cuisine as I have experienced it so far: It's greasy. It's salty. And it consists of the weirdest possible combinations of meat, fat, and shameful North American creations, like mashed potatoes out of the box, processed cheese, and mayonnaise. The food just screams Famine, We Ate What We Had To, Shuttup. The meat is invariably liver, or various kinds of dried or marinated fish. There is nothing particularily abhorrent about fish, or liver for that matter, but there is just something about the kinds of preparations I have tasted that makes for a singularily miserable dining experience.
Having been forewarned about the food, when I sat down to eat I scanned quickly over all the bowls and pans to see what wouldn't induce gagging: there were slices of rye bread with sardines stretched across them. Various types of beet salad, (beets with nuts, beets with sardines, beets with onions, beets with herring). There was a sweet bread with meat at it's center, which was actually very good. In fact I was doing fine until I saw the cake. It was made up of layers of what looked like chocolate wafers, and a white icing dribbled between each layer. There were approximately eight layers of wafer, topped with what I took for lemon shavings and more icing. I ate lightly, and saved myself for the cake. Somewhere around midnight, after a twentieth raising of the vodka glasses for the new year, I cut myself a piece. It turned out not to be a cake at all, but multiple layers of chopped liver, sandwiched together with Helmann's mayonnaise, and topped with cheese shavings. It was the surprise of my life, let me tell you.
There were about 200 people at the gathering, and I immediately noted, after looking around, that my friend was not only right about the men, but she had been a little more tactful than is usually her wont. It is not simply that the men were homely, they seemed to come from another century -- a time when men pulled carts alongside their oxen, wore pelts and picked their teeth with slivers of rock. But there was a twist: they were all wearing suits, with the neckties so tight it was amazing they could drink and dance despite prolonged strangulation.
It was the Soviet block all over again, crammed into a basement with a white plastic christmas tree, white paper table cloths on the tables, and two women MC's screeching in Ukrainian. Ira told me the reason she and her friends go to this event is largely to drink themselves sick and then take turns laughing at the bad dancing and the fashion crimes. I did not notice that the fashion was so bad, but I must say she was right about the dancing. There was an old-world courtesy to the way the men approached for a dance: the hand held slightly opened, an ingratiating bow and a cock of the head. This was when there was a Ukrainian folk dance. The choreography consists largely of hopping from foot to foot and lifting your female partner with you as you go, crushing her chest to yours and just taking her with you as you bound around in circles, like a kind of King Kong jackrabbit, only the blonde in King Kong's grasp was me.
I saw a small blond woman in a skin-tight red dress, dancing with one of these brutes. I thought he was going to wipe the floor with her. She was light on her six-inch heels, trying to dance a salsa with an orangutan in a beige suit, his rat-tail ponytail swinging between his mammoth shoulder blades as he flung her around. He was drunk, and probably not the most graceful man in the best circumstances, and he kept flinging her against table corners, chairs, and once he narrowly missed flinging her against the christmas tree. She kept getting up and entering into the circle of his arms again, for which I didn't know whether she deserved sympathy or scorn. A space cleared on the dance floor for them, mostly because people were afraid she would end up suddenly flying at their heads. She performed well, smiling despite the humiliation of it, and continuing to do the 1-2-3 in her heels even though they rarely touched the floor. I felt sorry for her and later, when I ran into her in the bathroom, I spoke to her in commiseration. "That man was really throwing you around the room.." She replied, " Well, sometimes my father can lose control. " Dear old dad. You know, not a day goes by when my own father isn't flinging me at furniture...
There was a little girl there, about three years old, and because I was occasionally overcome with longing for my own daughter, I gravitated towards her whenever she ventured onto the dance floor. She never so much as cracked a smile the entire night, but stood about looking at the grownups through her serious brown eyes, a plastic tiara on her head. Sometimes she would dance, hopping on her small plastic high heels with her fists clenched. I have no idea where her parents were, and as the night wore on I began to worry. But she never looked concerned. She would disappear and then suddenly pop out onto the dance floor and stare at the grownups whirling and jumping about, and then disappear again. I was wearing a fake diamond belt myself, and once when she came near me I took it off and wrapped it around her shoulders, like a shawl. She watched me the whole time, and only touched the belt briefly with one fingertip before wriggling out of it and disappearing. Much later, when it was almost three in the morning, I saw her again. She allowed me to pick her up and dance with her a little bit, and when I dipped her head back towards the floor, her thin brown pigtails lifted up on top of her head and she smiled one small, quiet little grin before wriggling out of my arms.
The company was good, and the positive aspect to bad dancing is that it easy to grasp, and becomes a fun way to pop around in the air between shots of wodka. At five-thirty in the morning there were still plenty of middle aged revellers, but I was tired of trying to keep up with the Shwartzes, and minced home in those painful, painfully high heels.
later,
N
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