Wakey-Wakey: Where Dreams Hang Out
I studied the Russian language in college. The Spanish and French classes were more popular, so I chose the language class with the fewest number of students. That would be Russian. My teacher was a little spit-fire from Moscow named Irene Trofimova. I loved her. She hated me. She called me “Kee-van” and told me frequently, “You vill go into the vorld, and you vill die.” One day, when only the two of us attended class, she said to me, “Kee-van, vhat is this vord, this ‘hanging-out’”. As she said the word, she threw her hands in front of herself like a farmer sowing seed. I said, “It just means to spend time together. Like you and me, right now, we are ‘hanging out’”. She blushed and waved her hands in the air. “Stop it, Kee-van. Don’t say such things!” I asked where she had heard this phrase - this “hanging out”. After more blushing and hand-waving, she finally said she’d heard it in a movie. A prostitute had said it to a client. She invited him to more prostituting. They could “hang ...