The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 154
Our mentor taught us the art of controlling common hand puppets, not letting them duck below the screen, out of the onlookers’ sight. We gathered at Children Sector twice a week, but sometimes Raissa missed the rehearsals or was late and on such occasions the key was to be found on the windowsill in the room of the movies list painters whose door was never locked but kept wide open for often visits of fans of their talent and art-lovers in general… So we opened Children Sector and played ping-pong for hours, albeit with a tennis ball, across that long table. Neither had we bats, effectively replacing them with the thinner of school textbooks in hard covers and the net between the players’ sectors was also made of the slightly open textbooks lined spines up, and though hard hits of tennis ball knocked them down but then restoring the net didn’t take long either…
Rough and exhausting is a puppeteer’s job: both mentally—you need to copy your character’s clues and learn them by heart, and physically—you shouldn’t ever low down your arm stretched out and aloft with the hand doll donned on your 3 fingers. During rehearsals, the acting arm grew numb because of the strenuous exertion, and even propping it with the remaining hand didn’t really work. Besides, there appeared that pesky nagging crick in the neck because your head was constantly tilted upward to check the actions of the doll. But, on the other hand, after the on-stage performance, you would step out from behind the screen and come in front of it, keeping your hand inside the doll lifted up to your shoulder, and Raissa Grigoryevna would announce that it was you who acted Hare. And, following the theatrical nod of your head, Hare next to your shoulder would also give a nice bow provoking the eager laughter and applause among the audience. O, thorns! O, sweetness of the glory!.
Later on, many of the participants dropped out but the core of Children Sector—Skully, Kuba, and I—persevered. Raissa made of us actors for short performances about the heroic kids and adults from the times of the October Revolution or the Civil War. For the performances, we made up, glued real theatrical mustache on upper lips, wore army tunics, rolled cigarettes of shag and newspaper slips the way she taught us, and let the smoke in and out of our mouths without really inhaling so as not to cough. With those performances, we toured the bigger shop floors in the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, the ones that had Red Corner rooms for meetings where, during the midday break, we acted on tiny stages before the workers eating their midday meal out of newspaper packages. More than anything else, they enjoyed the moment with hand-rolled cigarettes…
Twice a year Club staged a major amateur concert where the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, recited heartfelt poems dedicated to the Communist Party. The pupils of Anatoly Kuzko, the teacher at the button-accordion class by Club, played their achievements.
Yet, the creamy crest of the concert program was dancing numbers by the Ballet Studio because their trainer Nina Alexandrovna enjoyed a well-deserved reputation which attracted students from all over the city. Besides, Club possessed a rich theatrical wardrobe so that for the Moldovan dance of Jock the dancers appeared in skin-tight pants and silk vests spangling with sequin, and for the Ukrainian Hopuck, they wore hugely wide trousers and soft ballet boots of red leather.