Kathakali dancers on the beach hut stage made up each others faces with natural paints creating clown-like drag queens. The group, reminiscent of an acting truope from Shakespear’s time, was all men, the shorter and more feminine of them playing the female lead.

They began their performance with a twenty minute scene of dancing eyes, the only movement on the stage the drummers hand thumping, another with small hand cymbols clapping, and a painted man sitting on a chair in the center moving his eyes in all directions to the beat of the music. Following was a long demonstration of hand signals that impart meaning, giving voice to silent actors if you can remember what they represent. Then one man mimed a bee extracting honey from a lotus flower, another became an elephant with posture and arm positioning.

The play began with a grotesquely painted face with tall sparkling head dress and a wide skirt with ruffles and wires like a hoop skirt beneath a prom dress from the eighties. He made advances towards the demure wife of another, letting out a deep, throaty mating call scream as he chased her around the stage. He slapped her and forced himself upon her. That scene dragged out as did the next when she reported the acts to her husband, also in a hoop skirt. They plot the demise of the so called anti-hero.

In the final scene the painted husband beats up the first guy who attacked his wife. Then he sodomizes him with hoop skirt over hoop skirt sprawled out on the stage floor for a painful and not meant to be hilarious scene that had us all rolling silently to ourselves so as not to be disrespectful in the audience. Then he stabs him too, which lasts an unbelievable amount of time as the guys red tongue and eyeballs keep protruding with each painful thrust.

These strange Kathakali dancers are a centuries old Keralan tradition. We watched them in Kochi, the home of the priest I met on the flight over. It’s a nice city made up of Ernakalum on the main land where we stayed and three islands off the coast. Local ferries took us across the Arabian Sea to Fort Cochin where we saw the famous Chinese fishing nets protruding from the water along the coast and the first European church built in India.

Another ferry took us to Vybeen Island where we heard there was a annual festival ocurring in a temple near Cherrai Beach. A crowded bus with open windows took us there where the dirt streets were filled with local people and an occasional white foreigner walking around in the county fair atmosphere. The way was lined with food vendors hawking Indian popcorn, sugar cane sticks and a crunchy snack resembling fried Cheerios. Twenty five elephants were in the main area, all lined up on each side facing each other, spectacularly decorated and each one ridden by three men holding yellow parasols up into the air.

I’m not sure if the local people were more intrigued by the elephants or by us. Cheyney, Patti’s tall, skinny nephew, was with us and he was making quite the scene walking around in public with this shirt off and shorts on. Someone in the crowd grabbed my behind. The first time I didn’t react fast enough, but the second time, I did. I twirled around and slapped some guy on the arm and screamed “Pervert!” He, of course, denied it was him. I guess I’ll never know.