Ramblings: Snapshots and Reminiscences From My Travels

Do you believe in fate? In 1974, I had made an ill fated trip to London, after which, I vowed never to cross the Atlantic again. Then in 1994, my boss at The Cleveland Play House, the late Josephine R. Abady, arranged for me to take The Ohio University/Play House Lab Company to an international theatre festival in Bratislava, Slovakia. I did not want to go. I did not want to take the play on The Holocaust we were taking. But most of all I did not want to meet up with an OU Alumnus who was now living in Bratislava. But all of those things happened, and as a result my life, both personal and artistic, was changed forever. Over the next thirteen years, I would make twelve trips to Europe for both business and pleasure. My travels would take me to The Czech and Slovak Republics, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Austria, Italy, England and Ukraine. What follows are some of my reminiscences about those trips. For the most part, they are not about the usual tourist sights, although there is some of that, but instead about places like the Old Jewish Cemetery in Vienna, an early morning open air market in Venice, a cheese maker's family I met on a mountain top in Switzerland, a meal in an old Blacksmith's forge in the Tatra Mountains, and the tears I shed upon first viewing Gustav Klimt's Beethoven frieze. These ramblings are also but about the people I met along the way. There's Daniela, the daughter of Rescuers, who went into exile from Czechoslovakia in 1968 and returned in 1994 to become the newly formed Slovak Republic's ambassador to the UN in Vienna. Others include Juraj Spitzer, a Jewish Resistance Fighter during WWII, David H., a director for the BBC World Service, and Heinz, my Swiss drinking companion in Ukraine, who guided me through the Alps. These ramblings also include some memories of my childhood and youth growing up in Michigan in the Eisenhower era, a time that seems almost quaint in comparison to the Twenty-First Century world of today.