I went to the Mayor's holiday party in Belgrade.
Everybody who was anybody in the local democratic
movement was there. I certainly wasn't anybody, but I
happened to be there anyway. So I shook the Mayor's
hand and I saw the President pass by.
And what else did I see?
Middle-aged intellectual women in spike heels and rimless glasses barking "Molim?" into cellphones
an amazingly bad art show
A swarm of learned academics, widows of martyred journalists, graying hippie dissidents swilling Campari and rakija, red velvet Tito-era upholstery, gilt chandeliers, teenage pages with cheese and meat platters, actresses, ballerinas, plump apparatchiks with politician's haircuts, TV stars in pancake video makeup, nutty performance artists in corduroy pants....
this city's decent people, maybe the nation's...
May 2005 be kinder to them than their past years.
