ANGELA.

The next days were like studying human wildlife. The clients, all with impressive professional resumes, seemed to get a real ego-boost from this adventure. Some told us that they were about to find out who they really were. They had met their deepest drives. From now on they would stop thinking before acting. They would totally trust their instincts, and follow 'the forces' they discovered inside themselves.
Some of them shared with us how for the first time in years they dared to dance again. Without having to get drunk first. A 35-year old American was wondering how his friends back home would react if he brought this beautiful 18-year old redhead back to California with him. But would she even stay? Or would she take off with the first surfer dude she'd meet? Tough questions. "She's like a young colt, charging through life", he concluded to fellow tour clients, "and I need to tame her." An ex-marine explained to us how strategic it was that after losing the cold war, American men were invading Russia to take the elite of the Russian gene pool home. We ran out of notebooks. Already there was too much material to choose from.
The third day we ran into 'Angela', an elegant French journalist, funny and very driven. She'd just spend 6 months undercover in Chechnya, covering the war there. She was also an angry person, and this new assignment wasn't helping; she was deeply offended at the romance tour phenomenon, probably the reason her magazine had sent her to St. Petersburg in the first place.
Strangely enough she seemed to like us, and she was very amused by the idea that we as married men had chosen this path full of potential pitfalls that could destroy the trust that our wives had in us. She admired our wives. Maybe they were just naive. She would keep an eye on us, and saw it as her mission to influence the script in every way possible. 'Men are beasts, and you should show that in your movie:'
She would like to see someone like herself in the movie; she offered to play that part, just in case we would not be able to find someone else.

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