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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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041089
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04108900.062
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1990-09-22
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SHOW BUSINESS, Page 115LET ME TELL YOU . . .
In a nation that has always adored social satire, Mikhail
Zhvanetsky, 55, is the undisputed comic laureate of glasnost. Once
forced to circulate tapes of his routines underground, today
Zhvanetsky plays thousand-seat arenas, appears on national
television and counts Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev among his
fans. To give readers a flavor of his comedic style, TIME asked
Zhvanetsky to write a monologue about his trip to the U.S. last
year.
"What really gets to a Soviet in America is not the fancy
clothes or mammoth cars. It's the supermarkets. You can go crazy
at the start, the middle and the end. There are meat counters 200
to 300 yards long, with sausages as plentiful as raindrops, so many
you keep bumping into them. That's the moment when Soviet tourists
get weak at the knees and begin to feel queasy, but they refuse
offers to be helped out for a breath of fresh air. The
fruit-and-vegetable section is personally devastating. Avocados,
papayas, kiwis, some kind of citrus thing that gets cut into
five-pointed stars, who the hell knows what they all are. We should
do something about it, comrades. While they continue to wolf food
down like this, good relations between us are impossible.
Take our mandarin oranges. I once stayed in a Soviet hotel with
a Japanese figure skater. He wanted to know what kind of fruit was
on sale that was small, sour and green and got scooped up into
bags. I told him they were mandarin oranges. "They can't be," he
said. "I know what a mandarin orange is." What could I say? Maybe
they get specially harvested as buds just for our people, so we'll
walk around with sour faces.
What we take here for yogurt is not yogurt, cream is not cream,
and milk is not milk. Maybe it's just a bad translation, but our
cream is their yogurt, our yogurt is their milk, and our milk is
their water. I wouldn't say they cook particularly well in America.
They don't use any salt or sugar. Contrary to us, they want to live
long; they like the way they live. We also want to live long, but
it's because we don't like our life and we hope to live on into the
next life. It would be nice to think that America has thrown open
its doors and is waiting for us all to come over. But that's not
the way it is. The Soviet Union has thrown open its doors, and it
seems like all America has come here on a visit. So it goes."