Lydia’s Blog

Tonight, me and my main homo, Toby, decided to go out for dinner somewhere around my apartment. I have no idea why we ended up doing it, but we went into THE restaurant in my neighborhood.

103.

Especially on Sundays, 103 is the place to see and be seen by the most smugly artistic members of Kastanienallee’s young media scene (film, underground pop, television, visual art, etc.) It’s always packed out to the gills, a blurring mass of greasy sideswept bangs, 17″ PowerBooks and Berlinale t-shirts from Hugo Boss.

Needless to say, the intolerable atmosphere and mediocre food at 103 were impressive enough in their own ways (yes, we did decide to go in the first place. I am therefore of course, partially responsible).

Still, the crass, dismissive, and particularly negligent behavior of one certain waitress was what really sold me on the pilot. After tenderly placing votives on tables before chain-smoking, slack-jawed and above all, self-titled DJs, she slammed one down on our table so hard that Toby’s (cold) club sandwich ended up with a waxy white frosting.

This was such a load of shit. Okay. I get the aesthetic politics of Prenzlauerberg. Hell, I even intentionally wore my PJs out to dinner just to look like I belonged. Still, no dice.

I thought it might be time for an upper-decker.

The upper-decker is a punitive act I first heard about from a tenor in a Young Artist Program that may or may not have been Glimmerglass. (This tenor also used to pull part of his scrotum through his fly and go around asking people if they’d help him find his chewing gum).

Anyway. It entails taking a shit into the septic tank of a toilet. Main benefits: an upper-decker stinks like hell (and it lasts and lasts), is somewhere between really difficult and impossible to clean up (especially when discovered after the first few hours…which happens in almost all cases…)

The source also cannot be traced. It’s the perfect crime.

I was thinking about blessing the 103 waitstaff and, indeed, community in general with a choice specimen. Fantasizing. I guess I was staring off into space, because Toby had to tap my arm and ask what I was thinking about.

I told him.

He looked at me stoically, chewed for a moment and said “Oh, ein Waechter”.

Yes. In Germany, the upper-decker has an official title, which translates into “The Guardian”.

I though that the idea of a slowly dissolving turd in a septic tank as “Guardian” was funny enough for me to forgive the waitress, the restaurant, my neighborhood and, indeed, the entire Teutonic race for at least the evening.

Because of a WILD communication failure on the part of a theater where I’m supposed to begin rehearsing on March 21st, it looks like I’ll be leaving Berlin a little sooner than expected (for the time being).

I’m happy. I’m nervous…also perhaps a bit sad…I’ve seen so little of my best friends in the city in the last few months. I’ll be in Austria until May 8, in the hospital from the 10th until early June, then, after another 7 weeks of work, I’ll go back to NYC for two months before next season starts.

Other opportunities which would require me to leave Berlin have come to my attention. And why not? The entire point of the exercise was to advance as quickly as possible in the world of opera, right?

Right?

I’m not so sure anymore. As annoying and depressing as the city can be…it’s actually the only home I’ve had during my adult life. The friends I have here aren’t keepers from college, grad school or some Young Artist program. Like it or not, this is where I’ve somehow managed to set up shop.

My dad just wrote me a beautiful email, suggesting that I think back to what thrilled me about the city in the beginning…in the hope of retrieving that innocent eye, so to speak.

It’s hard, especially with my schedule. 9am to 10pm at the opera house, rehearsing [what is basically an old production of] Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier [into the ground].

I look forward to my commute to work every morning, though. There’s a great turkish girl at the bakery by the Tram stop. She knows exactly how I like my coffee, and we joke around a bit about before I head out on my way.

Sometimes, especially if I need just that extra kick of humanity in the morning, I’ll let the first few trams pass by until my favorite commuter (and a half) approaches the stop.

He’s a British guy, probably early forties, with a son who’s about three or four years old. I try to sit relatively close to them on the tram.

Throughout the entire tram ride, this man tells stories to his son, probably to keep him calm on the crowded train. You can always hear the stories over the icy morning German-ness.

I love these stories. The kid orders up the setting. “In outer space” he’ll say.

“Pirates or dinosaurs?” The father will ask.

“Dinosaurs. No. Pirates…”

“all right…what are the pirates’ names?”

“Nigel, Simon…and…”

“How about Martin?”

“No, Brian.” concludes the little boy.

And away they go. Giant puppies rescue fairies from the insides of volcanos, cowboys save Michael Jackson from an overly posessive Canada redwood, David Beckham breaks the spell that turns Manchester United into a group of ballerinas, with the help of a love-struck spider.

It’s hard to say why, but those stories, nonsense stories for a little boy, can somehow make Berlin perfect in my eyes, at least for those precious few minutes.