Frances Assa: I hope every
one caught the opening ceremony. A little girl falls asleep over her
Cyrillic alphabet book, and wonderful Russian things sail through the sky for
each letter. Letter N...Nabokov!!!!!! Imagine.
JM: Imagine! What a strange
company. I checked two sites ( no N pictures, though):
The
18-chapter, nearly three-hour opening ceremony began at the symbolic moment of
8:14 p.m. — 20:14, as time is counted here — and provided a majestic spectacle
that included a glowing troika of horses made of light streaking through a
snowbound sky, the multicolor onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral bobbing in
the air; literary references to Gogol, Tolstoy and Nabokov; images of Stalinist
skyscrapers; and performances by Russia’s storied ballerinas, musicians and
singers.
The ceremony began with the Cyrillic alphabet and significant
Russian figures or inventions attached to each letter: from Lake Baikal to
Catherine The Great, corn mowing machines, Kandinsky, Nabokov, Television, and
Pushkin. Then a young girl on a trapeze, dressed all in innocent white and
called Love, began a journey through Russian history, beginning by floating
above a series of virtual landscapes, including the birch forests of the
Urals... http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/07/sorry-putin-the-sochi-opening-ceremony-was-totally-gay.html