| Alpine Village wasn't a total letdown, after all. After our Oktoberfest fiasco, I went back during normal operating hours, and the bookstore there had something I'd been searching for (inbetween the $8 copies of Stern!) -- fresh copies of the California Staats-Zeitung.
The CSZ is an odd little paper for German speakers in California. I subscribed before we went to Hamburg; now that we're back, I've renewed my subscription as part of my plan to keep up my German proficiency. It comes once a week; it's usually twenty pages or so, containing a selection of wire-service world news, some California items, 'lifestyle' pieces from Germany (See the latest zany food item/fashion style from back home! Look on as we test-drive this BMW!), horoscopes, a crossword puzzle (completing that every week would be good practice), a half-page fiction serial, and a sports section that mostly consists of the play-by-play soccer recaps that you just can't get in an American paper. And then there's the Siegfried and Roy section. After last year's Roy-gets-chomped-by-a-tiger incident, the CSZ started running gigantic articles about everybody's favorite Germanic entertainment duo -- long breathy pieces about their history together, the accident itself, Roy's struggle for survival afterwards. I'm relieved to see that after six months, nothing has changed. The top half of the front page held an article about President Bush's most recent speech before the UN -- but when I pulled the paper off of the shelf and flipped it open, the bottom half was about Siegfried and Roy, one year on. Roy is in a wheelchair, partially paralyzed -- but he still has his sense of humor! The tiger wasn't trying to kill Roy -- he was trying to rescue him! Roy is gaining back his strength -- but his true strength comes from his fans! They still visit the tigers every day -- but now from behind a Plexiglass shield! For some reason, I imagine all of these S&R articles being greenlighted by a blue-haired little old lady who really loves Vegas and Siegfried and Roy, and thinks that it's a shame that neither of those two nice men found the right woman in time to support them through their ordeal ... with a teenaged grandchild tagging along behind to suggest "Um, Oma -- maybe Seigfried and Roy didn't exactly like girls that way, if you know what I mean?" I wonder what the CSZ thinks about Father of the Pride? |
