Budapest - Thursday, May 22, 1980
It's midnight and I'm in a comfortable room - room no. 459 - at the Hotel Hilton in Budapest. We got into the airport, exactly on time, about two hours ago, and I immediately felt a very heavy atmosphere about the place: soldiers with machine guns, tight controls. I gave a sigh of relief as soon as I spotted György Galántai and his wife Julia waiting for me outside. Julia speaks Italian fairly well, and she'll be a great help to me; her brother was waiting for us in the car, and he speaks Italian too. He once came to Italy to go the University of Rome, but the strikes were so frequent that he decided to spend his time simply travelling around the country. Julia and her brother told me that their father had even once taught at the University of Rome and that the Italian government had never paid him his salary. It seems that they've been having a little trouble with the preparations for my show here: delays in the mails, and some of the printed materials I've sent have been blocked by the censors. This explains why they haven't been able to send out the invitation to the show in Hungarian, I wrote it out especially for them in my very best handwriting, it's the same text that I sent to my friends in California. «I've been talking to people about your show for over six months», Galántai tells me. I've brought along 2000 stickers with me, posters large and small, my pale-blue tails and the top-coat with my writing on them, a couple of video tapes of performances in which I write on people, and there's also the little film that the Canadians made. I've also brought along eleven envelopes of letters from Galántai, I've turned them into «round-trips» that I've numbered and addressed to my show. Galántai also wants me to do a performance in the huge Piazza dedicated to Hungary's heroes: I should write all over him and Julia, both of whom will be dressed in white. That will turn them too into monuments and heroes. Tonight Julia was wearing one of the white T-shirts with my sticker printed on it.