Click here to subscribe today or Login.
First thought: Look! Coneheads! And they’re dancing with members of the Gold Babushkas, an Eastern European version of our Red Hat Society.
Second thought: When was the last time Hazleton Area High School saw this many young women in scarves that completely hide their hair, and skirts so low they have to leap to show a little leg?
Once the Tamburitzans start doing their Eastern European folk dances, my thoughts often swirl as fast as some of their whirling human circles, flitting from idea to idea as frequently as their hands slap and feet stomp.
The men donned those furry conical caps (seen in a picture in Monday’s paper) during Serbian “Vlach dances.” Vlach, as near as I can tell, is an ethnic group found near the Romanian border. In fact, if I heard right, the unseen announcer during Sunday’s show conjured a meeting of a young man and a woman in the Serb hills. “You are Vlach, I am Serb. Let’s Dance!”
The “Tammies,” for the uninitiated, are a group of full-time students at Duquesne University who tour the country doing these shows with colorful costumes and a dizzying array of folk instruments.
My personal favorite this year was the dance from Slovakia (my ancestral haunts). I thought, a la the often-addled Abe Simpson in the cartoon series, “This reminds me of a time I can’t remember, and a celebration that may never have existed, and an old country I’ve never visited.”
The efficiency and versatility of these guys could be a model for most of us (maybe the county could bring them in as courthouse consultants). Some musicians switched from trumpet to violin to mandolin-style instruments. I once watched a show from the wings at the Kirby Center. Many costume changes occurred just out of public view, a vortex of clothes and people appearing and disappearing on the edges of the stage like so much colorful dust gusting in and out.
Precision vs. patchwork on display
For 16 years, these wunderkinds have come to our area thanks primarily to former Tamburitzan Andrew Buleza. Full disclosure: He gave my wife tickets so we could take my mom, though I would have gladly paid. Too often the auditoriums seem half-empty. This one had few open seats, thanks partly to two busloads of fans from out of town.
This was the first time the crew came to Hazleton, and I guess it was inevitable that sitting in the high school auditorium would spark memories unrelated to dance. My earliest memory there is March 1995, when School District officials held a state-mandated public meeting on “Project 2000,” a districtwide renovation and construction project.
Back then, they pegged the cost at about $44 million, and promised it would handle district enrollment for a decade or more. By the time it was done, the cost had roughly doubled and the newly reshaped district saw buildings already overflowing with students. More money was spent to reopen the former Hazleton High School as an elementary school, but enrollment is still bumping the building-capacity ceiling.
It’s a story that seems the exact opposite of the Tamburitzans. While they show coordination and precision timing, the high school they performed in symbolizes, in some ways, grand mistakes and patchwork solutions. They bring endless energy; the school and Project 2000 brought arguments.
That faded with the lights. The Tammies made the auditorium what a school needs to be: Not a site of contention, but a center of community.