| August 1, 2003 - The good ship Gabriella |
| Dear Friends, one of the things that the students on the Swedish summer program can do is spend a weekend in Helsinki. You pay the costs prior to arriving in Sweden and the director of the program makes all the arrangements. To get to Helsinki, you go down to Stockholm and catch a Viking line ship called the Gabriella. It's not a little ferry at all. It has bars, restaurants, discos, and, of course, cabins for the passengers because it's an overnight trip. When you first start out from Stockholm, it's always nice to sit in the lounge/disco area because it's at the stern of the ship and you can watch the archipelago slide past. However, the lounge has an added attraction that many of us found amusing. They put on a kid's show around 5:00 p.m. On the way to Helsinki the show is in Finnish and on the way back to Stockholm it's in Swedish. The actors in the show don't really say anything; they just move their mouths to a pre-recorded soundtrack of dialogue and songs. Now, here's the funny part about the show. The main character is a cat who comes out wearing a red apron. The apron comes together in a peak at the front that makes him look likes he's sporting an enormous, raging erection! We were all totally mystified about what was going on and why this cat would have an erection for a kid's performance. Initially, the character interacts with a woman wearing a feather boa who laughs derisively at him and appears to say all kinds of hateful things in Finnish. Then he interacts with something that looks like a gigantic dolphin wearing a crown and carrying a trident. Then he meets up with a one-eyed seamonster, but the one eye is really just the mirror from a cosmetic case that's been sewn onto the head of the costume. In between their dialogues the characters also sing different kinds of songs and speak to the kids in the audience. Well, we were all just amazed as this cat swaggered around shaking his erection back and forth and bouncing it up and down. Of course, we couldn't help but laugh! After the woman with the feather boa danced around and jiggled herself at him, he took off his apron and pretended to swim across the stage and after that he began having conversations with the dolphin and the seamonster. At the end, he put his apron back on, but it was really a different apron, because when he turned sideways, it had "Gabriella" stitched on the side of it. Then we finally understood that the apron was supposed to represent a ship that he was sitting in! Can you believe that? We were reading all sorts of salacious meanings into everything and here the apron was just supposed to be the Gabriella. Well, I told several of my friends about this apron-erection thing and they said they absolutely had to see it on the way back to Sweden. So we all gathered in the lounge on the return trip and because it was in Swedish, we actually could figure out what the storyline was supposed to be. Apparently this cat is in a boat that has no name. The woman with the feather boa is supposed to be a mermaid that he meets who makes fun of the idea of a cat in a boat as well as the fact that the boat has no name. There were two teenage boys in the audience who apparently thought the apron looked like an erection, too, because they started laughing uproariously as the cat pranced around. And then they laughed even harder when the mermaid plucked at the "erection" and said, "What do you have there?" Needless to say, that put our table over the top, too, and it was difficult to stop laughing. The character that I thought was a dolphin was actually supposed to be an enchanted seahorse. It sends the cat on a mission to find a name for the ship. At one point the seahorse makes a statement that all seahorses can change color. And my friend, Ilse, turned to me and asked, "Is that true? Can seahorses change color?" And I answered, "In the universe of this performance they apparently can." Now, right after his conversation with the mermaid, the cat asked the kids in the audience what he should do to find a name for his ship. There were only about 7 kids there and they shouted out different things. The cat said, "You're all right. I'll swim to the bottom of the ocean!" That left the poor kids kind of confused and looking around at one another, because not a single one of them had made that suggestion. Unfortunately, just before the cat was to encounter the seamonster, we had to go join the rest of our classmates for din-din. But based on the Finnish version of the performance, I think we can surmise that the cat finally names his ship Gabriella. Next entry Previous entry Go to diary entries Go back home |