Waking up giggling... and thinking.

I haven't been sleeping well lately. 

The cause is nothing I can talk about here... but suffice it to say that my usual ability to fall asleep instantly, and sleep dreamlessly until someone (or something) wakes me up, has gone on vacation for the time being.

This has resulted in a few pre-dawn hours every day spent sifting through my jumbled mental filing cabinet in search of life's great lessons. 

What follows is a random memory that had me giggling... and thinking at 5:00 AM this morning:

Back in my days as a professional trombonist, I played at most of the hotels and wedding halls around the Metro NY area.  One of these places was a former Brooklyn movie theater that had been converted into a budget-level catering facility. 

The only reason I knew this place had once been a movie house is that my grandmother had taken me there a couple of times as a kid.  A strange thing about this place in its present incarnation as a catering hall is that whenever the main room was filled to (or beyond) capacity with guests, the band would have to play from a balcony in a small upstairs room that had once been the projectionist's booth.

Anyway, one of the perks of playing down on the main floor was having ready access to one of the funniest bartenders in NY City.  Not only would he keep the band topped up with tasty beverages... but he always had a fresh supply of great (if somewhat irreverent) jokes.

One evening while playing a gig there with the band situated right next to the bar... this bartender leaned over and asked if I wanted another drink.  I gratefully accepted but watched as he came up empty after reaching under the bar for a clean glass.  Without missing a beat he flagged down a passing waiter with a loud, "Hey communist... do me a favor and bring out a couple of trays of clean glasses from the kitchen."

[Back-story note: For this tactless remark to make sense to the reader, it is important to mention at this point in the story that almost the entire waitstaff in this hall were Russian Immigrants, most of whom still had very thick accents.]

This 18 or 19 year old Russian immigrant responded indignantly in clear but heavily accented English, "I'll get you your glasses but I'm not a communist!"

Without missing a beat the bartender said, "Oh yeah?... That's what you tell people, but I have a little test that will prove you're a communist; Say 'Moose and Squirrel'."

A puzzled look crossed the waiter's face but he complied with a thickly accented "Mooose ent Skvirrel".

With a triumphant look on his face the bartender shouted, "There!  I knew you were a communist!"

The waiter, who had obviously never heard of (or watched) 'The Rocky and Bulwinkle Show'... with its cold war caricature villains Boris and Natasha... wandered away to get the requested glasses with a profoundly confused expression on his face.

After he'd returned with the glasses, the bartender and I (still wiping tears of laughter from our eyes) explained to him how these Russian cartoon characters had been a staple of a generation of Cold War-era American kids.  We explained that it was one of many ways in which the American media had quietly conspired to remind the American public who the enemy was.  Of course after the collapse of the former Soviet Union such blatant jingoistic stereotyping became an anachronism overnight which, we explained, was sort of the point of the joke.

The next time I played at that hall this waiter came over and told me that he'd started watching the Rocky and Bulwinkle Show on the Cartoon Network.  He said he found parts of it funny but wanted to know if the Boris and Natasha characters had really made my generation of American kids see all Russians as villains (I think he actually used the term 'bad guys').

I told him that on some level I sometimes subconsciously connected Russian accents with the 'bad guys' as a result of the show... but that I hoped that such simplistic cartoon images didn't have any relation to how I perceived individual Russians as an adult. 

He seemed to accept this and over the next few years, whenever I played at this hall he usually came over to tell me how he was doing with his studies at Brooklyn College... and to crack me up with an exaggeratedly accented rendition of 'Moose ent Skvirrel'.

The funny part is that now that I'm the new immigrant with the funny accent... this is the tape my sleep-deprived brain has decided to drag out of cold storage in the wee hours of the morning. 

It just goes to show you that the subconscious is always good for a giggle... and sometimes a sensitivity lesson.