Save the Bulgarian Nurses!

This past week I attended a benefit concert at the Opera House for the Bulgarian nurses on trial in Libya. For those “out of the know”, 5 Bulgarian nurses have been sentences to death for infecting over 400 children in a Libyan hospital with HIV. The only evidence Libya has is confessions of the nurses obtained under torture. Interestingly, although the nurse have been in jail, tortured and raped for 7 years, no one has really cared until now. Anyway, that’s a grim background for a story of an entertaining benefit concert.

My friend was given a single ticket to the concert and asked if I wanted to tag along. I said “sure” because in my 2 previous trips to the Opera House, the performance was neither full, nor did anyone bother to check if I had a ticket. On this occasion they did actually check tickets – at several locations, but my friend always went first and I was able to follow closely behind before anyone had a chance to check if I had one. I was quite surprised by the audience’s attire – many people were wearing suits and dresses. My friend was dressed nicely, but I was wearing jeans, a baseball shirt, and a frumpy fleece. Before arriving I didn’t think anything of my attire since my last trip here (to see Puccini’s opera, Tosca), something I would assume to have the highest standards of dress, had an average dress attire much like mine was now. Perhaps it was the out of character attire that allowed me to confuse and subvert the ticket collecting staff long enough to get to an open seat (of which there were many – as per my previous experiences here).

The lights dimmed and the concert began with two narrators speaking from one of the private balconies to the side of the stage. I only caught parts of the conversation since it was all in Bulgarian, but there were obviously talking about the nurses. While the narrators spoke, pictures from the nurses and trial in Libya flashed on a large screen over the stage. These were interesting for a few minutes until I realized they only had 6 pictures. That might have hindered other benefit concerts, but not this one. Those 6 photos were flashing on the screen for the next 2 ½ hours. I felt like I was watching the ads before a movie where they keep repeating the “unscramble the actors name”. It reached a point, probably somewhere around the second hour, where I had all the wall patterns behind the nurses memorized. All I can say is that the Libyans chose poor wall patterns for their courthouse.

I didn’t spend all two and a half hours watching the photos of course. They did have some performances between narrations – it was a benefit concert, after all. First of all, I want to give all performances an A for effort. The grade for actual execution varied widely between acts.

The first performance was a group of children doing some traditional Bulgarian singing. It was the call-and-response type singing that I heard a couple months earlier in some of our cultural excursion trips. Not my favorite type of music, but very appropriate for this venue. Aside from some confusion as to how to get off the stage following their performance, the children did a pretty good job.

The second performance was an orthodox choir. At least several of them were orthodox priests, and possibly all of them were. Usually orthodox priests have big beards, hats and black robes. However, they were wearing choir robes so I couldn’t see what they had on underneath, and not all priests have the big beards and hats. Anyway, they were horrible. You know how in small churches there are always a few bad singers in the choir just because they need bodies to fill the choir? Well, take all those bad singers and make a choir out of just them and you have this orthodox choir. In addition to their tone-deafness and inability to start verses together, their last song was complete mumbling. I had to look close to verify they had not replaced the choir with a group of mentally challenged kids. I couldn’t tell if that was how the song went or everyone just forgot the words. It took all my willpower not to laugh out loud. I think the endless droning had an effect on one of the narrators. After the choir exited, the spotlight went back to the narrator booth. One of them was standing; ready to speak, while the other one appeared to have dozed off for a bit. The bright spotlight woke him up a little too fast causing him to fall out of his seat. For a second all you saw his hand over the edge of the railing before his full body emerged – slightly crumpled script in hand.

After the mumbling priests came the real highlight of the show, “Lily Ignatova’s Bulgarian Dream Dancers” (yes, that is actually what they are called). In terms of competitive athletics Bulgaria is pretty mediocre in most respects. However, in the field of rhythmic dancing, they are superstars. Nobody knows this because no one has any idea what the hell rhythmic dancing is. You know those girls at the Olympics that swirl around those little ribbons on a stick? Those are rhythmic dancers. You usually watch them for a few minutes before turning back to something more exciting, like curling. To show how interested the world is in rhythmic dancing – the Rhythmic Dancing World Championships this year were held in Azerbaijan (where the Bulgarian team won). Now there’s a highly sought after venue. The other thing Bulgarians are good at is Bulgarian folk dancing (amazing, huh?). So, Lily Ignatova, who was a rhythmic dancing star (at least in Bulgaria) back in the 80’s, decided to put together Bulgaria’s two athletic competencies in one show. Aside from performing at Bulgarian benefit concerts, they are also putting together a show called “Legend” which they’ll be touring around the US next year.

The “Legend” show is financed by a wealthy American who thinks it will be the next “Riverdance” and will take Vegas by storm. He gets the Bulgarians all riled up by saying that “Riverdance” increased tourism to Ireland by 400% and “Legend” will do the same for Bulgaria. I think he overlooks several key facts that Americans would take into account when planning holidays such as:
1) People in Ireland speak English
2) Americans have heard of Ireland. Several of them might even be able to identify it on a map.
3) The cost to get to Ireland is 4x lower than the cost to get to Bulgaria
4) Ireland has an image of beauty and rich history. Bulgaria has an image of Olympic weightlifters from the 1980’s.
5) Ireland’s capital city is more aesthetically pleasing, being made up of something other than concrete communist style housing blocks
6) Ireland has more than 3 golf courses in the entire country
7) etc., etc..

Anyway, despite the fact I think it will have minimal impact on tourism, I think the show is worth seeing (I saw it here in Sofia a few weeks ago) so keep an eye out for it in the US next year.

So back to the benefit concert – the Dream Dancers put on a fabulous performance. It was different than any part of the Legend show so it was all new to me. They twirled those ribbons around like real professionals.

The next performance was another out-of-tune group who sang a medley of songs from the musical Hair. I got excited when I heard the instrumental opening since I recognized the melody, but quickly lost any excitement when the singers opened their mouths.

Next came a rock trio who were probably popular in the early 80’s. One guy was sporting the classic permed 80’s rock mullet. Another would have been sporting the same look, except a significant portion of his hair had fallen out so it didn’t have quite the same body and bounce. The lead singer had his hair slicked back as if to say, “All I need is a quick wash and blow-dry and I too will have a bushy mullet.”

Next came a male/female duet who were in tune and probably one of the best performances of the evening. It also didn’t hurt that the female was pretty hot.

For the last couple acts the Bulgarians decided they’d throw some effects processing into the voice amplification. The next singer was a female (I’m sure all of these singers have names and are famous in Bulgaria, but I don’t know who they are) singing some pop-ish tunes. Anyway, there is a voice effect, usually used in recording, where you delay the voice by a few milliseconds and play it over the live voice. You can do this several times to make it sound like there are several people singing at once. The number of “background singers” depends on how many times you offset the main voice. Well, the Bulgarians thought 432 times is a good number of delays, so every time she opened her mouth it sounded like you were getting hit by the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir. A bit much, I thought.

The final singer, and highlight of the show, was Bulgarian pop diva Lily Ivanova (I knew she was famous by the way everyone clapped when she came out, but I didn’t know she was a pop diva until after the show). Lily looked about 50 years old with bleach blond hair. Luckily the sound technicians decided to go without the offset, but they sure did found out where the echo button was. Think Elvis Presley recording times 50. I think I they had left the speakers on Lily’s voice would still be singing today.

Lily was the final performance. Afterwards all the singers came onstage for some Bulgarian “We Are the World” type song. One of the audience members was brought up who I think was a mother of one of the nurses. She spent her few precious moments on the stage telling Lily how amazed she was to see her so close in person. I thought to myself that, aside from thinking she could use a bit less peroxide in her hair, I probably wouldn’t pay her any notice on the street.

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