Last month I went to the town of Kasperkeho Hory with my friends Troy, Clare and their dog Money. We were invited to perform for an orphanage there. Clare has a face painting business, Troy does experimental puppet theatre, and I would be entertaining the kids with my repertoire of Jacques Brel songs played on my Honer diatonic accordion. This was to be our first orphanage performance and if it went well we would be performing the whole orphanage circuit in the Czech Republic.
The Orphan House at Kasperkeho Hory is a bright orange building just off the main square in town. It was an old school house built in the late 1800’s. Inside the front door are photos from the early part of the century of groups of uniformed children engaged in calisthenics, hauling coal on their backs, standing at attention with toy rifles over their shoulders, assembling a military aircraft surrounded by old plane parts, etc. Aside from some distant hip hop playing, the building was strangely quiet. It was not a bustling scene of pandemonium and shenanigans, like out of some Charles Dickens novel or Shirley Temple movie.
The first children we saw were quietly seated around a large circular table playing cards. They ranged in age from approximately nine to 17. I was surprised to see the older boys smoking cigarettes. But it was the very young Romany boy with the large glasses who was apparently the big winner, having three large towers of chips stacked up in front of him.
The head of the Orphanage came hurrying down the stairs to meet us. Her name is Paní Bila. Mrs. White. She did not speak much English, but basically we were made to understand that she had a family emergency to attend to and that we would be left alone with the children until 9 pm when the next caretaker came on duty. That gave us three hours. More than enough time to prepare and perform. However, the idea that we were going to be left entirely in charge of this group of children was a bit unnerving.
Before she left, Mrs. White introduced us to some of the older children who would assist us and take care of any problem we might have. I didn’t know what sort of problems Mrs. White might expect to happen, but the broad shouldered Roman, who kept cracking his knuckles while Mrs. White spoke, seemed capable of handling just about any situation.
“You like hip hop?” Roman asked after Mrs. White had said her goodbyes.
“Sure. We love hip hop,” said Clare.
Roman waved us into the next room where he had a boom box set up and a stack of cassettes. He placed one of the cassettes into the machine and hit play.
….gonna getcha bitch ya oughta make me hotta gotta lotta hotchie momma rub ya boda suck my wad ah…
Roman, square shouldered, head bobbing, eyes shut, was savoring the exquisite perfection of the beautifully integrated rhythm and prose. Three girls of about twelve years old entered the room, drawn there like mice to the melody of a pied piper. They paid no attention to the three adult foreigners and began to dance like extras on a Little Kim video, their pelvises gyrating, their shoulders back, legs apart.
…suck my sweat ya bet ya get the rest or just the sex ya think ya need confess ta this or can I just enlist your clit to sit upon the crest of this…
I could tell by Troy’s expression that he was thinking how to rework his puppet act to be more in tune with his audience. I had already warned him before we even got here that a twenty minute abridgement of The Prime of Miss Jane Brody was probably not going to work as a hand puppet performance at a Czech orphanage. But I think we both had entirely different expectations of what we would find here.
