1997

SHARING THE POSTER WITH U2
&
THE LENINGRAD COWBOYS

The Fools were received in Palermo in quite the same manner as in Helsinki: long cues to reserve the tickets. One of the reasons was that the Lord Mayor, Guanluca Orlanda, became an ardent fan who invited all the Fools in his official residence. The city experienced a cultural revival in a rare lull in between the mafia-appointed Mayors and the arrival of the Ship of Fools just happened to be what the city longed for. He came late and saw the show standing aside with his dozen of bodyguards, so we actors had to push their revolvers away to enter stage. When we left for Napoli he waved us good-bye with a 12-member orchestra, having given us quite a lot of money and hundreds of exemplars of the book “Fools of Palermo” to redistribute. That year, the last shows were in Thessaloniki, Cultural Capital of Europe, where the ship moored in front of the city’s gutter. The Capital lost billions of drachma’s with the U2 concert and, although we shared the poster, couldn’t pay us anymore. It took years to retrieve our miserable money.