In 1976 I was the technical director of Columbia College Dance Center in Chicago. I would be handed a contract for a group to perform in my theatre or a contract for the resident dance company to perform elsewhere, and I had to make it happen. Our artistic director and a crazy film teacher cooked up a plan for the dance company to perform in Yugoslavia. The Cold War was in full flower. The doomsday clock for nuclear Armageddon was set at 11:58 and 25 seconds, and this gig was in a Communist country. I asked Bob for a copy of the contract and he said that there wasn’t one, so I said, “We aren’t going.” Shirley, our artistic director, said, “Yes, we are.” I was charged to figure out the technical end of a completely unknown gig. We didn’t know where we were going to perform, when, how long… Nothing.
I am, by the way, certified language incompetent. It says so on my Carleton transcript. Incidentally, there are NO root words in common between Serbo-Croatian and any other language on earth.
First stop, Groznjan, on the Istrian peninsula. The nearby coast was the de facto French-Riviera of the Communist bloc, but little Groznjan was a medieval hilltop kingdom that had been hammered during WW II. Terraced fields that surrounded the center were fallow; a German army helmet, in the dirt, rusted, split in half, unclaimed as a souvenir, explained why. The Yugoslav government had picked this place to start a summer arts camp and was making rehearsal and performance spaces out of old, abandoned buildings. We became a part of evening candle-lit lute recitals, we taught dance classes, and a couple insane free-jazz musicians from Poland provided comic relief. They taught jazz classes to classical musicians from all over the USSR who spent two weeks trying, and failing, to play the rhythm of “Girl from Ipanema.”
When it came time for the equally insane people from Chicago to perform, the dancers really wanted a wooden floor. There was only one in town and there weren’t many windows around it, so it was dark. There was only one electrical outlet in town, and it was behind the refrigerator in a space that passed for the only general store, about 100 meters from the performing space. A farmer had a couple of crude scoop-type parking lot lights. It was agreed that someone would go gather all the extension cords that could be found and, at the last minute before the performance, I unplugged the town refrigerator, plugged in the cord, and ran down the street to start the reel-to-reel tape recorder for the show. The audience loved it, and 500 watts is really bright after you haven’t seen anything but candles for a week. Afterwards, the crazy Poles shouted “Picasso Music,” which was their code for wanting to play free jazz while the dancers improvised. A crazy dance and all-night revel ensued in which it was rumored that not everyone kept their pants on.
[Photo by Chuck Osgood, Chicago Tribune]
After gigs in Pula and Ljubljana, we ended up at the State Theatre of Zagreb. … In a turn of cosmic justice, there were a couple of crew members in the Zagreb show who had learned some French from ancestors who had been in the Russian aristocracy. In addition, I discovered that Austrian had some words that sounded like English. So, the performance contract that had never existed eventually happened with a mix of butchered French, Austrian, and English. The standing, screaming audience brought us back for four curtain calls.
The story gets better: In these countries at this time, you left your passport with the hotel clerk as a security that you would pay your bill. Can you tell where I am going with this? The crazy artistic director thought that my passport was her daughter’s, the clerk gave it to her, and she got on a bus from Zagreb for the coast. Meanwhile, the rest of the group decided to bug out on various Dalmatian vacations and left me and another dancer with 160 kilos worth of costumes and supplies above the airline luggage limit.
Oh, and, yes, as tour manager, I had been gathering the box office from these shows and had about 35,000 Yugoslav dinara, which I foolishly thought I would change to dollars at the airport in New York. Actually, the law was that one could not take dinara out of the country, and there was no legal way to change it locally. Okay, think Blues Brothers here: I’ve got 35,000 dinara in illegal money, 160 kilos of excess luggage, and no passport in a Communist country. Richard and I each also had a new lover back home, so we were on a mission! Oh, I forgot to say, this was in June, and Yugoslav Airlines was totally booked until August. So I HAD to make the plane.
Long story short, I had to call the hotel the artistic director was headed for. This entailed going to the post office and getting in a long line of people waiting for the phone. After you told them, verbally, where you wanted to call—there were no phone numbers—a lady picked up a wire and plugged it into a wall full of holes. She talked to some other lady, she plugged you in, and so on across the country—until one of the legs of the connection was busy. You would hear a series of loud pops as you got unplugged about 15 times, and then you stood off to the side while some other person tried their call. After about six hours, I managed to contact the hotel in Porec, they eventually found someone who spoke some English, and … what did I tell them? Think about this… I had to tell them that a loopy lady with an extra passport was going to be showing up at their hotel and that she had 20 minutes to get it to the ONLY bus that could make it back from Porec to Zagreb before my plane was to leave. I then had many hours to imagine my boss giving my American passport to an oppressed Communist-bloc bus driver who was so nice that he wouldn’t just quit his job and cash it in, but would instead bring it to Zagreb and get it, somehow, to me.
Meanwhile, back to the 35,000 dinara: They were only worth about 5 ½ cents each, but this was real money back in the day. No one could believe that we hadn’t written a contract to get paid in dollars. Eventually a nice man at the American Embassy said that he would take our dinara and send us his countersigned American paychecks until they approximated the value of our tour receipts. At 4:30 a.m. at the Zagreb bus station, after the chickens got off the bus, a very nice man did indeed hand me my passport, wads of dinara paid for the excess luggage, and we got on a plane.
We didn’t leave. We baked on the Zagreb airstrip with the plane dead silent. No fans, no mechanical noise, nothing. They loaded us off, we waited in the airport, they loaded us back on, this happened four times. On our last time across the tarmac, they had the cowling off an engine and a guy on a stepladder was reaching inside. As we went up the ladder, I heard what I took to be a Serbian curse word and there was the “tink, tonk, tink” sound of a wrench bouncing its way through engine parts to land on the ground. We offered to go back into the terminal but were loaded on the plane, which took off.
We arrived at LaGuardia, twelve hours late. Customs was carefully inspecting this planeload of suspects from behind the Iron Curtain, but through pneumatic sliding doors I could see my new lover waiting. What I didn’t know was that her whole family was waiting in the parking lot in a Winnebago, ready to take their beloved daughter and her new goyim lover to Maine. I also didn’t know that Deb’s dad had learned to drive in a bread truck in Manhattan and this boxy Winnebago had transformed him back to a teenager rocketing through downtown New York while junkies and fashion models dived for the curb.
We did get to an island in Maine, and Deb is still my soulmate, but that is another story.