Tonight I went to Moscow. To the Bolshoi Ballet, to be precise. It was the Nutcracker, and it was broadcast live all over the world. Including to the movie theater down the road, to which I managed to drag myself for the second time today through the snow, for which I was rewarded by two hours of magic.
It was like we were actually inside the theater, in the audience, the orchestra, and backstage. In the seats watching the live show instead of its live broadcast, with the silver snow, colorful costumes, gorgeous sets, magic dolls, the growing tree, annoying brother, menacing mouse, eccentric uncle, exotic dancers, melting flowers and handsome prince. I hadn't seen the ballet since I was a little girl with my mom (she used to dance in it, trained by the lady she made my godmother, a star Eastern European ballerina who fled to the US during the war). But I've listened to Tschaikovsky's music for years, and, once again, the tender pas de deux made me cry, seated between a Scottish lady and her ballerina granddaughter, and a senior couple drinking tea.
On this frosty evening, I used the word 'drag' not because the snow was deep (it was :D) but because I have spent the last 3 long days in bed with the 'lurgy', which I think sounds like a pirate term but is really just a British word for the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, flu. I managed to make it through two thirds of my last class before going home at the break, since I didn't want to sit there and cough and expose everyone. It was a wasted effort, apparently, since half the class was already coming down with it and the rest have now followed. Plus I missed the class pub dinner, complete with the retirement gift for our possibly retiring professor that I semi-organized before dumping it on my most responsible classmate...yes, superb timing :( anyway, once home, the lurgy restricted me to tottering across the floor, literally, (with what I assume was fever but will never know as I could not find my thermometer which I think I lent to one of my roommates,) until my remaining roommate (the same) shooed me back to bed. And then left for Christmas. And then got stuck in the snow at Heathrow for a long wait and is still stranded.
Because of the chaos it's causing, I feel almost guilty to enjoy the latest snowfall. But I've never seen so much before at once. It REALLY snowed the other day, it was falling and swirling all day long and is now about 6 inches deep, powdery, and glorious. I am discovering all sorts of snow-related things, such as how it drifts, what color/s it turns, how far I can sink into it, how to walk in it without slipping, how it slides off the trees when it gets too heavy, and how it muffles sounds. It also: makes roofs blend in with the sky, shows you that the birds haven't eaten the crumbs you put out for them, freezes your roommate's leftover 4-week-old-egg when you accidentally slip and drop it (twice) on the way to the compost (well, the second time was actually because the snow froze my fingers when I tried to lift the lid. I hope it froze any allergens off too :P), freezes your fingers very VERY quickly, blows into crystals in the wind, reflects the color at sunset, is breathtaking under the moonlight on these longest nights of the year, and is generally exquisitely interesting.
Dragging through the snow, my first trip of the day to the theater was because I received a free ticket to a movie preview, as a member. This was super exciting, because I rarely get free anything. And the movie actually sounded like one I would enjoy (no bombs! well, that turned out to be wrong, but just no gratuitous ones), so I got out of bed and went. It was The King's Speech and I won't spoil it for you by giving anything away. But I really liked it, and I think Colin Firth deserves an award for merging with his character, King George VI, over the length of the film.
The film's setting was especially touching and relevant for me, having just spoken to a war veteran a few days earlier. He and his wife and I were waiting at the bus stop for a very long time, for a bus that never showed up. Before we finally caught the next one, he had told of being an air warden during the Blitz, as a teenager in Birmingham, in charge of making sure people went indoors when the sirens announced the bombers. His eyes darkened as he recalled it, and it hit home that what I used to see as history is still living memory. At that moment I stopped feeling sorry for myself after a very long morning which had involved leaving home early, encountering two trains, one disruption, and one cancellation; walking an hour to get to the hairdresser's in the cold and wet (which turned out to be further than they said and also have a nearby duplicate address), and then being left with only enough time to achieve half my hair plans, after having finally made it to one in 2010; leaving my lunch at home, and then deciding after all of this to take the bus back to the train station rather than walk and freeze, which bus then failed to show up so I stood and froze instead. It also didn't help that, as I now know, I was coming down with the flu. I mean, lurgy.
I had a much better afternoon though because it involved finally receiving the hoody order I'd been working on for the past month. For some reason I'd decided it was a good idea to organize our second ever batch of campus-specific hoodies, and wound up spending hours on colors, styles, emails, collecting & returning change, making bank deposits, changing orders all over again, fitting in last minute orders, and -- well, you get the picture. I then decided to complicate things by trying to go pick up two giant boxes of hoodies and get a haircut in the same city. At least I looked properly coiffed as I dashed through the university halls with a shopping cart, full of a giant box of spanking new, multicolored, personalized & overflowing hoodies. The cart just happened to be on hand at the shop, and, having been delayed by the campus ATM (that kept cutting off my card as I tried to withdraw the entire combined amount, and kept having to be reset after the bank automaton called me to make sure I wasn't a criminal and the hoody manager kept laughing nervously), I was dashing to avoid holding up my professor, who had happened to be at the main campus that day and offered the use of her colleague's car, saving me and a classmate the effort of trying to get them back by (disrupted and cancelled) train with the help of only my pitiful little wheeled carry-on (which, I forgot to mention, I dragged an hour in the rain to the hairdresser's. I think they were offended when I refused their magazine in the waiting area and preferred to just rest and look around. The Indian hairdressers I'm used to don't have prior appointments. Or trophies. Or phones with long extension cords that stretch across the people whose hair they're cutting. Or snazzy silver wallpaper and glitter decor. But I digress).
This afternoon also happened to be the occasion of our college's graduation ceremony, so I was wheeling the shopping cart across the quad while dodging happy families photographing their robed progeny. I bet some of those photos have a shopping cart in the background; some of them may even have a professor in scarlet robes helping unload it. In addition to the giant box of hoodies the cart also held the tiny carry-on it dwarfed, now containing a small collection of Indian food and products from my favorite import store, in which I stock up on supplies every time I visit the city. On the latest visit, I branched out from food to cosmetics. Me: Do you have shampoo? Owner (obligingly): Yesss, we have lots of sshampoo. (forges ahead to the Pantene section) Me: I mean, Indian shampoo. Owner: Oh, INDIAN shampoo? (looks at me appraisingly, with a faint recollection. There are no apparent outward clues to my culture -- I'm white, in blue jeans and with no Indian jewelry, which I removed for the play.) Perspicaciously: You're from India? Me: Yes :) Owner: Which part? Me: South. Owner (without batting an eye, you've got to love his cutting straight to the priorities): Hindu or Christian? Me: Hindu*.
Close enough. At the end of last year, I quietly converted out of organized religion and into universal humanity. The upheaval the mere rumor of this caused in my small home village society was indescribable. I prefer not to go into details; it's hard to explain, when people ask me whether I'm going home for Christmas too, that my past has imploded, like Alderaan. Fortunately, the present is incredibly beautiful. Tomorrow, on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, there's a lunar eclipse. Once the shadow passes, I bet you the full moon shines even brighter on the snow beneath.
*I should explain, in this context it's not so much asking about one's personal practices/beliefs as one's culture/background.
No comments:
Post a Comment