One night In 1997 a Russian lady, Alla, called me up and asked me to meet her in a bar. She felt like having a drink and thought that I would be the perfect drinking companion.  Unfortunately, however, the only bar that I knew was the famous Saigon Passion located on Ke'eaumoku Street in downtown Honolulu, Hawaii.  She said she'd meet me there in 30 minutes.

I guess I forgot to tell her that the Saigon Passion is a strip joint.  Fortunately Miss Alla took it all in good humor and if it bothered her that I couldn't keep my eyes off the headline dancer, Susie, she never said anything. Still, I've sometimes wondered if, at the bottom of her heart, Alla must have wondered it would have been possible to meet a man who was cruder than me.  That may be one reason why last night, ten years after our first date,  Alla took me to the ballet. But we were not in Honolulu. A few months ago, Alla decided that American life was too stressful, so she returned to mother Russia and her ancestral home, Saint Petersburg. Here she lives in one of the hundreds of gray 8-story apartment buildings that Nikita Kruschov built to solve Russia's housing crunch. They are called Kruchshavites.

Actually, she didn't exactly invite me to the ballet. What really happened is that she asked me if I wanted to go to the ballet or the opera.  My thinking was that, even if opera girls are extremely large breasted, they sing in language that I cannot understand. So I decided on the ballet because ballet is a little bit like yoga except that they dance and jump.

The only other thing I had heard about ballet is that supposedly most of the male dancers are homosexual.  When I asked  Alla if this was true, she said that there are almost no homosexuals in Russia so I was probably confusing Russian ballet with French ballet.

The ballet we were going to see was Swan Lake. It's a touching story about a prince who falls in love with a swan. This swan however is actually a princess who is under a spell put on her by an evil magician. The prince, after pledging his love for the swan, almost immediately falls for another woman who has an uncanny resemblance to the swan princess. They elope for a dirty weekend. Meanwhile the real Swan Lady finds out about it and is more than a little upset.  But in the end there is a happy ending when the prince decides that he will become a Buddhist monk and the swan decides that maybe in the end she's better off just being a stupid swan and staying away from drunken two-timing Russian men. 

Actually I might have the ending a little bit confused because I couldn't follow the story at all. You see, in ballet nobody says anything. The only thing you hear is the orchestra and the padded feet of the dancers sliding and jumping around the stage. You gotta understand that in ballet there's almost no way you could possibly know what's going on unless you've read the program and memorized the story line. My memory failed me about halfway through. But that didn't make any difference — the show was fantastic. There is something wonderfully hypnotic, majestic and dignified about people who have perfect bodies and do things with them that most everyone else could never dream of doing. And they are doing them with unbelievable grace and beauty.  Miss Alla says that because of things like ballet, pornography never took off in Russia like it did in the USA.

Think of that!

Besides the dancing, the theater itself was magnificent.  It sits on the banks of one of the many canals in St. Petersburg that was built with incredible amounts of slave labor.  Supposedly each one of the huge stones used to make the walls of the canals here represents the life of one slave who died (that's 100,000 stones). That's the negative part. The positive part is that this city was built by Peter the Great after he lived in the Netherlands and decided that his country needed a city that looked like a European city, and to that end, at least to Russians, he succeeded.  The fact that this place is near the Arctic Circle and, for reasons that were obvious to most people, no one wanted to live here until then, didn't really enter into Peter's calculations. So the city was built and by World War II there were 2 million people living here. With World War II came the German invasion. The Germans blockaded the city and during their 900-day siege half the population died, but the city never fell into German hands.  Lest anyone forget this, there are at least two museums and a bazilion other memorials around the city so that people get the point.

The only other thing that I should tell you if you're planning to go to go to the ballet in St. Petersburg is that photography is permitted, so long as you turn off the flash. Supposedly the flashes can temporarily blind the dancers causing them to fall during their jumps, and ballet dancers really jump a lot, more than basketball players. That was really the surprising thing — those guys in tights who wear the same underwear that Spanish bullfighters wear and the women who have breasts the size of peas, really can jump and miraculously land standing on their tip toes.  A blinding flash could be devastating. Therefore to make it perfectly clear that flash is not permitted  someone announces before every performance in fluent English, French, and Russian that FLASH IS NOT PERMITTED.  Nevertheless, just after the show started people started taking pictures with the flash of their cameras turned on.  I found this very shocking. Later my hostess told me that this was normal behavior for the French.