Alexandrina Delova

I was born on the day of the autumnal equinox in 1967 in Plovdiv. My first contact with newspaper ink was with a bucket of it in the printing house of the newspaper "Karlovo’s Tribune." It was quite a baptism because my parents had to buy me a whole set of new clothes and bandage my black to the elbow arm to avoid the explanation to the grandmas on how I was able to get access to the coveted liquid. My first scene love was a pink rabbit in the Puppet Theatre few years later. One of my grandfather taught me to read on the Plovdiv Theatre’s purple posters with blue letters on them. Posters hung on the fences along the way to the Music School. The dream of my grandmother that the piano would be crying under my hands did not come exactly true - desperately crying were all my music teachers. Ballet school proved more resistant to pressure and never accepted me even for audition for which I am eternally grateful. My other grandmother was an active tourist and her march group had always a member who would entertain the boiled spaghetti legged children with a fairy tale. I have been climbing for four hours straight under the "Winnie the Pooh." Rocky cliffs look completely different, if a knowledgeable person tells you the more respectable parts of Greek mythology while climbing up and down. The more obscene parts one reads personally, if just to check if the adults had not lied at the shack whit the self-explanatory sing “Without Gods”. Moreover, reading is encouraged at the English Language School, where my teachers were magnificent. Casual mention of Hemingway saved me from the aspiration for journalism faculty, but not from journalism in two newspapers and Plovdiv Radio. At that time I had already graduated from engineering school and did not dabble in buckets of ink while watching morning edition coming from the rollers. Printing presses are like bridges - news pass through them from the teletype tape to the neatly folded issue next to your cup of morning coffee. Bridges are my weakness - I always live in a place with bridges: Plovdiv, Sankt Peterburg, Istanbul, Montreal, even in my current small town in a bend of the Saint-Lawrence river from the window I see a bridge that sometimes hides in the descended clouds.