Parent and Child

Today I realized I was refraining from writing further until I had a better photograph of a Russian woman dressed head-to-toe in violet, which is a pretty extreme constraint even from a lifelong procrastinator.

But yes: answer to last Blog Bowl was supposed to be purple, but since it has sort of turned into All of the Above. I really wanted to be taking pictures of these zoot-suited women but apparently dressing all in one color and walking fast in the opposite direction of cameras are two skills that come necessarily paired. Buy one get one. Annnnd like many things, sartorial monochromatics have sort of faded into normalcy.

For instance, I finally have discovered the only quiet hours in my home, 5-7AM, and relish chai and kasha and English-language podcasts in the blue light of dawn before the hustle and egg-frying and quotidian movie marathon begin (at which point I return to the hard-but-beloved lofted pallet of mine for another hour or two before class). I am used to walking thirty minutes down puffball-strewn Tverskaya to the Moscow Art Theatre School only to be told that class has been moved to tomorrow, or yesterday, or the day before that (“but I went to that one, and they told me the next one was today…?”). I am used to the beautiful pastel-colored buildings (seasonal depression prevention tactic #1, or so I hear: paint your office building turquoise).  Such is life: what weeks ago held trembling, gape-mouthed fascination is today what I pass and do not smile at, like a hardened local. A tourist’s wonderment is like that of a child, and I guess I’m like eleven or so in traveler’s years—still noticing, but not screaming in delight to the nearest adult at what I find. Cities become cities become cities, with the pushing and the shoving and the foods and the street signs and the people in them we find to love. But it would be nice, I think, if we could always keep our traveler’s age in single digits, allowing for the merriment and gasping and superfluous photography that dwells therein. In turn, as locals, let the visitors stare and snap, and retain the parental calm and understanding and pride.

Church of Christ the Saviour

Church of Chekhov the Saviour (MXAT)

I have a week left (how this has flown!), jam-packed with shows and exams and classes and send-offs, then to Cambridge to get deeper into the meat of all this stuff—interviews, six classes with Droznin a week, Chekhov in the evenings, and laying, at long last, in the grass of the Common. There is, after all, something lovely to be said for the familiar and dear as well.