Thanksgiving Night at
the Bouzoukeria
Thanksgiving Day was notable for another
reason: it was the night that Edie's Greek class was invited out for a
night on the town by Hayley, a very sweet British student who is married to a
popular Greek singer named Giorgos Daskoulides, who's had several big hits on
the Greek club circuit. I was afraid that, after Thanksgiving Dinner and
hours and hours of feasting, I wouldn't be able to stay awake long enough to
make the show: the club doesn't open its doors until midnight! However,
thanks to a number of cups of the very good coffee we had after dinner, I was
able to make it up WAAAAY past my usual bedtime. And thank goodness --
this is the sort of thing that one really doesn't want to miss!
The
club is called the Embati North and is located in the northern suburb of
Kifissia, in a sort of service-road area along the National Road (until
recently, the only real highway in Greece). I met Iva, a Croatian-Canadian
student in the class, in front of the Athens Hilton, and we shared a cab up to
Kifissia. We had been told by Hayley that if our cab drivers didn't know
where the Embati North was, to tell them that it was very close to Rich &
Famous, an apparently well-know strip club. But with only a few wrong turns, and
the aid of his fellow cab drivers, Iva and I were able to make the half-hour
drive to the club for only EU 6.00 (very reasonable, I thought) and without any
panic.
Iva and I were only the second customers to
arrive at the club, shortly before midnight -- we had been preceded by the very
punctual German accountant from our class, Werner, and shortly thereafter we
were joined by Hayley, who had driven up from Glyfada (another suburb, but in
the opposite direction, along the coast) with Godert, our Dutch Proctor & Gamble
marketing executive. A whole raft of other students from the other Greek
class, whom I don't know by name, joined us in awhile, including the daughter of
a very famous Greek-German singer, whose name has been whispered to me on
numerous occasions but which I'm afraid I can never remember. Hayley had
obtained for us the table right in front of the stage, so that we wouldn't miss
a thing.
After our visit to the smoky club Gagarin 205
back in October, I was afraid that I might have to spend the evening off in the
parking lot, but luckily the Embati North is quite a bit more upscale and
actually had a decent ventilation system. (Also, the clientele
didn't seem to chain-smoke nearly as much as the ex-punks at the Gagarin!)
There were tables with white tablecloths and vases of fresh flowers, and strings
of twinkle lights. There seemed to be a mix of students and young
professionals, businessmen, and middle-aged couples with their friends or
relatives. Everyone was dressed to the nines, men in suits, women in
mostly black spandex:
we
had a table of young women next to us, all in their 20's, it seemed, and all in
tight black evening outfits. I had vacillated on what to wear, and decided
on black slacks and a black and tan blouse, which turned out to be acceptable if
not exactly exciting and not nearly tight enough for this crowd!
We had been warned by our Greek teacher how the
whole business operates: Every table comes with its bottle of whiskey, for
which they charge an astronomical fee (EU 120.00 in this case, which is real
money: about $144.00 at the current exchange rate!). It claimed to
be 15 year old scotch by the name of Dimple, but it sure tasted like Kentucky
bourbon to me.
There were bottles of Coke and of mineral water to mix it with. Hayley had
very generously agreed to provide the cover charge and the first bottle of
whiskey, plus to provide some trays of carnations for us. These carnations
are sold by women who walk around the club in skimpy outfits and sell the trays
at four trays for EU 50.00 -- the flowers are then flung at the performers in
lieu of breaking plates, which has now been outlawed by the Greek government.
There were plates of pistachios, and trays of fresh fruit, since the Greeks very
sensibly refuse to serve alcohol without food to accompany it. All in all,
it reminded me of nothing so much as a weird permutation of the El Morocco or
the Stork Club 50 or 60 years ago in New York, with their cigarette girls and
hat check girls -- aimed at the wealthy and the upwardly mobile.
The music started around 12:30 with a couple of
girl singers, Eva Milli and Theano
(who
seems to go by one name), in very tight outfits, a la Madonna by way of Britney
Spears, with a lot of skin showing, singing and doing a vigorous but not very
athletic style of stage dancing. There was a big boxy microphone box
attached to the very low back of one of their dresses. They were joined by
another male singer with very moussed-up hair. There were about eight
musicians in the back of the stage, playing electric instruments: guitar,
bass, keyboard, etc.
It
was all a variation of standard club Europop with some Greek pop hits thrown it,
which I recognized from my husband and my daughter's incessant playing of a
couple of popular CD's. The songs were non-stop -- one hit after another
-- although the singers changed configuration occasionally. Whenever one
of the girls would reappear, she would be wearing some new skimpy outfit.
"Look at that one!" I gasped to Hayley, when one singer appeared in a
particularly short and tight Op Art outfit. "And that's the only reason
she's here, " replied Hayley, "because she sure can't sing."
Ooooh, backstage politics. The outfits were rather astounding: check
out the Marilyn Monroe dress in the photo.
Finally, around 1:30, Giorgos and his partner,
Spiros Spirkos, arrived onstage, and the real event began. The most
obvious Europop was over, and the singing became more obviously Greek and with
more Turkish influence, it seemed to me. His style of singing is very
Greek, but not at all the traditional rembetika music that you might be familiar
with from records or movies. It is, instead, a very Greek mixture of
Europop (of the Julio Iglesias variety) with an insistent oriental sound akin to
belly-dancing ("Oriental Delight", for those members of the Folta family who
can't ever forget it). See Gary's article on Greek music, when he gets
around to posting it! I can never remember the singers or the songs, but
it was great fun to try to identify the various influences as I heard them.
It's
definitely not my sort of music (and I still think longingly of the amazing and
powerful Thanassis Papakonstantinopoulos show at the Gagarin that we were forced
out of by the smoke) but you can hear echoes of the sort of music that I do
like, and Giorgos and his partner really do have beautiful voices and great
stage presence: real stars. Much duet singing, much bowing and
entwining of microphones, and arms around shoulders. Giorgios was nice
enough to join us at our table after his set, and of course when he was back
onstage, had to sing especially for his wife.
As promised by our teacher, as the night wore
on, the dancing began: the girls at the next table got up in their black
outfits and high heels and danced on the table;
they
got up on stage and danced with each other and with the students from our table
(not me!) and with the middle-aged couples and their cousins. After
awhile, a few of the men got up and danced solo, while another man would crouch
at the edge of the stage and clap rhythm for them. The women danced
together with their arms around each other's shoulders, and danced for each
other with sinuous movements which were based on belly dancing but were very
slow and sensual. During these dances, they never made eye contact with
any man: it was a display for men, but obviously it was taboo to make any
eye contact with men or to acknowledge in any way that they were watching;
instead, the women looked at each other and complimented each other on their
moves, woman to woman. It was very striking, and reminded me immediately
of an idiom that Gary had learned in his Greek class: "to take out one's
eyes for someone" which means, rather literally, to get it on with someone.
Obviously, eye contact is very rigorously monitored in this culture.
The carnations started being flung onto the
stage, right at the performers, who sometimes flung them back, and occasionally
one of the carnation girls would take four trays of flowers right up on stage,
stand right next to the singer, and dump them one by one down the front of his
suit in what seemed to me a somewhat aggressive manner -- but this was all taken
in stride by the performers.
Every once in awhile, between songs, a couple of club employees would leap
onstage with brooms and vigorously sweep the carnations to the back of the
stage, to make room for more to be flung, and then leap back off again.
"New career option!" I shouted to Godert, who hasn't made any headway in the
Greek job market.
Finally, about 4 am, things were winding down
-- the carnations were gone, everyone was exhausted, and the taxi ride back to
Athens or wherever remained to be ridden. To Godert's horror, the whiskey
still wasn't finished, and he did his manful best to rectify that situation.
The taxis were called, the very quick trip down Kifissias Avenue driven, and I
crawled in the gate of the American School around 4:30 am -- and, amazingly
enough, woke up in time to go to my Greek class at 9:30 and recount the whole
previous 24 hours -- but I was too tired to manage to describe it in anything
but English.
-- Edie Folta, November
30, 2003
.