Maypole Dance

Thanks to everyone for writing to me with such encouraging remarks about the descriptions of my life posted every day here, come hell or high water, and that’s really true...read on. Sigh, here I am in the Sofitel Hotel lobby bar, sipping a Bier vom Fass, and charging the laptop for the second time today. The ancient fuses in my apartment went berserk and are now on strike. After the Schönberg House concert yesterday, then a leisurely coffee afterwards with my friend Christine, I returned to find a dark apartment, water covering the kitchen floor (slippery, from the freezer ice melting), and for two days and nights now have gone without power. Try finding an electrician in Vienna on a Friday afternoon. After searching for a couple of hours I did finally locate a live repairman, whose shop was still open, but he couldn’t be bothered to show up and repair whatever has gone wrong until Monday. Let's have a happier ending to the day...I’ll try to find a photo that looks....hopeful, not sad! In fact, here's a glimpse of the May Pole dance that Christine and I lucked into witnessing yesterday in Mödling, a village close enough to Vienna to be a suburb. This was a ribbon dance, where the white and red ribbons (Frauen took the white, Herren the red) were intertwined and plaited into a web. The dancers then retraced their steps exactly to unravel the ribbons---a spatial retrograde event, just down the street from Schönberg's house!