It’s been something like 50 years since Ann Sabri invited a few of us to come to a dance put on each month by the Greek church in Mansfield.
Ann’s then-husband Saf was Iraqi. All the ‘Mid-eastern folks’ in Mansfield … there were at least five of them … went to the Greek evenings. The food and music spoke of some shared geography and culture. It said ‘More.’
I’d learned a couple of steps (Kalamatiano) since my first Greek festival at an Agh. Haralampos summer picnic in Canton. That was at the invite of Joanne Poll (read: Polis, Politis, Polarikopoulos?), Galion ’63 classmate. The gateway!
A hot summer afternoon. My god, Joanne’s grandfather was something like 76, had had two strokes and still danced? And the food was good, too. Was there some secret they weren’t telling us?
A few months later came the Thanksgiving dance at the Hotel Onesto in Canton. Joanne’s grandfather basted the pine-nut stuffed turkey, and later Aunt Sophie danced the seam out of her gold lamé sheath dress. She was really enjoying the occasion! Do they always do this?
So, we went to that Mansfield church dance. Drank retsina (fermented pine resin? You learn to love it!) and renewed the acquaintance. And did it again.
My first tapes of Greek music were ‘borrowed’ from LPs at the Mansfield Library. They’d been ordered up by the priest back a decade or so, so post-junta immigrants could feel some sense of home. I imagine, like me, they also recorded and listened to the tapes while driving down state for work.
Knowing my lean, my friend Ellen Flood found and gifted an album with a woman in Macedonian headdress dancing among poppies and chamomile. Years later, I connected. It was a Dora Stratou recording. One of their early ones.
The dance line led on from Mansfield, through Columbus, deeper connections, OSU graduation (finally, after breaks for wedding, kids, divorce etc), a minor in ‘Modern Greek Studies’ and a rather impetuous leap to Greece ‘to continue MA research into post-WWII Greek history,’ That thesis fell to the realities of feeding two kids and a cat in Athens, GR.
The ‘kids’ grew up with a cross-cultural perspective … and moved back to Ohio. One is planning to move back to Greece. A fourth cat is still being fed.
Like so many other things, and looking back as well as forward, Mansfield was a significant weigh-station along the journey.
Karen Lee
Athens, Greece