First: I was getting used to regular comments. What happened? I like them!
Second: I just spent way too much money on a digital camera. It's an Olympus Mini Digital and other than being too expensive it's perfect: extremely small (no bigger than the width of my palm), 4 megapixels, 2X optical zoom, a rechargeble lithium battery, an aluminum body and weatherproof. Humorusly, it's orange (you know, Orange Revolution) What does this mean? It means I can start posting photos of all these places and people I've been talking about. Diana's birthday is tonight, so I'll get some photos of her and hopefully have them up this week.
Third: A funny story. So a few days ago I judged at a “Mr. Know It All” contest, where high school students from around the oblast competed in six teams of five in vocabulary, trivia and acting. The teams filed onstage, each person dressed like the other members of his or her team. Most teams were formally dressed, but all the members of one team, inexplicably, wore plaid shirts, blue jeans and bandannas around their necks.
The vocabulary contest went smoothly, the students trying to stump the other teams with definitions of English words. They even stumped me: “you see it in the night sky, but you can not drown it in milk.” The answer, and I don’t really get this, was: “the milky way.”
Then they moved onto trivia, which is when things got weird. They were given questions and four answer options. The correct answer to “What does a Scotsman traditionally wear?” was “a pleated skirt”. I don’t think the Scotsmen would agree. There was a question: “They say love and cough…”. The correct answer was: “…cannot be hid,” bad grammar and all. Frankly, I had never heard the saying before. Another was, “what is the English equivalent of ne navchai bchenoho?” Well, ne navchai bchenoho literally means “you can’t teach a learned man.” The correct answer, according to the emcee, was “teach your grandmother to suck eggs.” You know, I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean in English.
Then there were the two questions where one team got robbed. I wasn’t even rooting for them, because Zhytomyr had a team and one of the students in my English club was in it, but I still fought for fairness. The first question was: “What is the most popular leisure activity in Britain.” The first two choices were “tea” and “gardening”. As bad as the grammar had been in all the previous questions, I thought “tea” was the correct answer. Well, one team suggested “tea” and were shot down because “tea is not an activity. It is gardening.” As the French would say, “quah?”
And then there was the successful battle. This question came up: “Complete the saying: stubborn as a…” and that team that lost a point to “tea” said “mule.” Wrong, said the emcee, it was “ox”. After the round was over, a furor was caused among the eight judges as this American tried to explain that the answer was, in fact, “mule”. “Is not mule and ox similar?” asked one judge. I thought for a second, comparing them in my mind. No, one is related to a cow, the other to a horse. They have four legs and a tail and if you wanted to go that route, a mule is really similar to a gerbil.
The judges didn’t believe me, or rather didn’t want to admit they were wrong. I called in the backup of Carrie, another volunteer who was watching some of her student compete.
I yelled: “Carrie, stubborn as a…?”
“Mule,” she said. The other judges looked chagrined and changed their score cards.
But then the day got even better. They moved on to the acting portion, wherein each team acted in English. I give these students all the credit in the world for acting in another language and they were great and I was impressed, but some stuff was so damn funny I just have to share it:
“Life is difficult, but we can find inspiration in the words of Rudyard Kipling and Paul McCartney,” said the girl in the metallic salmon colored shirt before turning her back to the audience.
Then, to the strains of the instrumental of “Yesterday”, another member of the identically-dressed team turned to the audience and said in monotone: “Help. I need somebody. Help. Not just anybody.” He turned away from us while another turned towards us: “Help. I need someone. Help.”
I’ve seen a guy dressed as Batman have sex with two women onstage in Amsterdam to the gospel version of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” and it was not as surreal as that was. They continued through the entire song in this way, sometimes taking seats and saying their lines sitting down, sometimes walking to another spot before stopping and saying their lines. They moved on to "If" by Rudyard Kipling, one girl staring off into nothing and saying flatly: “trust yourself when all men doubt you.” “Yesterday” was still playing in the background.
Next was the post-modern version of Little Red Riding hood. You know, the one where a girl comes out dressed as the wolf and (quite well, I might add) explained in rhyme how he was going to eat the girl dressed as granny. Then, after the consumption (glasses and a shirt flying out form behind a partition and the wolf emerging with a huge belly), in comes Red Riding Hood, the team’s sole male, wearing a dress, blush, tights heels, and a little purple rose on his wrist. There was some conversation about “what big eyes you have,” before the wolf got up to eat Red Riding Hood. Miss Red then proceeded to pull out a plastic shotgun and shoot the wolf to death. He/she dragged the wolf offstage and he returned moments later, cradling the gun, wearing a fur vest and fur hat.
A comedy set in Italy was only lukewarm funny because they were struggling through the lines, but then, for some reason, one of the girls broke out into song, singing, quite badly, the whole of “You’ll See” by Madonna.
Another team did a Victorian-era British drama in which a the husband of a writer-wife leaves her for the cook because the wife is too intelligent and literate and because the cook likes detective novels. At the end, the writer-wife declares she will write “a detective novel that is a work of art.” Okay, that wasn't so funny.
The Zhytomyr team did some scenes from “My Fair Lady,” without even attempting to do British accents. “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,” turned from unintelligible garble into Ukrainian-accented English and they all rejoiced. That was pretty damn funny.
And the acting it ended with a one minute scene from David Copperfield, the girl playing David on the ground and getting faux-whipped by a stick that never hit her and crying out in thickly-accented English: “Pray, pray don’t beat me! Pray, pray don’t beat me!”
It was great. I had to swallow laughter over and over, but they were so earnest about it and it’s not like you’re going to find me acting in Ukrainian. I gave them all high marks, even the ones in metallic salmon.