London and Me

Welcome to London.

Unlike my trips to Montreal and Atlanta but rather more like my trips to other Olympic host cities, I’ve made only one trip to London which is, as of 2021 the only city to have hosted the Games on three different occasions. (Paris will become the second in 2024 and Los Angeles the third in 2028.) This trip happened long enough ago that I can’t recall the exact year and, frankly, this is a little embarrassing because this was the first time I’d traveled off the North American continent. I can tell you that the year was probably 1976 but may have been 1974 😕). I know that the trip happened during spring break while I was attending UMBC and, with a group of like minded theatre buffs, we would mainly be exploring the London theatre scene and its history. We’d see stage productions on alternate nights at the National Theatre, various theatres in the West End like The Palace,

[From Wikipedia By Matt May uploaded and derivative work: MrPanyGoff BY CC-SA-3.0Photo of the Palace Theatre but not from 1976!.]

and perhaps a show at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. (I suspect 1976 because I don’t think I had declared my IDNS major in 1974.) After 45 years, I can’t remember any of the shows we saw.

During the days we saw many of the expected sights – the Tower of London, the Tate Modern, the British Museum, Hyde Park, and the like. I also know that even if we didn’t see a show there, we had a day trip to Stratford to tour Shakespeare’s home.  Notwithstanding these gaps in my memory, I do retain a few vivid recollections that I shall recount anon.

Three indelible nights.

You might be wondering why I’ve headed this section as I have when I’ve stated that I can’t recall a single production we saw while in England. Let me explain.

When Michael Corleone sees Apollonia in The Godfather, his jaw drops and his face takes on an awestruck expression. One of his companions says, “I think you just got hit by the thunderbolt.”

When I walked into the hotel and saw the young woman working at the check-in desk, my jaw dropped and my face took on an awestruck expression. In front of me stood a stunning young woman with black hair and piercing blue eyes. Her face was rounder, her hair shorter, and not cut with bangs but with respect to her eyes, hair color, and complexion, she looked quite a bit like a woman named Sydney Endicott whose photo I found on Pinterest:.

Had I a British companion at the time, he might have said I was gobsmacked. I immediately moved to the back of our group so I could be the last to check-in because I needed a few moments to compose myself and perhaps think of something clever to say.

When I finally reached the desk and she welcomed me with a gentle Irish brogue, I think I responded as articulately as Ralph Kramden.

Fortunately for me (and I hope for her) I eventually found a measure of equanimity and began a normal conversation. Her name was Roisin (Roh-SHEEN) which means little rose. It wasn’t long before that conversation turned into a second, then a third, then a pint or two of half and half at a nearby pub, and ultimately a first night good night make out session that became a second night sleepover with very little actual sleep. I was young. It was the seventies. And, while it wasn’t late December, Oh, What a Night.

The phone call.

The phone call came on a night that wasn’t quite as glorious. Well, it wasn’t actually night. The phone call happened in the wee small hours of the morning. Those of us of a certain age can easily recall a time without mobile phones. A time when a long distance phone call of any kind  – let alone an international call – was both exotic and costly. A time when it was less expensive to make the call after 23:00. A time when there were things like person to person and collect calls that you made by first calling an operator who was a human being whose job it was to facilitate such phone calls. A time when houses with more than one physical phone were the exception not the rule. And when adolescent calls of, “I’ll get it!” echoed through the house lest our parents intervene in a call with a girlfriend or boyfriend. Such was still the time in the seventies.

So, given the rarity of such calls, I hope you can imagine my shock when the phone in my hotel room rang startling me awake sometime after 01:00. I recall the operator saying in a questioning tone, “Mister Todd Carton?” Following my affirmation, she said, “This is an international call. Please hold while I connect you.”

While I was holding, my mind raced from one panicked thought to another and my heart rose higher in my chest than it had when I first saw Roisin. Some catastrophe had to have befallen the family. Why else would they be calling let alone calling at this hour?

“Go ahead,” the operator said. Almost simultaneously I heard the voices of my parents. “Hi, Babe,” said my mother and a nearly simultaneous “Hello, Todd,” from my father. Mom asked if I was having a good time and, although I answered in the affirmative, she must have heard the hesitancy and incredulity in my tone. “It doesn’t sound like it.” I replied that it was nearly two in the morning, that I’d been sound asleep a few minutes ago, and that I was anticipating some terrible news because of the call.

As it turns out, my parents didn’t know that Great Britain had already changed to daylight savings time which added an hour to the time difference (not that it would have meant much of a change in my reaction). The reason for the call my father told me was that he wanted me to buy a Russian – English dictionary at a specific book store near Hyde Park. Somehow, he thought this was a very special dictionary that would be of particular help when his cousin Ilya visited. I don’t remember if I managed to fall back asleep.

The visit to Ealing.

During my college years, I had a certain ambivalence about my religion. I wavered between belief and non-belief, between adhering to Jewish custom and practice and flouting it. I don’t know which of these states held sway at that specific moment in time but one thing was certain, I was in a foreign country during Passover and felt the absence of family.

Of all the important Jewish holidays, Passover is the one most centered on home and family. The closest analogy for Christians in the U S would be Thanksgiving which, unlike Christmas and Easter eschews the church for a celebration at home. There are no special services to attend in a synagogue as there are on other Jewish holy days. Rather, we read a portion of the Haggadah at the Seder table,

[Photo of a Seder Table from WikiWand.]

share a meal, drink awful tasting wine, and complete the reading of the Haggadah.

Fortunately, believer or not, when you are Jewish, you are a member of the tribe and there are resources to tap almost anywhere in the world. In this instance, the resource I used was Hillel. I reached out to them and asked if they could find a family who would invite me to their Seder. They did just that.

The family, whose name I have long forgotten, but whose hospitality I have not, lived in Ealing about 10 miles west of central London. I was able to take the Tube to West Ealing where they picked me up. Happily, they didn’t observe the holiday the way a strictly Orthodox family might. In fact, it was so much like the manner we celebrated at home – breaking with tradition in the same manner and places that we did, sharing inside family jokes, and even having very similar food – that I couldn’t have felt more comfortable.

I thanked them profusely at the time, sent a small gift when I got home, and the next year mailed a photo of me and my family at our Seder.

This is the point in the previous posts where the next chapter would have the title “Notable happenings of the ___ Olympiad. However, since London has hosted the Games on three separate occasions, it demands a different approach. I, for one, found some of the highlights particularly interesting and encourage you to read them.