CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

In northern central Greece, halfway between Athens and Thessalonika (about three hours drive from either), is the city of Volos on the Pagasitikos Gulf. Mythology places this as the point from which Jason and his Argonauts sailed in their trireme in search of The Golden Fleece. It's a good-sized city, about a quarter-million population, an industrial seaport and tourist center but not very well-known. Behind Volos rises Mount Pelion, one mile high, dotted with small villages, apple and pear orchards and olive groves. Pelion is the mythical home of the centaurs: half-man, half horse. It's a pretty, quiet place.

Halfway up the mountain, a 17 kilometer drive, is the village of Drakeia, an old Greek word meaning "palm of the hand" because the village sits in a valley like, well, like it was sitting in the palm of a giant's hand. The 800 residents of Drakeia are mostly apple farmers and goatherds. That's pretty much it. They work hard in their orchards all day and drink tsipouro (an anise-flavored booze similar to ouzo but homemade) in the kafeneio at night. They go to church on Sundays and some of them may be centaurs but they keep pretty much to themselves.

One winter evening in 1992, a number of the residents were sitting around in the kafeneio discussing how quiet things were. There isn't much to do in the orchards during the winter, which is why tsipouro was invented, but the owner of the kafeneio was lamenting the lack of tourism over the last few years. Not that Drakeia is a tourist stop; "quaintly provincial and unsullied" would be more like it. And good tsipouro. Everyone was listening quietly including the village doctor, an Englishwoman with Greek nationality, and her boyfriend, an American expatriate engineer who had lived in Greece for six years and learned the language.

"Didn't the village have a Carnival celebration, like Patras does, many years ago?" asked the doctor. (Carnival in Rio and Mardi Gras in New Orleans take place the week before Lent and consist of parades with costumes, floats, music, royalty and lots of booze.) "That would bring people in."

"That was a long time ago" said a village elder. "There was one man in the village who was a carpenter. He built a wonderful float: a big airplane of wood. It took him a year. He's dead now and no one else knows how to build things like that. And it would be very expensive. This is a poor village." Greek optimism.

"We could do groups," said one of the women. "Like, well, fruit. This is a fruit-growing village. The children could be fruit. We could make costumes."

"Too expensive. Too much work. Not enough people to sew."

The American engineer sat quietly at a table in the corner, drinking tsipouro and idly sketching on a napkin. (In my study of technological innovation, it's amazing the prominent roles played by alcohol and napkins in the creative process.) "Let's ask him," said the doctor. "He's a theatre engineer." So they did.

"Well," said the American, "wonderful three-dimensional shapes can be built using cardboard from appliance boxes and duct tape." He showed them the napkin sketches. "An apple is just a bunch of segments, called vesica, taped together to form a sphere. You can make any sort of fruit or any shape out of cardboard sheets by curving them both with and against the corrugations, then putting people inside."

"American technology!" said the woman.

"Actually it was Euclid and Pythagoras, a couple of Greek guys," said the American.

So the men started bringing cardboard boxes up the mountain each day in their pickup trucks: refrigerator boxes, oven boxes, television boxes. And rolls and rolls of packing tape. The women cut and bent and taped. The children painted. The American drank tsipouro and sketched designs. They built apples, pears, bananas and bunches of grapes. They built a team of cooking utensils: teapots, skillets, clocks, refrigerators and ovens. They built a team of beverage containers: beer bottles, tsipouro glasses, soda cans and wine barrels. Then the American built a huge motorized dragon and the doctor rode her horse as Saint George and slayed it. It was a wonderful parade. There was a queen and four princesses. Thousands of people came up the mountain to see it and they drank and danced and spent lots of money. It made the national television. The parade became an annual tradition again.

The villagers became masters at the art of three-dimensional cardboard modeling. Farmers and goatherds relearned the concepts of solid and spherical geometry. Five years later, watching the parade over a glass of tsipouro, the American laughed and said: "Two generations from now, some cultural anthropologist is going to discover this and wonder what the hell happened here." Then he went back to America.

I miss tsipouro. Ouzo isn't quite the same.

Tomorrow I'll post Part 3: Corrugated cardboard, the miracle set construction material!

posted by C. J. # 4:46 PM