The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 155

The accompaniment for them all, including young girls in ballet tutus, was provided by virtuoso accordionist Ayeeda standing behind the scenes of the stage. And there, next to her, stood also we, in army tunics and adult makeup, marveling how classy she played without any sheet music.

The handsome electrician Murashkovsky recited comical rhymed humoreskas and sang in duet with the bald tenor, a turner from the Mechanical Shop, “Two Colors of My Life” in Ukrainian. On Murashkovsky’s right hand there missed three fingers – only the pinky one and the thumb stayed in place and, to hide the deficit, he clutched a spiffy handkerchief between them like an extrinsic catch grabbed by a crab claw.

Two elderly women sang romances, not in a duet but in turn, accompanied by the button-accordion of Anatoly Kuzko himself, whose eyes were sooner astray than crossed, when he eye-contacted you with one of them, the other was looking straight into the ceiling.

For the concluding peak of the concert, Aksyonov, the blonde Head of the Variety Band, and his musicians came to the stage thru the dark of the auditorium. The drums and double bass were already waiting there in the small makeup room behind the stage for their invigorated players, but his saxophone Aksyonov was bringing himself.

Blonde Jeanne Parasyuk, also, by the way, a graduate from our school, performed a couple of popular hits accompanied by the Variety Band and the concert ended with the all-out applause and eager shouts “encore!”

The auditorium at those events was filled to the brim, like for a show of some popular two-sequel Indian film. The stage was inundated by the light of lamps sitting along its edge as well as from those above it, and the blinding beams of searchlights from both balconies. In the dark passage along the wall beneath the balcony, the Ballet Studio dancers kept trotting to the Dressing Room of auntie Tanya on the first floor, to change their stage clothes for the following numbers.

For acting our short performances, Raissa trained us how to appear on stage from behind the scenes and get out without turning your back to the spectators, and how to look into the hall – not at someone in particular but just so, in general, somewhere between the fifth and sixth rows. Although in the crude glare of the searchlights directed into your face from the balconies thru the dark hall, you could hardly make out anyone after the fourth row, and even those in the first one looked fairly blurred…

So Club became a part of my life and if I didn’t show up home for a long time after school, they didn’t worry – I was dawdling at Club as usual….

In the dark of winter nights, we got together for hanging out along the streetcar track because our favorite pastime became riding the streetcar “sausage”, so was called the tubular grille hanging under the driver cab. We ambushed a streetcar at the stop, neared from behind and, when it started rolling forward, we jumped onto the “sausage”, grabbing at the small ledge under the windshield of the empty driver cabin. The narrow ledge provided nothing to catch a hold at, and you strained your fingers to the utmost seeking some absent point of vantage in its smooth surface. The streetcar rolled and rumbled, and bumped on the rail joints, the springy “sausage” jumped up and down under your feet – wow! Super!