Showtime in Batumi

Here in Georgia, there are two things you can count on.

The first is that things that you expect to happen either happen late or don't happen at all.

The other is that things you don't expect to happen, happen all the time. If you're the sort of person who likes a well-regulated life and regular feeding-times, do yourself a favor and stay out of the Caucasus.

Case in point: last Saturday afternoon I was minding my own business.

That same morning I had been to an orientation class for new teachers of English. However, for me anyway, the orientation session became moot when my fellow teachers from Public School #117, owing to a scheduling foul-up, didn't show up. I, who speak a total of four words of Georgian, was the only teacher from #117 there. Not much of an emissary for the others. Sorry.

So, for me anyway, the class was tentatively rescheduled for Monday (tentatively is the way we do everything here in Georgia), which was okay with me, and off I went to spend the afternoon having lunch and shopping with my pal Jason, another teacher.

Late that afternoon, tired, I was walking back to my tiny Soviet-style apartment in the Tbilisi district of Varketili, when my cellphone rang. It was one of the young women from Teach and Learn with Georgia, the Georgian government agency that brought us all over here to teach.

I assumed that she was calling to reschedule my orientation class (again.)

No. She had something else in mind. Apparently, at the 11th-and-a-half hour, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili had decided to invite all of us TLG English teachers to attend the premiere of Keto and Kote, a new musical based on the three-act comic opera by Georgian composer Viktor Dolidze. Written in 1919, the opera was adapted as a film in 1948. So the story has been around for a while. It's familiar here in Georgia.

The new Batumi Opera House, where the premiere of Keto and Kote
took place on Sunday, Sept. 19, 2011.

But this new musical treatment of it coincided with the recent opening of the new opera house in Batumi, on the Black Sea. Saakashvili was planning to attend, and decided to invite of all of us. We were to be provided with transportation to and from Batumi, a luncheon on the way, and overnight accommodations.
As guests of the government.

Hey, who could turn down such an offer?

Ah, but then came the kicker. "We leave tomorrow morning," she said.

"Tomorrow MORNING?"

"Sorry, we didn't get much notice either. If you would like to go, be in front of the Radisson at 8 a.m."

I was about to drop with fatigue from the afternoon's shopping, but I said, "Yes, of course. I'll be there." I'm a guest in this country, and furthermore, working for its Education Ministry. Am I going to turn down an invitation from the president? Not likely. Besides, I'd been wanting to see Batumi.

So, I went home, showered, packed my backpack for the road, had a beer, read for a while and went to bed.

Sunday morning at 7 a.m. sharp, I was hiking toward the Varketili Metro station to get myself up to where that bus was (hopefully) waiting.

When I got there I found a lot of my fellow TLG teachers milling around. (Milling around is something we do real well. We do a lot of it.) Most were quietly chit-chatting, smoking, watching the TLG supervisors try and round everyone up for the road, assign us to buses. (There were two, plus a smaller bus of the sort known here in Georgia as a "Marshutka." This is something sort of halfway between a bus and a van. They carry maybe half-a-dozen passengers. You can hail them the way you'd hail a taxi, and they run all over the country, usually at breakneck speed, dodging cows and goats in the road. They're scary, but they're probably the fastest road transportation in all of Georgia.)

Some teachers, familiar with the tried-and-true Georgian tradition of hurry-up-and-wait, were wandering across Rustaveli Avenue to McDonald's for coffee. Now that it was after eight a.m., McDonald's was open. Yes, believe it or not, in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, nothing and I mean nothing, is ever open before 8 a.m. and that includes McDonald's. Before eight a.m. the only people doing business here are the cab drivers. I was astounded at this until someone reminded me that the Georgian work day generally doesn't start until 10 a.m. We Americans, with our puritan work ethic, are scuttling to our offices at dawn; the Georgians have a somewhat more laid-back attitude toward life and work. Tbilisi is buttoned up tight until eight a.m. every day; the only 24/7 business you'll ever find here is an occasional gas station.

The bus pulled out of Tbilisi at nine a.m. for the drive to Batumi, which normally takes about six hours. But between getting stuck behind trucks going through the mountains, our sumptuous lunch break along the road, and traffic generally, the trip took more like eight hours.

That wouldn't have been a problem, were it not for the fact that the curtain was to go up at 7:30 and they were NOT going to hold the curtain for us. After all, the president of Georgia was going to be there! It was nearly 6 p.m. by the time my particular group reached its hotel, the super-luxurious Radisson Batumi. I waited to see how our "handlers" were going to handle this.

I soon found out. Word shortly came down from hotel management that nobody was going to be allowed to check into their rooms until after the show. There just wasn't going to be time beforehand.

We were told that if we wished, we could go up to the men's and women's spas on the third floor and change clothes, but that was about all they could do for us at that point.

So I did that. In the men's spa on the third floor I found my colleague Aman, calmly and unhurriedly shaving.

"Don't we have to hurry up, Aman?" I asked him.

"Probably not," he said. "Anyway, I'm going to take a shower." He proceeded to do just that, and as I shaved and changed into my own clean clothes, we visited, sang Tom Petty songs together while he was in the shower ... Aman's my captain. I go where he goes.

He turned out to be right. After we had both shaved, and he had showered, and we had gotten into our clean clothes for the theater, we had plenty of time to make it to the bus.

The theater in Batumi is indeed brand-new, and gorgeous. I wish it had a cloakroom, though; I held my hat and jacket on my lap through the entire performance of Keto and Kote. I think President Saakashvili was indeed there; there were TV cameras all over the place, anyhow. But I don't know what he looks like, so I'll accept it on faith that he was somewhere down in the orchestra section. I was in the balcony, on the right side, precisely where I had sat at the Vienna State Opera on New Year's Day 1988 when my then-bride Chris and I saw Die Fledermaus on our wedding trip. It brought back memories.

Keto and Kote is a bit of a puzzler unless you see it in perspective. On the surface, it's a re-telling of the Romeo and Juliet legend (sort of) with a happy ending. But look a little deeper, historically: 1948 was the year of the so-called 'Zhdanovschina', when Josef Stalin's cultural henchman Tikhon Khrennikov was sending trouble in the way of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and other composers whose music had displeased Stalin. (Our bus passed nearby Stalin's home town of Gori going both ways.) This show, in its 1948 film version, was the kind of thing that the Composer's Union thought 'safe' in those days. Evidently even Stalin liked the film, and the original opera.

But that's all ancient history now. Today it's just fun, and that's obviously what this new adaptation was all about. It celebrated the Georgian spirit of revelry, dance (and yes, good Georgian wine) in a tongue-in-cheek production characterized by colorful costumes, dazzling lighting effects, and of course, lots of athletic dancing.

When we all got back to the hotel after the show, a little surprise awaited us. Lado Arteneli, the show's lead baritone, was staying at the same hotel at which we had all been put up, the Radisson. When I got back, there he was in the lobby, chit-chatting with admiring audience members and autograph-seekers. I chatted him up a bit myself, (he told me that he's going to be singing Amonasro in Aida at the Met this coming February) and, yes, I got his autograph too.

It was getting late. I called my old girlfriend Nadya up in Moscow to tell her that I was in Batumi,what I had just seen and how I had come to be there. Then, intensely fatigued after eight hours on the road followed by an evening at the theater, I declined to join my TLG friends in an excursion to a local Georgian restaurant. I sat at the bar in the Radisson, had a beer or two, ordered a Caesar salad from the hotel menu, and then went up to my room to shower, read for a while and get some sleep.

The next day, Monday, we saddled up around 11 a.m. and began the long drive back to Tbilisi. Most of my fellow sojourners slept much of the way back, except for the crowd down on the lower deck of the bus that had a non-stop poker game going. (They were playing for Georgian coins of denominations smaller than one Lari) I read in David Copperfield, the book I had brought along to kill the road hours, (it's thick and therefore good for killing hours of any kind) looked at the incomparable Georgian landscape as the bus rolled along, and thought about the rewards that sometimes accrue from life when you don't know what to expect, and don't waste too much time worrying about it.