Sing along with me – Was I Only Dreaming

Today, we’re in Zhenghou, which is the largest city in Henan Province. From the 5 star hotel that we’re staying in (courtesy of the Henan Province Cultural Department) to the beautiful Henan Museum that I see from my window (that we’ll we be getting a private tour of this morning, it is vey clear that China’s economic miracle has reached this city of 10 million people.

Last night, we had a traditional banquet (at least 30 dishes, accompanied by at least 8 toasts) with our gracious hosts) at an incredibly beautiful high-end restaurant a short walk from our hotel. I say short walk, probably all of 200 yards, but we were put on a bus to go from the hotel to the restaurant. On the way back, most of us stayed true to form as Western rule breakers, and chose to walk. We have a particularly efficient ‘handler with us’, so I’m sure that our transgression must have had her pulling her hair out.

There was a lot of construction and traffic noise late last night, and so I decided to switch on the TV and indulge in a little channel surfing. Within a couple of minutes, I was rewarded with a surreal experience. I guess that I came across a children’s version of China’s Got Talent (the format was the same, but all the performers seemed to be under 7. I flipped to this channel as the shot zoomed in to showing the compere consoling a young performer, who was clearly very upset and in floods of tears. As I wondered what was wrong,I noticed that the child had a really strange haircut; sort of bobbed on the right-hand side, but then almost a crew cut on the left-hand side. Then the camera zoomed out as the child’s mother came to console them, and I became even more confused.

The child was dressed half as a boy and half as a girl. When I say that, I don’t mean something like a rugby shirt together with a skirt. Instead, the split was vertical with the left side of his/her body being dressed in some form of tunic, which was then connected to the glittery party dress on the right side of his/her body.

I have no idea what the child did for their performance, but I remember a precedent that was set by one of my favorite TV personalities when I was growing up. Tommy Cooper was an English comedian / magician, who was famous for making his magic tricks go wrong in the funniest of ways. If you’ve never heard of him, do yourself a favor and watch some of his stuff on YouTube. Anyway, as part of his act, he’d often do something similar to what I saw last night. He’d come on stage Ionesco of these crazy split costumes, and then act out a two-person dialogue, by turning his body and delivering the dialogue as that persona. The funny bit (if you’re scratching your head, trust me.. It really could be side-splittingly funny), he’d invariably get the lines mixed up.

I dashed out of bed to get my camera last night, but they moved on to the next act as I was just framing the shot. It didn’t really get any less surreal from there, as the next act could only be described as two pre-adolescent punk drummers (leather,punk t-shirts, mohawks, etc.) who then proceeded to sing and play along to some kiddy-pop number that made Alvin & The Chipmunks sound like baritones. The crowd absolutely loved it.

As you can imagine, I had the strangest dreams last night.