The big dance at Zmaj. My first success as the president of youth league, I negotiated and managed to finally get a permission. Today at 16:30. In other news, it's stiff winter already, and we're under a bout of shanghai (aka hongkong) flu. For one, Tejka is absent.
The dance didn't quite start as scheduled, becuase in the next room there was a TV and the boys were watching basketball. Barely managed to persuade a few of them to move over, the girls are waiting... so it began. The girls: Rencika, D. K., V. P., Dragana, Oli Boj, Duca (wasn't dancing), Bosa and a few others, specially it seems all of them from VIII1. Two or three guys from my class, Bora, Vasa. I wrote down which girls I danced with... there were several, and it seems I was busy all evening. Nothing came of it, but it was fun and it was exciting in a way. We were learning to party.
On 20th, we managed to organize another one. More girls this time - Tejka (cured now), and few others from my class. There was a problem with the record player: the one that works was away, the rhythmical sekcija took it, they were performing somewhere. The other one was somewhere, and we managed to find it (the literature teacher, that is, the classmaster of VIII1, who is usually thought to be stiff and unfriendly, seems to have warmed up for the cause and would sometimes even smile on something we'd do... and now, 50 years later, I think she was cute). The motor of it didn't work, so I almost went home to get mine (though I don't know what we'd use for amplifier and how would we connect it), but then it started working... and then it stopped. "Look, if you want to cut me into pieces, use something else, not this" said I and went home and brought the Emona. Power strips weren't invented yet, so we sought a splitter, the ugly contraption which did the same job of turning one outlet into up to three. We somehow plugged things together and at 17:20 it started.
First I danced with Tejka, tough reluctantly, because she was a bit taller than me (which will be rectified in the spring, but who could guess, and didn't seem so at the moment). She started humming "Smem li da ti kažem 'mila'?" by Boba Stefanović, same as Dragana was humming to whoever she was dancing with at the moment. The earworm of the evening. Dragana, on the other hand, ran to me to dance, because the nutty M. from VIII/4 was trying to get her to dance third time. I've observed the first couple of times, he held her at arm's length - customary at the time was a hand's breadth, or no distance at all (for steady going couples or when you're both in the mood).
Patak came by, but the teacher wouldn't let him in, he's overage, already in MPSŠC or wherever, and Rencika was so very sad (it seems they reheated the sarma meanwhile). So she sat by the record player and played the records.
Then in my diary I went ruminating about the neighborhood. The first house is an odd bunch. The old guy is a jolly old joker. He used to be a director of a slaughterhouse, but they caught him trying to fuck some young girl who worked there, which is an abuse of position so he was beaten up by her friends. His wife is an old, evil eye nag, whom I never heard say a kind word. Their son got married a couple of years ago. They have a a boy (and then several years later a daughter). The kid is permanently shuffled to the next house, where another old woman lives with her daughter and a grandson. That kid was the smallest in our gang, kind of confused but a good pal. There's also a father, who is more away than here, travelling architect, he brought the first Legos that we ever saw, probably some 8 years ago. The mother is taking visitors, permanently wearing the dressing gown (don't remember her in anything else), eyebrows plucked high. Now that I think of it, she was probably sexy for the times, but never my type. The story was that they have a villa on the Montenegro coast and a house in some other part of town, probably unfinished, because they were still here - but, true, they sold the place (and Zina's grandfather, the lousy mason, bought it). The kid grew, at this time, into something nasty and naively cunning, never talked straight but didn't quite have the street smarts to get away with his lies. Next house, several families in there, prob'ly some tennants, and one snotty kid, a couple of years younger than us, always spoiled our games, did wrong things and would at times get so angry for some reason that he'd be fuming and growling (he died in 2019 or 2020). Next was M., at this time a rather fat girl, who was my next best friend when I was 5 - I even let her in through the window when my folks were away and I was alone in the house (she died... dunno, around 2000 or so, and her mother at about 2012, in a private nursing home; she was very pretty, a real lady of the times). Next a typical Banat family, practically peasants, with a špicnamet completely different and unrelated to their surname. The surname I actually never knew until the old man died and I saw it nailed, in plastic letters, on his coffin. The son and daughter were both quite fat, and when he got married, the wife got fat likewise. They later had a son and daughter.
In the other direction on our side of the street, Kale. His father is a Slovak, mom a Hungarian, and his older sister is, as I wrote down, passed from the previous marriage of one of them - I'd guess mother's, as her name was hungarian. She never looked thin, but then never went above somewhat plump. The mother spoke serbian with lots of hungarian accent, lack of gender, random cases and substituted words. They had an old cat, I think it lived to 13 years. Next was the aunt, probably on mother's side, whom we'd visit once or twice a year. She lived alone and... I actually know nothing about her, but the surname.