Form and Content

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages ... and the costumes women dare to wear in Berlin gyms. I think it's high time for a short report on the state of female athletic couture over here, if only to emphasize that I have nearly peed my pants after two recent encounters.

First of all, I'm in a women's gym. I'm not sure how that changes things, if indeed it does. Meaning, I can't tell if women in all women gyms are more or less lazy, sloppy, dirty or overdressed in a girls-only situation than they would otherwise be. I truthfully can't tell. But what I do know, is that two days ago I saw a women wearing what could have been the winning costume in an all-out, all-80s aerobics instructor contest. The following is a truthful account. I'm leaving the locker room and I see in front of me (from the back) a women with Dolly Parton blond hair. She's wearing true blue shiny racer tights to below the knee, overtop of which is a black, one-piece THONG swimsuit with and a tight floral undershirt beneath the swimsuit. Her hightops are white adidas, and straight out of the eighties. You'd have to get them on ebay. She's headed toward the treadmill. Truthfully, her behind wasn't embarrassing or flabby, but it was visible. I averted my eyes.

Today I met a women coming down the hall from the bathroom and almost choked. She had on patent leather white flats, a strapless, loose-fitting yellow, very fancy, top, and strange, sexless black jog pants.

I don't wanna give the wrong impression. For the most part, women in gyms are women in gyms. Just like in America, women in gyms walk around slowly and look at the equipment, wondering if it this machine or that machine might be interesting. They climb on one backwards, do a move or two or three with awkward, slow motions, then get off. They spend a lot of time checking each other out, and checking themselves out. All of this is comforting and familiar. Yesterday I got a lecture on my form from an overweight 50-year-old.

This is not a ...

When I arrived in my Goethe-arranged lodgings, my hostess announced that the bathroom would be mostly unusable for the next 2 weeks due to its being worked on. There would be no showers. Tonight marks my tenth shower taken sitting down. But wouldn't that be a bath, Majel? Perhaps it should be called shbath. But the point of my bringing this up is to tell you that really, it's neither. Or, rather, the benefits of showering and bathing are both absent with a shbath. You neither experience the stream of water 'n' gravity effect of showering, nor the pool-of-hotness effect of bathing. When shbathing, you sit in an empty tub holding the showerhead in your free hand while the other is busy. There are no soapholders, hooks or ledges in a shbath, so if you put the soap or shampoo or razor down, you had better be ready to then put the showerhead down in order to retrieve the soap/shampoo/razor. It's a lot like trying to put a sock on with one hand. The average shbath lasts anywhere from 20-25 minutes and if you need to wash your hair, add 8 more minutes. Shbaths are a little cold. The funny part is that the bathroom workers finished their work on the bathroom today, but we're still shbathing. Apparently they were only working on the tiles.

The word I'm looking for is I think 'unheimlich.' The most interesting part about being in Germany is that I keep expecting it to stop being Germany. There's a language which I understanding perfectly well, and then there's this other one, which is like mashed up bits of words, and I keep being surprised that every time I get onto the subway in the morning, people are still talking the mashed-up language instead of the one that makes sense. The doors are still push to go in and pull to go out. There are still no water fountains; I drink out of the sinks. I shbathe.

Visits are Nice

This past Sunday, Pier Oddone (first-rate Peruvian particle physicist, and pal/colleague of Young-Kee Kim & Sidney Nagel in Chicago ... for those who don't know him, also maker of excellent vino!) made my day by visiting Berlin for 10 hours. And it was a LOVELY, sunny day. We are at the Brandenburger Tor [Tor = Gate] in the picture, if I'm not mistaken. But much, much more exciting, in the Starbucks next to the Brandenburger Tor, I got a private tutorial in cutting-edge particle physics and a free latte. You're the best, Pier.

Fairgrounds of Overstimulation

Not to fear. No news is good news. Classes at the Goethe Institut started this past Tuesday, so with opera in the morning, opera in the evening, and Goethe in the middle, plus hour-long train rides in all directions, I'm a tired girl.

My classmates are hands-down hysterical. Brilliant people, all around: an archaelogist from Turkmenistan, a photographer from Nigeria, an anthropology professor from China, two engineers from Russia and so on. NO ONE has the vaguest idea what's going on. Our adorable, grandmotherly teacher repeats two, and three, and four times over, "This is a table," in German (Das ist ein Tisch), and then asks the Libyan surgeon, "What's this?" but he doesn't understand. She asks again, "WAS IST DAS?" But he doesn't even have enough German to tell her he can't understand her and begins to look like he'll vomit or run. He looks to the Italian hotel manager for help. The hotel manager says: "Here is a door." It's first rate comedy.

I sit at the English table with an English girl who's normal (not an aeronautical engineer), a Romanian actress, the one other American, a guy who appears to be averting a mid-life crisis by simply side-stepping it, and a New Zealander who's so busy having a good time he hasn't learned anything.

I discovered a few days ago that in Germany you can buy gum in bargain-size pill bottle containers. My chain chewing habit is decidedly more serious. Not to mention my other bad habit: I had probably six milchkaffees today. But then, I've also discovered the rapture of Vollmilch here which, of course, we have in America: full fat milk. Not to mention full fat cheese.

Last night I saw the best opera of my life. No exaggeration. This was one hour after I considered that it would be a good idea for me to leave Berlin immediately and apply to Divinity Schools. That was three hours after my mother called me on the phone from Nebraska and I cried. Like I said, I'm a little tired. It's good.

Skidding around the edge of sanity

There's a word, Sitsmark (also English), which means the imprint in the snow left by a skier after falling backward on his/her ass. It also means the [wake of disaster] in the [supermarket/subway/street-crossing] left by [me] after [generally making mud pie of everything I do here]. Damn the torpedoes. It's been a busy week. Tomorrow more I here write of in general things.

Dark Night of the Soul

It's always quiet in Nebraska, where I spent my childhood. There just isn't a lot going on, unless the crickets are out and about in the summertime screeching and breeding like pigs. And then this is simply not sleeping weather. But most of the time in the quiet, in the dark, you can lie completely immobilized and the silence is almost physical.

Until I was seven years old I was an only child. I hated being alone. Sometimes I'd be lying in bed and the silence of being in the middle of nowhere crept up on me like a drum. Stricken and remote: here you are in the great, great wide world. And however violently my heart batted, God was as distant as he was huge outside my small, tiny room. Miles and miles of sky topped miles and miles of people doing miles upon miles of things while I lamely lay and beat, and beat, and beat.

I think back on this and wonder if true religiousness is only possible with children. I had real FEAR, then. In the biblical sense.

In later life, I've found cities comforting. Someone is always outside, laughing and kicking a can. In the subway and 4 o'clock in the morning there are always people going God knows where, just like you. In the apartment next to yours, someone is shouting at a dog. Stillness, however, requires a stiff upper lip.

I am finally in my semi-permanent lodging in Berlin. It's a quiet neighborhood. The stillness is graphic.

A few balls richer

Still just me (and a Stadtplan of Berlin) in these pictures. But don't feel bad. I have plenty to do. The U-Bahn is up again after a strike, which means less walking. And I made my big chicken move today.

Christopher Alden was staging his pie-eating contest scene at the Deutsche Oper this morning, and it wasn't quite working; other members of the production team who are more important than me were making a fuss about it, but Christopher wouldn't budge. Pretty soon it was lunchtime, which is always a mess of social politics. People make an assessment about how cool they are and choose seats accordingly (near Christopher and Roy [Rallo], not so near Christopher and Roy). Rather than saying something witless in front of someone who may have play in my future career, I generally sit with the people closer to me in age. Even among us production minions (costume designers and costume designer assistants, stage managers, stage builders and stage builder assistants) I'm on the bottom rung. I walked in off the street. But back to my move.

I sally up to Christopher and Roy with my fifth latte of the day and ask to join. (Christopher is pouring Gerolsteiner into a wine glass.) I tell him I'm worried about the staging. I don't think it reads. The audience may get lost. Perhaps he would want to experiment with [I offer my thoughts.] Christopher responds with brotherly frankness. He seems more or less convinced. I maintain coolness till lunch is over.

Back up in the Malsaal after lunch, Christopher implements my new staging plan. And, cooler than cool, I get called over from my post in the corner of the Malsaal to sit up front with Roy and Christopher as stage consultant while they reconfigure. Briefly, CLOUD NINE.

In other news, I've inexplicably started eating tomato soup, which I've hated like death since childhood.

And in more news, I've met Laura Weiss, who graciously invited me to stay with her a few days until I can FINALLY move into my Goethe-host's house. I am possibly the last person in Hyde Park to finally meet Laura, who dances in the city. Laura's apartment is literally 50 meters from an enormous church of indeterminate denomination with bells that give real meaning to the word PEAL. At 7a on 5 hours' sleep it's hallucinogenic.