Having fun working with Zeynep Oral

I have not yet been able to watch the Zeynep Oral documentary titled “A Babıali Summit”, produced by Habitat TV, which premiered on Metrohan on June 17. Fortunately, Dikmen Gürün expressed her impressions beautifully in her article last week. While reading, the events of Zeynep Oral that had accumulated in my memory and were like a document began to come to my mind. This article includes moments lived with Zeynep.

My teacher Sevda Şener had likened Zeynep, whom she had first met at a meeting abroad, to Ondine. (Ondine was the lead character in the ballet Ondine (1958), which was “choreographed” for the star of the Royal Ballet, Margot Fontayn.) I myself witnessed how apt this comparison to this delicate water nymph, who remained human as long as she was in love with a mortal and returned to the mysterious underwater world when she was betrayed, was during a trip abroad. Due to a back problem, Zeynep was strictly forbidden from carrying heavy luggage and was advised to keep her luggage light, for example, to take only the toothpaste that had been squeezed out of her body. However, I knew from the Milliyet Sanat articles she had ordered over the phone and which she had definitely requested on the exact day that Zeynep was a tough nut, a person with a steel will, and a determined magazine executive.

CRITICISMS' MEETINGS ABROAD

Our travels together were mostly due to the congresses of the International Critics Association. In the 1980s and 1990s, our Theatre Critics Association was just starting to form and there was a high probability of getting on the board of directors at international congresses. To this end, we would present impressive papers at the symposiums held at the congresses. Zeynep would also communicate with the French-speaking delegates and I would mingle with the English-speaking ones. We managed to get on the board of directors for five or six consecutive years, which required a lot of effort. There were times when Zeynep and I would not see each other at the congresses. In the meantime, Zeynep would rush to Türkiye to write.

When we saw each other, Zeynep would always come up with a “fun” suggestion. At a Warsaw convention, our soft-hearted friend had organized a celebration for Dikmen Gürün, who had been in bed for three days because she had caught a severe flu, by filling a hip flask with brandy from an unknown source and bringing snacks to the hotel room to cheer her up. During the lunch break at a Lisbon convention, she had arranged for the embassy car to take Lütfi Ay, who was staying at the same hotel, and me to see the monuments that had been created in the city’s new port, which she had seen and liked very much.

FROM THE ROME SOCIETY MARKET TO THE HELSINKI 'GENTLEMEN'S CLUB'

Taking advantage of a free time during the Rome congress held in a rainy November, we went to the city’s “socialite market” – Zeynep learned where it was from somewhere. Let’s just say it’s hard to tell me apart from Italians, but it’s obvious that blonde Zeynep is a foreigner. Despite the vendors’ warnings, “Ladies watch your purse,” Zeynep left her boots there, which she noticed had gotten wet, and put on her brand new Italian boots, which she also “combined” with a gilded sweater – which was very fashionable at the time.

Zeynep is a master of making the most of her limited time. We would leave an unpleasant play unfinished and head to a fancy café to have some fun there. Or, instead of going on a potentially boring group trip, we would go to a suggested play. At the East Berlin congress, in order to reach a theater in a remote part of the city, a few of us had to walk endless dark streets for minutes - due to Zeynep's excessive reliance on my unpracticed German - and with the help of East German citizens who somehow understood my "kem kum"s, we made it to the play. Zeynep and I, who had been suffocated in the shabby hotel where we had arrived at the congress in Helsinki before everyone else, had had a pleasant dinner in the middle of the night at a "Gentlemen's Club" that we found open, as two women in a men's world. No one had asked anything. If asked, it would have been easy for Zeynep to show her journalist ID and say that we had come "to do a review."

All of these are gifts to me from the private lives of the “clever journalist” Zeynep.