Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [44]
“The Blue Sardine. End of the boardwalk. 7:30 tonight.”
Great.
“See you there,” Joanna says.
“Okay,” I say, and step out of frame as if I have somewhere else to go, which, as we know, is most certainly not the case at all.
“Cut!”
Congratulating ourselves on a successful morning's work, we break for lunch and head for a boardwalk restaurant Joanna picked out for us. En route, she eases in close to me and begins asking questions, some about the show, others more personal.
“Back home, are you famous, Cash?”
“Famous? Hm, let me see. I've been broadcasting nationally on public radio in Britain for fifteen years and in America every week for ten years … so no.”
“But once this program is shown …?”
“Oh, probably. Depends how things go. Why?”
Bobbing alongside, she's looking up at me, a little starry-eyed.
“Just asking.” She grins impishly, then clams up.
How very odd.
“Hmmmmm,” I hula-mula-wonder to myself, “what's that about?”
The most difficult aspect for me of continually being on the road is—big surprise—finding food to eat. Specifically food that isn't swimming in oil. And never more so than in Greece—the clue's in the name, really—a country where olives grow in profusion and olive oil is so integral to the national diet that I'm surprised they don't just serve it neat in a pint glass and be done with it.
Waiters become quite offended, I've noticed, if you dare to suggest that your food be cooked without it.
“No oil??” they gasp, forcing me to explain the reason, using my hands to mime boils bursting all over my face. Psh, psh, psh!
The best compromise most times is the soup, once the waiter has assured me very begrudgingly that there's only “the barest minimum of olive oil in it” (by Greek standards that means about half a liter or so), plus some grilled fish fresh caught that morning, a specialty of the islands. Good, that'll do.
Lunch, once you've ordered it, takes forty minutes to arrive. Nobody rushes to do anything in Lesbos. It's either too hot or they're too lazy, not sure which. So while I'm busy keeping my eye on the chef, the crew wanders off to do some clothes shopping in nearby stores, taking Joanna along with them to translate.
As the group walks away, I hear her mumbling to Tasha, “It's a big problem. I don't know which to choose. I love them both. What shall I do? What would you do?”
In the clear absence of lesbians today, we abandon our search of the bars along the seafront and switch our attention instead to filming B-roll of the Bewilderbeest sauntering idly along the beach wearing nothing but a T-shirt, shorts, and his special Mystified Look:4 glance left, glance right, frown, squint, a purse of the lips, then—“Uh-oh, what's that interesting thing over there?”—and walk out of shot at a brisk pace. Never fails!
Skala Eressos has one of the best beaches in Europe, or so they say. It's even won awards. Hard to say why that is, because parts of it are truly horrible. Horrible!
“Ow, ow, ow, OWWWW!”
This used to be miles of golden sand. But then something terrible happened: a ruinous storm, according to Joanna, that hauled in a bunch of shingle from somewhere, doing to parts of the beach what the 2004 Olympics did to the rest of Lesbos, leaving it volcanic gray in color and pebble-strewn, and turning a pleasurable paddle in the water into one of the most unendurably painful experiences of my entire life. Like walking barefoot over crushed beer cans.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, OW! OW!”
Afterwards, I hobble back to the village square to meet with Yorgos, the owner of a local motor-scooter shop.
Having come to this island apparently to see the lesbians, only to find that they're a bit thin on the ground, and with nothing else seemingly going on, we're reduced to improvising, shooting on the fly, filling the show with things we've just thought of, immediately after we've thought of them. It's very laissez-faire, and a lot more enjoyable for being so.
Yorgos, a jolly, middle-aged man with a gray mullet and substantial girth that spills over his belt like sandbags, and who