'Erotic Verses Deck Festival'

I have to admit, not too many things sound better in the Dutch language, but due to the beautiful alliteration this title does: 'Vieze Verzen Vlonder Festival'. Explaining where the name comes from doesn’t even work in a different language, as it involves a plant with the name ‘Holpijp’, which only in Dutch has a kind of ambiguous meaning. The literal meaning is ‘hollow pipe’. I trust my followers to have enough sense of humor to come up with other meanings or comparisons themselves.

Just imagine two couples, neighbors & friends, all four a bit crazy. Let them share a pond and a deck in their adjacent backyards and put a water plant in the pond called ‘Holpijp’… They didn’t even need too much wine to come up with the idea of the ‘Erotic Verses Deck Festival/Vieze Verzen Vlonder Festival’, a dinner in their backyards where, “rhyme, wine and gathering” are the keywords. This evening has become a recurrent event during the last five years.

Now beware! The rhymes that are recited on an evening like that MUST be erotic, but NOT vulgar! Well… myths, sagas, Gods, Goddesses, fates, muses, graces… everything and everybody was brought up to create and recite titillating poems and stories. Witty, intelligent, explicit, instructive and exciting tales crossed the dinner table. A divine nectar was prepared and served to us by Zeus and Hera. The promiscuous Aphrodite and her prudish sister Athena were bickering; Leda was horrified, watching her children crawling out of eggs, nine months after cheating on her husband with Zeus (who came to her in the form of a swan…). And all of this happened while we were having a delicious, abundant Greek meal!

I had to think about my previous post, called ‘Vices and virtues’. How uninhibited these people were during the old days! Look at ancient Greece and the Roman empire! Read the erotic Greek poems and study the frescoes of Pompei. And most of that behavior wasn’t even called immoral, just part of daily life! Who ever said history was boring? Did we move forward or back…? At least the traditions of those times gave us a heavenly and fun ‘Vieze Verzen Vlonder Festival’! Love, M.