Dancing at the Wall

15 Jan Dancing at the Wall

Life can be rather ironic sometimes. In 1991 I was taking a Czechoslovakian Literature course at NYU. This was an extraordinary class taught by a Czech woman who was the top translator for the newly elected President Vaclav Havel: a Czechoslovakian playwright whose outspoken politics had forced him into prison. Havel was the first democratically elected president after communism was overthrown. It was a very exciting time.

Our professor came in the room one day and said. “I have been invited to choose a student to participate in a summer exchange program. Something we have been unable to do in my country, until now.” She asked who would like to go, many of us raised our hands, but she had a particular fondness for me. I was a huge fan of Czech literature and was an undergraduate acting student through NYU’s Tisch School Of The Arts. Both of those things wildly appealed to her.

That summer I travelled to a city outside of Prague known as Pardubice. I worked with two other American students, one from Berkley and one from Yale. It was a magical time. The wall was coming down in Berlin and one of our Czech students informed us of a Pink Floyd concert that would be coming up. We quickly travelled by train to Berlin to attend the concert. During the day we visited the wall. People everywhere were cheering and carving off bits of concrete to stuff in their pockets, I did the same. An older man approached me and started talking in German. I explained I didn’t speak German and he quickly changed to English. “We should dance together ” he said, “This is a most joyful and historic occasion.” And so we did.

22 years later I would be back in Berlin filming a documentary called The Drivers about a volunteer corps of American ambulance drivers in WWII who started the first high school exchange program, American Field Service(AFS). The irony is not lost on me.