A Very Mrs. Ashley's Kidz Clubhaus Thanksgiving

For weeks, Svitlana has been all aflutter about Thanksgiving. A seminar for teachers in our region would take place this same week, and she was determined to parade our kids before them in an array of traditional American pageantry. Whenever she asked me for suggestions, though, the essence of my response was generally, “Durr?”

I’m really bad at this kind of thing. Not that I don’t appreciate whimsy (my friend Jacek and I have written many brilliant children’s songs about animals who are friends). But I tend to see this stuff through a jaundiced, ironic eye. And to truly do a Ukrainian concert well, it requires a full-hearted, totally unironic and open-armed embrace of all things kitsch.

I’ve seen a great many school concerts here, and they typically involve the following:

1. Really enthusiastic singing, often to a tinny recording of Lady Gaga or some Ukrainian pop song. The girls go all out: Dangerously high boots, electric blue eyeshadow, and dresses either skin-tight or enormously floofy and cupcake-shaped. It’s like, if they were any more hyper-feminine, you’d have to slap a plastic Bratz box on them and sell them to American preteens who have no positive female role models.

2. The same goddamn dance where the ninth grade girls wear black catsuits and floaty gauze on their arms like wings and dance in a REALLY creepy way in a circle around a tiny child, who bobs from side to side with arms and eyes lolling as if drunk or possessed. I think this is the only dance they know.

3. Verse recitations by tiny children in lilting, sing-song voices.

4. The insidious machinations of compulsory heterosexuality. Call me paranoid, but I find something disturbing in the frequency of romantic plots in children’s skits. I remember one variation on Little Red Riding Hood in which Red slow-danced with an eyebrow-wagging Wolf. The latter is a 10-year-old named Dima who hits on me regularly. I blame his precocious lasciviousness on these skits’ sexual undertones.

Our concert yesterday was, blessedly, not creepy – in the immortal words of Linus, “Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see!” Regarding kitsch, the Thanksgiving children’s pageant is perfect for these people. It’s all Norman Rockwell innocence and nostalgia that would make Howard Zinn, if he were dead, spin in his grave: Happy smallpox-free Indians in warpaint and feathers breaking bread with happy Pilgrims, as other children waddle in enormous turkey/potato/yam costumes. It’s all so vulnerable to ironic humor, I feel bad making fun because it’s just too easy. Especially when these happy Indians and Pilgrims deliver lines in thick Ukrainian accents, such as, “I am potato! Potato is very tasty! Potato was important source of sustenance for Pilgrims.” 

Actually, most of the kids bungled their lines out of nervousness/ not really knowing English at all. One of my favorite pupils, Igor, an impossibly small 10-year-old with giant eyes like a cartoon mouse, just spouted out random nonverbal sounds. The children were to spell out the word “Thanks” and his letter was “K.” The original lines said something about “kith and kin expected soon,” but little Igor just shouted enthusiastically, “KEEP AND KEET AND KOOT AND KOO!!!” He grinned, his mouse-eyes bugging out.

Another favorite of mine, Ira, was The Cranberry, and delivered her lines in that same swinging sing-song voice with which children recite Ukrainian verses, totally heedless of correct emphasis on words or syllables. Still, I was super proud of her! Ira is the best! She and her friends in the fourth grade have begun frequenting my office every day after school. We practice vocabulary and play Hangman and little Radion asks me weird questions like, “Mrs. Ashley, do you smoke?” or, “Mrs. Ashley, are you afraid of zombies?” He asked me the latter while toting a plastic gun. I told him that in the case of zombie apocalypse, he’d have to protect me by shooting zombies in the head. Or burning them. Because zombies are like the Others in Game of Thrones, right? He seemed confused. My Ukrainian zombie vocabulary isn’t very good.

Anyway, this is an example of how Ukraine has made me hate children in the general sense and totally love individual ones to death. I’ve come to think of these fourth graders as Mrs. Ashley’s Kidz Clubhaus. If we were a PBS cartoon, I would wear Miz Frizzle-esque dresses with various verb tenses scattered across them.    

Of course, our pageant featured many musical interludes, several of which featured … ME! Like this ridiculous Ukrainian song. Please watch the video and imagine that the woman in Disney princess dress is yours truly, horseback-riding with macho Cossack companion. The concert also included reprises of my top hits: “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Yesterday.”

I had a lot of fun rehearsing with my colleagues beforehand. They’re just a bunch of gruff middle-aged guys who like to mess around on guitar and pretend to be rock stars, and yell at each other and laugh boomingly. They kept yelling at me to sing louder. “Ashley needs to get drunk! Then she’ll want to sing!” they said and laughed boomingly again.

I’ve always been really embarrassed to sing in front of people. But I figured I would look way more stupid onstage if I sang half-heartedly, like the humiliated old clown in that German movie The Blue Angel. So I pretended that I was a crooning, velvet-voiced chanteuse, and I belted the songs as much as I could. And the teachers in the audience looked totally into it! Some of them sang along, others actually looked moist-eyed.

And I realized this: It doesn’t matter how well you do something, as long as you do it real loud, and with copious enthusiasm. Anyone can make sarcastic jokes. What’s a real challenge is to make an ass of yourself, and look like you’re LOVING IT.

From all of us here at the Clubhaus, sending you moist-eyed, super sincere wishes for a wonderful Thanksgiving!

More brushes with the absurd and slightly horrifying

I’ve had a lot of manly experiences this past year, and going to the bannya last month has topped them all. I have always associated bathhouses with masculinity in various intense, sweaty forms, like homosexual decadence, or a bunch of hugely fat and naked Turkish men (or both!). Finally, a couple weeks ago I was granted admittance to the bannya in Kirovograd.

The baths were in a rustic, wood-paneled lodge which private groups can rent out for a few hours at a time. This meant I was alone with my friends and their Ukrainian acquaintances, and didn’t get to see any hot guy-on-guy action.

What happens is this: You lie down in a tiny, dark room where near-100 degree heat emanates from a stove. At first, it feels like your heart is being sat on by the hugely fat Turkish man. You are also naked, except for a felt bell-shaped hat, so you look rather silly as the sweat dribbles down you in fat droplets. You can only stay there for a few minutes at a time, taking breaks to drink tea and re-hydrate. After a few times, the sensation is more relaxing than painful. I felt very focused inside my body, all blood and heart and breath. 

Towards the end, one of the Ukrainian women – a large, sturdy specimen with a cherubic face – soaked leafy branches in hot water. Then she beat us with them. It was not unpleasant in its kinky European way, and I suppose this is what I mean by "manly": Ukraine beats you until you are STRONG and have sweat out your ill humors! 

The following week, I traveled to Kharkiv for the infamous Halloween party. This experience was the bannya’s complete opposite: I did not get naked, and I was very cold. Had my post-bannya feelings of masculinity manifested themselves as physical testicles, they would have shrunk back into me for fear of freezing off.

Let me tell you something about the Kharkiv Halloween party. It’s not supposed to be just any party. It’s supposed to be a sensational, sensual, totally gross explosion of Peace Corps volunteers’ pent-up sexual frustration and rage. I arrived expecting to see people vomiting on the dance floor, banging on the dance floor, starting fights and bleeding on the dance floor, and making general fools of themselves for my voyeuristic enjoyment. Do you know how many body fluids I saw that night? None but my own snot dripping from my icy nostrils. Fail!

The party took place in a dim, frigid, Soviet-era hotel with a particularly Eastern atmosphere of gloom. The toilets either didn’t work or flooded, and the lights were out in my bedroom. At least I had a great costume. I wore a friend’s ridiculously silky, ridiculously leopard-print nightie and a fake beard. A Freudian slip – GET IT? Of course you do, dear reader, because you have a good sense of humor and are not a moron.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for some other partygoers, such as a very abrasive young woman I encountered waiting for the elevator. There was only one elevator in this dump, and no one could find the staircase, so you had to wait an awfully long time if you wanted to go anywhere, which meant having to make a lot of conversations I didn’t want to have with other people waiting. The abrasive woman had draped herself with a large piece of paper cut in the shape of a fish, with crossed-out eyes. Accompanying her, a girl dressed as a lobster, and a handsome boy wearing a babushka bag with holes cut for arms and chips packages pasted to it. I realized later that they were dressed as popular Ukrainian snacks sold at bazaars and outside train stations, such as salted fish (although I still see no reason for the lobster). At the time I found her costume confusing, and also sort of sick and violent. “What are you supposed to be – a Flintstone?” she asked, and when I answered, she snapped, “Well – my costume is funnier!” She and the lobster inexplicably started slapping the handsome boy’s babushka bag and they all screeched and laughed, abrasively.

As the night waned, all eyes went hungry with lust. Sexy little pumpkins and sexy little lobsters laughed too loud and orgasmically at men’s jokes. I saw one young woman grab a guy’s hand and practically drag him up to her room like some sort of Dothraki horse lord, starving for coupling. The less desired boys circled the emptying dance floor with clomping steps, unchosen. And I hunkered down for sleep in my coat and mittens, beneath two wool blankets, shivering violently and waiting to die.

Perhaps my tone savors of spinsterly bitterness. But I’m not angry that my desires went unsatisfied, if they ever could be satisfied, so infinite and infinitely insatiable as they are. Rather, I resented these surroundings because they made all desire into something silly.

A good friend once sent me the following quote from Adrienne Rich – it took me until Kharkiv to arrive at it with understanding.

“Desire: yes: the sudden knowledge, like coming out of the flu, that the body is sexual. Walking in the streets with that knowledge. That evening in the plane from Pittsburgh, fantasizing going to meet you. Walking through the airport blazing the energy and joy. But knowing all along that you were not the source of that energy and joy; you were a man, a stranger, a name, a voice on the telephone, a friend; this desire was mine, this energy my energy; it could be used a hundred ways, and going to meet you could be one of them.”

There is no one waiting at the airport for me to meet them, no form for my desire to take. And so it takes all forms, and takes what it needs from them to thrive. I would not call it joyous now, but I know it is mine, and neither its object nor its consummation matter as much as this.