Tomorrow is Evacuation Day...

It may have been on The Daily Show, but is historically accurate. So forget Black Friday, and think about Evacuation Day. I can only link, not embed...

But you can see it here.


And btw... it was funny as hell. And why didn't I learn about it in school? Just wonderin'....

Oh my.... New Hampsha gets Rachel upset!

She has a point... New Hampsha always gets picked on... I think it was the Daily Show where the line fell... New Hampshire is so white, they think snow is camouflage.

The lead was good, but it's about what Rethugs have been doing instead of creating jobs, and all about 'the other', and abortion. But she's right... shortening the actual legislative period is getting out of hand. And I agree with that...

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And I was crushed.... yes crushed, when The Old Man of the Mountain collapsed in 1993. It seemed to be something amazing, lasting. It should have told me something. On the other hand, maybe they should switch the trademark to Indian Head. It would be fitting, maybe.... (for those who don't know, it's a similar natural rock formation.) And for young people now... I would still recommend the short story about the Old Man by Nathanial Hawthorne. It is beautiful.

New series on PBS about the Prohibition...

Sounds awesome, and stories my grandmother told me came to mind. Like the time she was way pregnant and trained to Bawston to get my grandfather some booze. And she had the bottles hidden in pockets sewn inside her dress, And a 'gallant' policeman wanted to accompany her home in her 'state', and all she could hear was 'glugg glugg glugg' She died a thousand deaths in that short walk home. And there was the bathtub gin, and kids selling it strolling their dolls in baby carriages, and hawking their goods. Weird time. I'd enjoy seeing the documentary on this.

The director seems very competent.

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Since I can't wait... and a REAL Gollum is back...

To see when Savonarola was tortured and burned at the stake... I Googled.

Yeah the Borgias again.

In the latest installment, the Pope wanted to have him be called heretic, and burned at the stake...for political gain and defense of the system. So that the French wouldn't invade Italy, which was a mess of fiefdoms and city-states, whose rulers' status and vindication was dependent on the Pope of Rome. And they weren't above crawling to heinous crimes to protect their power. The Mafia would pale in comparison.

The series begins in 1492 with the rise of the first Borgia Pope. The very dangerous Savonarola died in 1498. This is a good thing, Becazuse the guy who does that cleric creeps me totally so I get to see a real villian.

Except there is a problem. Savonarola was one of the most disgustingly violent and destructive priests ever known. And what was at the bottom of the report? Pope Johnn Paul II initiated proceedings to promote that baseless scum to sainthood.

I am often surprised by what they do, but that left me spitless.

Crap.

This is going to be the LAST post on a stupid topic: pegged pants...

Most people who ever check into this mish-mash of what is left of my mind....

Never grew up in the Fifties. If you were a young boy, you wore balloon pants that were so baggy, you were amorphous, hey. Neuter.

And 'pegged pants' suddenly became the rage, and I hated the balloon pants. I was maybe thirteen or so. Elvis was King,, and there was a sort of new awareness. Cigarette Babies used to hang out in front of the Sweeney Post Lodge dance hall on Saturday nights, in everything that made them look even thinner than they were, tailored, and they had greased up duck-tails, and cigarettes hanging off their lips, and looked dangerous, and sexy. It was a VA bar with a huge hall upstairs, and me and my brother used to be onlookers. Watching negatives of a picture of 'fun'.

The girls came in petticoats, and the more they had, the better off they were, or something. I wanted to grow up and be cool, and 'dangerous' looking.

My brother was interested in the petticoats, and embarassed me totally by hanging upside down on a low fence, and counting how many they had as the girls walked by. He was ten, you couldn't take him ANYWHERE. And hardly innocent... he got caught playing doctor with a young girl his age under the porch when he was eight. 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours...' so to speak. But no one really made a huge deal out of it, which was good....

Yeah, so I wanted to be a 'hood', as we called them, short for hoodlums... And I did errands, and went out and got me a pair of pegged jeans with the money I made. I loved those jeans. And was excited, on my way to hoodlimism.... yes!

And I wanted to show them off to my cousin, what a cool thing I'd gotten for myself, and my Mom was there. The details are vague on that... But I came out in those new jeans, and nuclear followed.

My Mom said, 'YOU'RE not wearing THAT!' I was genuinely confused. 'Why?'

'Because you can see EVERYTHING, even the CRACK! Go to your room and change!'

Y'see, Puritanical.....

But the devil in me was delighted, and I WORE them because it was 'cool'.

That line has followed me for decades now. It was a mainstay in Peter and my relationship. If we were going somewhere? And he'd be 'inappropriate'? I'd say the magic words... 'Go to your room and change, hey...' And he LOVED that story. Hell, he loved all of her maxims for 'proper' living and even adhered to some of them.

He could laugh so hard when I'd do that. I found a whole list of her 'rules and regulations' for living he had written and tucked away when he was in the hospital once.

But 'Go to your room and change!' was one of the ones we delighted in.

Styles change, people change... oldies here go off the charts for kids wanting to look like Justin Bieber, or Goth or Punk and sort of become ghosts of my past, but it doesn't bother me. I just keep thinking... 'when they are 3o or so... someone will show them a picture of how they look now, and they are SO going to wince.' And I never had a picture of me in pegged jeans. But my Mom was more than cool. She was wise. 'Give someone enough rope, they'll hang themselves.' That was my favorite.

End of history lesson.

A story....

Once upon a time....

There were two people, a young man and a woman, who fell in love in Europe. At the turn of the last century, in a part of Austria that is now Slovenia. They spent their honeymoon in Dubrovnik, and even traveled to Egypt, which was pretty ostentious for the beginning of the last century... Alexandria, and Cairo, and it was romantic.

And they proceeded to have four daughters. Hildegard, Charlotte, Ilse, and Doris. And then finally, a little boy, which was the dearest wish of the man's heart. Because he would carry on the family name, you see, and that is what people thought back then. And sometimes even now.

The little boy died of pneumonia, and it crushed the man, and he wasn't so nice to his daughters.

And disaster struck in their realm, and WAR came. The father was resolutely against everything... he would listen to the radio ilegally,because it was forbidden. It was sorta like being ordered to listen to Faux news, and forbidden to listen to MSNBC. Only you could be punished by death if you did the latter... sorta like, only much worse.

The woman, she enjoyed entertainment, and her greatest gratification was watching MGM musicals in movie houses. The man was more interested in books and ideology by that time, so it wasn't a priority for him, and he looked down on it in principle, and wasn't forgiving her for having 'lost' their son.

And the WAR changed the family. Hildegard got caught up in the enemy ideology and became evil. Charlotte got inducted and had to serve in a place way north of where she'd ever been, but her heart remained in her native town. Ilse met a German concert pianist.

She was stricken, and fell helplessly in love. And Hildegard plotted an evil plan to send her baby sister Doris to a camp for indoctrination, where she caught a bad disease, and succumbed to it much later without ever having spoken with her sister again.

The WAR changed everything. Ilse became pregnant, and had a boy.... except his father died in a traffic accident being underway to where the aggressors were heading. And never married him, there hadn't been time. The man was thrilled, he had a male heir.

And the woman was frightened to death, not only WAR... but, if anything should happen to the boy, it would mean the end of everything in her world.

But the woman wouldn't give up her beliefs, and what pleased her. She was feisty. And risked things.... like getting into a physical fight at a market place over who was better, Ginger Rogers, or Marika Rökk. Which was something very dangerous at that time and place.

Well.... in that fictive realm, that country began to lose. And the boy caught pneumonia, and they were being bombarded from the other side. And the woman would take him down in the cellar, lugging a grammaphone, and play music for him. (They didn't have penicillan back then...). And she'd play Fred Astaire. 'Cheek To Cheek'.... and it would begin 'Heaven, I'm in Heaven...' And the bombs would begin falling.... The boy miraculously recovered.

The WAR ended at Easter one year. And the family was up on a hillside having a picnic. And the other side came in and tried to bomb the city, and the man was up yelling at them, 'The industry stuff is over THERE!' How do they excpect to win the war by dropping bombs on the university!!???'

Shortly thereafter, the OTHERS came in to finish the war. The first were from a vicious country, and they raped women, and weren't otherwise exactly nice, but they weren't that way to children. And the boy watched his grandfather, the man, pull down 'the Leader's' portrait, and stomped on it and yell, and curse, and the soldiers brought out some vodka, and they toasted one another.

Decades passed. The woman never got over the censure of having missed the golden age of MGM musicals, and would drag the boy to the movies. To catch up. The man wasn't good with it, and there were fights.

The girls were dispersed, Doris and Charlotte ended up in Frankfurt, and Doris died way too early, as a result of what Hildegard did. Ilse died way too early. The boy had been living a life that was rich, and interesting, but came back to take care of her, and it broke his heart.

And Hildegard? She remained a terrorist till the end of her days. She toasted her husband when he got shipped off to the vile country, with champagne, and looked forward to becoming a widow. He survived, and when he came back, she never forgave him. She wanted to be a WAR widow. They had a daughter, and she is gone now too, and HER daughter married a sneakret service person from yet another land... divorced him and is now never to be found.

But Hildegard went out in a blaze of glory... trying to recruit African American rebels in Harlem and Florida. She ran out of steam at last... and passed on. Much to the relief of the rest of the family.

And the boy? Was stellar, and fell in love, and became very ill. It's how families can rise and fall....

All that is left is Charlotte, who married a man from the North, and is of advanced age... and me.

It's a parable....

Hidden treasures......

I was talking with my father last night. About theaters in the town I grew up in. I worked in a lot of them, so know a lot about them.

But I knew of one that was so hidden, hardly anyone knew about it. I guess I couldn't find anything really relevant on Google today, but it seems it was called the Variety Theater.

I later learned that Abraham Lincoln gave an important speech there.

And I discovered it by accident.... Had a paper route, and the door was open, and it was amazing.

You have to imagine a ten year old boy wandering in there, because... it was a discovery, hey.... This wonderful place one flight up no one had ever HEARD about? And it felt incredibly sad... The store beneath used it as storage. Lots of boxes, and dust.

I didn't know it at the time, but it was very European in design. Loges all around the sides, gilded, incredibly beautiful. So my jaw literally DROPPED. So I gaped.

It was like wandering into some sort of story that ended badly very long ago, and was enchanted somehow. I sometimes still dream about it. It could have been made a jewel again, and I can imagine the lights, the audiences, the excitement....

Except... the building got razed.

That's what they do, right? History means NOTHING to 'Murkins. They replicate it in some sort of Disney World. It REALLY means nothing to those in 'power'.

I spent ten years of my life working in a cinema. It was historical. It was the last 'palace' to be built before the Depression in 1929. After the opening, they thought they would have to fold, and they asked the staff ot forego two week's pay, and they would repay them.

And they all did, and it was good.

Solidarity, hey.

The building was Art Deco. People used to come and photograph it, it was a landmark.

It was innovative for its' time.... It had a cooling system for the dog days in August.... god-awful turbines I hated to turn on because I was sure they would blow me up, they had such rachitis... and would turn on the most ginormous fans I have ever seen.... and they would blow cool air into the place. But before... the ice men came in. There were holes under the rows, and they put the ice in there. And the fans came on, and blew it over the ice, and it was... whaddaya know, air conditioning.

I loved that building, I loved discovering all the secrets, it was phenomenal.

Just the lobby would bowl you over. Huge, high, chandeliers to die for... staircases you'd want do ascend and DEscend in gala clothes. If you were feeling nostalgic one day...

It was a palace. And I sort of lived there for ten years.

There are so many stories I could tell.

And today?

It's a parking lot, they razed it to the ground. I cried. It was home to me. But I know... somewhere in the front cellar, my name is in spray paint in yellow, so I'm there. We used to keep up the paint on the letters for the marquee, you see, and sort of messed around. We were young... once.

This is indicative of so many things I find wrong. If something is your heritage, you treasure it, and don't turn it into Disney World, or fuck it up.

So yes, it makes me sad.

To end today on a nostalgic note.....

Because I am sleepless in Graz, worrying, and hopefully my hair will turn white and not completely fall out... I sent the Ven something I'd seen on Sixty Minutes. A film from 1906 taken six days before the earthquake.

You can watch it HERE... although I hate the music.

And he said,

yeh! I rember elm street in the old days with a trolley car

that went to lake massabesic and pine Island park

and horse drawn ice wagons and milk wagons

and horsehit in the middle of canal street where my dad and the man up stairs joe Bussier would vie to see who got to it first to put in their little garden patches as fertilizer

of sneaking up to the ice wagon to retrieve a chip of ice to cool of in the hot summers . of model T fords my dad owned one , it had three pedals on the floor , one was a back up

the middle one was to shift and the last was to brake

to start it one had to crank it with a handle out side

and if you did not hold it right it might kick back and break your wrist. fun and games in the good old day

now I just point a remote out the window and the car starts

to warm the car up in the cold days and to get the ac and engine going in the heat. now is the good old days believe me youngstes today have no Idea of what life was back then even here in the good old new Hampshire.

I hope he tells me more... but it's not always easy. But I think it is something nice to share.

Au Weh! Au WEH!!!!

oh.my.gawwd... Jessica.

Peter called and told me she had been in Gamlitz today, and said she'd been there for the second time today, came in with a mess of doctors, and 'interfered'. Or did an intervention. And I thought 'Wha???' And I said, 'You must have been DREAMING, Peter.'

He insisted she had been and not for the first time. That is when I thought, Au, WEH!

She HATES hospitals.

Ok, slamming on the brakes here, screech, and backing up.

Jessica isn't her name. She was my old boss and ran the hotel during my day for nearly thirty years during my time. I hadn't been there long, and the old series SOAP becan running on Austrian tee-vee, and there was a character of that name. Peter had been watching it as well, and one day I said, 'Doesn't our boss remind you of Jessica on that show?' And he gleefully said, 'YES!'

The character on the show was scatterbrained, and chattered on about things, and if you didn't know the background, you were clueless. And that was sort of what my boss was like fifty thousand things in mind, a family, four children, the hotel to run, business to take care of, and once in a while we would look at one another and say, 'WHAA?'

She's always been a good woman at heart. And sort of a mother hen. But she remained 'Jessica' for a long time.

So when Peter told me that, I was non-plussed, but uncertain.

I 'thought' maybe someone from the HO-tel had said something, so was uncertain.

So I called her. A call that was long overdue, she did some very nice things for me, and you don't sit thirty years next to one another without knowing who the other person is, and the first thing was, 'Oh Gawwd, are you in trouble?' With great concern in her voice...

And I said, 'No but I have an odd question... were you in Gamlitz today?'

'No.... let me see, I was in Gamlitz a week ago, with my family, and we went to have Sturm in a Buschenschank... Sturm is a fresh wine with an immense amount of sugar, and she LURVS it. Let me tell you, if you want a headache to end all headaches, it's toxic... )
'Today I was in the restaurant, and boy are they in trouble....'

And then we had this circular conversation, and she wanted to know what is wrong, while telling me all the stuff she does to stay fit. She had a stroke two weeks before Peter did.

What came across was the caring, so I caught her up to date, and she didn't like it. At all, but is doing well, and berated me for smoking still.

We were always at loggerheads, she being more or less a freeper, and me freshly minted Sozi, but there were so many other things, and respect.

I MISS that. I mentioned something about Peter, and she said, 'Oh, HIM. How are YOU doing?'

Guess she liked me.

I have to add something, because it ties in to a couple of posts below. WWII

My boss was brought up in the so-called 'Sudetenland'. It was a mixture of Czechs and Germans in the west of what later became Tschechoslovakia. HER earliest memories were being thrown out of the country at the end of the war, and taking what they could carry on foot, in this case to Austria, and she was very young, and many people died.

It must have been terrifying for her. And am sure it never left her memory.

Am not saying it wasn't worse that what the Germans did, sending concentration camp victims who were so weak on a 'Death March'. That was worse. MUCH worse.

But over the years, and just talking with people, isn't it always the weakest and most vulnerable who get the most harm?

I don't even WANT to think about what went on in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past ten years, to the general population, and isn't THAT a cynical term?

But I DO think that what is happening now over there happened then.

It's all sort of 'odd'. No one seems to want to LEARN much of anything...

Dunno, was just cogitating... which is never good...

I hate Sundays....

And a memory popped back, a sad one. It's about the post on Rudolf Brazda post below.

It was in the early 70's, I was in the Munich train station and sort of crowded, but they had a nice custom. If there was a table for four and one person sat there, you could go over and ask, 'Excuse me, is this seat taken?' And they would invariably say, 'Of course, sit.' So I had an hour, got a mug of beer. And we chatted a bit, and he was really down.

He was 'old' to me, grey-haired, and looked morose. We chatted a little, and then I saw it... the inside of his left forearm. A tatoo.

And my heart sank.

And I said, 'Excuse me, but is THAT what I THINK it is???'

He said, 'Yes, Buchenwald.' It was his tatooed concentration camp number, hey...

'Are you going home?'

'No, I just come here.'

'WHY???' ( I was 26 and naive....)

'I hate being alone.'

He told me a little bit about his experience, and it was horrible, was young and more than impressionable....

And it was awful. And I was speechless. Of course I knew generally but hearing it from a real person was pretty devastating.

I just listened.

So seemingly, he just went up to the train station café and find someone to talk to and tell his story. It was horrible and frightening, but he never got past it.

And I asked the stupidest question of my LIFE... 'Once you got freed, how could you STAY here, why didn't you get OUT?' (I'd have high-tailed it out of there, but he had roots.)

The answer was crushing. 'I had nowhere to GO...'

He was German born, generations in the country, they wiped his family out, but he still felt Germany was his 'homeland'. And so crushed, and decimated... he couldn't move one way or the other, but just feel sad and reach out to strangers in transit in a train station.

And that is what fascist regimes do in the end.

Ok, am connecting dots. Big industrialists, like Bush's grandfather and others supported the Nazis financially, that is no secret and open. And others. And the Krupps (steel industry) were way in with 'Adi' and his gang, but too stupid to see where it would lead, G0ebbels was a genius at communication, and this idjit.... from Alaska, I think, (or Tennessee) wants to put poor people into camps to be 're-instructed'????

WHY do alarm bells go off in my head?

It'll probably be the end of the world, who knows.... But if those tools get in, oh man are you all in for a big ride to nowhere.

And there will be lots of people crushed and sitting around train station cafés or the Greyhound bus ones, destroyed.... And not Starbucks.

And... Someone is gonna ask me about the sculpture

of the street-washing Jew. Can we back UP here just a bit? Teeney tiny?

Okay... As I understand it... The Nazis FORCED the surviving Jewish populace to clean up the mess they supposedly made after Kristallnacht, when they trashed their businesses, wrecked their homes, and they had to scrub the streets. On their hands and knees. In Vienna.

This monument was put up on what used to be a flat-iron building which was bombed by the US, but was about the Jewish population in Vienna, and the hell they went through. The figure is before a 'Gate to Hell', and there are some other elements on that site. They never got the bodies out. So it is hallowed ground.

At the time... people were fully angry for having their faces wiped in their pasts. I found it appropriate....

Oh, I'd nearly forgotton... they had a subsequent 'problem' with that sculpture. Tourists had no idea what it was about, thought it was a bench, and sat on it, eating hamburgers from MacD's. To say THAT was disrespectful is the understatement of the decade.... So they had to string barbed wire over it so that no one would sit on it. Good solution.

So where WERE we, when I got so unexpectedly interrupted?

Ach ja... Peter's 'fambly'. So ok, his grandparents had four girls who survived the war. I never met his mother, she was terminally ill when I first got here, and died fairly soon thereafter. I have always regretted that. She must have been very funny, and he got her sense of humour, which is sort of like mine. He had a rough time of it back then. We were just friends, he did the night shifts. And would come home mornings to find she had hemmoraged in the night, and it did a number on him.

The only fun thing I have about her was a play on words. He was visiting her in hospital, and the other woman asked Peter to close the window because she was 'Algerian' when it came to drafts. She meant allergic, of course. That's been a running joke between us for decades now. Will say, Oh, am algerisch to that. Instead of allergisch.

See? That is one of the fun things you share when you know one another a long time.

Charlotte married shortly after the war. She is graceful, elegant, and very nice. It's only been two years since I am allowed to address her in the familiar form. Her husband was Prussian, and unfortunately died a few years ago. Peter being her only nephew, she does the mother hen number, which irritates him.

Doris got REALLY messed up by her oldest sister, who sent her off to some Nazi version of the girl scouts, (BDM) and caught an illness she never really recovered from, and never spoke with her ever again, as far as I know.

Which leaves us the eldest, Hildegard. I only met her once. It was enough, believe me. She wasn't just the black sheep, she terrorised the entire family. The only Nazi in it. And she never stopped, hey. She never ratted them out, but her escapades were legendary. Like drinking champagne and telling her husband not to come back when he got sent to Stalingrad. She wanted to be a war widow. He was a POW, and she was disappointed when he finally came back, and took up his job as a gardener. I can't think of two more diverse people to ever get married.

And she never stopped, hey. She was over seventy, flew to New Yawk.... wearing her SS leather coat without the insignia, and decided to go out searching for people who were on her 'agenda'. This is so not making anything up, by the way. The entire family was scandalised at the time.

So what did she DO? She went to Harlem, ALONE, AT NIGHT. And hooked up with this African American activist by the name of Robbie... and he was the apple of her eye. Am pretty sure she went back a couple of times after that, and I think the last time was in Florida, and she hooked up with him, whipped his group into shape with uniforms and everything. And there was something about riding those propellor boats in the Everglades, but I don't think they killed anyone. I hope...

Her sisters were on their fainting couches reaching for the smelling salts.

Yup, she was a piece of work, all right... She only said one sentence to me ever, but it was a doozy. She and Charlotte were waiting on Peter in the ho-tel lobby to celebrate his fiftieth 'birfday', and the couches there were very low. He came down and she asked me, 'Do you have CRANES to get me out of this thing?' Which was when I realised no one had been exaggerating.

Her granddaughter married a CIA agent. That didn't last. Last I heard, she is an attorney in Florida, and I just don't WANT to know, ok?

Charlotte had two daughters, and they are coming to Graz. Barbara, the oldest, who once cornered me in the reception area, and sort of implied I was a gold-digger.... at a time neither of us had two Schillings to rub together, and Renate, who is very quiet and very cool. Over the deacades, we have learned to play nice. Renate bears a striking resemblance to Jill Clayburgh, by the way... It's uncanny.

Charlotte has eyes similar to Peter's, the only one of 'da girls' who do. But with her, there is a slant to them, and they are very green. I told her that recently, and she got all flustered, it was just a compliment.... and not flattery.

So you see? Life can be fun, and irritating, and you live it as fully as you can....

And OH, yes, another classic: Hildegard was going ON about Hitler. And his grandmother said, 'YOUR Hitler made me miss the golden age of the MGM MUSICALS!' That one has to go down in history. She nearly got in a cat-fight at the market over who was better, Marika Rökk, or Ginger Rogers. Which was dangerous.

So... that ends my two-parter on Peter's family, relationships, and how you absorb 'things you never needed to know.'

But that is what a solid relationship brings with it. Have been trying to impart some of the fun things that occurred over the past (nearly) four decades, and give you a smile or two.

And on the other hand, Peter knows an awful lot about my family as well. I used to think, 'hokay... top this.' That is sort of 'guy stuff'. Always a bit of competition, but a good one means sharing. Being held, feeling 'safe'. And returning the favour when your signifcant other isn't on top of his/her game.

Some of you have been here, and you saw me at my worst, and you saw me 'in-love', which can make you so blind you don't know what hit you. Some of you have seen me so angry, and at times self-destructive I can feel ashamed.

I can pass it off, and say 'well, that comes from my bio-mom's genes', and part of it would be true.... But in the end, it was passion. No matter what I have done, it was straight from the heart, and I don't regret it.

So now you know a piece of my life I didn't share.

I will regale you with stories till I leave....

Y'know, if you spend nearly forty years with someone, you tell each other EVERYTHING. If the relationship is good. You share the absurd, the important things of all the people in your lives. It isn't gossip, it is your past, and who formed you to be who you are.

So today, we begin with Peter's grandparents. Yeah, that sounds far-fetched... But they were interesting, in that they more or less raised him. And I don't know how they ever got along together, but there was this 'thing' called World War II, you see, and Hitler, and so on.

They had five children, four girls, one boy. The little boy died, because there weren't any antibiotics back then. Peter lost his father before he was ever born. The Germans were pushing into Poland, and he was a concert pianist, and he died in a car crash.

So he never knew him. And his mother did her utmost to do everything right, and worked her ass off.

Which brings us back to the grandparents. From all accounts... his grandfather was sort of amazing. He would listen secretly to the BBC where no one could hear, and keep up on the news. I suspect I would have liked him. The Russians came into his home first back then, and they could be so brutal. His grandfather did a 'number'. Ripped down a photo of Hitler, stomped on it, and screamed and yelled.

He was basically Socialist. The photo was 'cover'. Thanks to one of his daughters.


He was interested in FKK, which was nudist culture. And mostly tolerant.

His gradmother was 'delicate'. She had heart asthma, and it was very bad. But she loved Hollywood musicals. And she did something so daring, it still takes my breath away.... There was a bomb raid, the English, I believe. And Peter had pneumonia. They fled to the basement, and his grandmother took the grammophone with her. Which was weird...

Just to keep him calm, hey.

You know what? It did. But the number she had was way off the charts. Fred Astaire singing 'Cheek to cheek` Remember how it begins? 'Heaven, I'm in heaven.' And the bombs falling????

Not to mention it was crazy dangerous, because the Blockwart was there, the Nazi guy who controlled everyone in that block. She didn't care. She was pissed off as it was.....

He remembers being up on a hill with them for Easter, 1945. And they were having a picnick, and the Americans came to bomb the city. His grandfather was outraged. 'What the hell are they DOING? The BOMBS are supposed to be falling on the industrial section, not the Opera! How the fuck do they expect to win the WAR, hey????'

His grandmother was more into musicals, and American stuff. But that is for the next post.

Yup, you can learn a lot over many years, you share, there is history there, and it can be funny, in retrospect, even if a lot is tragic.

Did the President reference Gays today on his German trip?

or was I dreaming? He's gonna keep a promise? I don't think so any time soon. Will have to scour the nets... They didn't just kill Jewish people. They killed gays. They killed Communists. They killed everyone who wasn't with the 'programme', and were good at oppostition.

A lot of people do not know that.