Carnival Time for Leyla

By Kathleen Hurley 

While visiting the spa in my building, I overheard the owner, a woman with a heavy accent, talking about politics.

She said she was from (of course!) New York. I was curious to learn more about her. She told me her name was Leyla. I asked how she felt about politics.

"Sometimes I feel it’s like, um…a carnival!" she said. Then she told me a story.

During the 1970s, she was Flamenco dancer in New York. She was hired as a contract dancer and entered Iran in 1973 to perform for three weeks. After entering the country the manager of the theater took her passport and kept it.

He wanted her to do more than just dance. She refused, limiting her work to dancing and only performed during the times spelled out in her contract. The entire time she was dancing she didn’t receive payment and when she asked for her passport to go home they refused to give it to her.

At that point, she knew she was in trouble. She befriended a patron of the theatre and asked him to help her get her passport. He tricked the management into giving him the passport and in the middle of the night she quietly left the country.

When she finished telling me this story she paused in deep thought and began.

"We are lucky to live in this country and have the freedom to chose who we want to represent us," she said. "I don’t know much about politics but it seems like the candidate that wins is the one that throws out the best joke rather than addressing what are the issues. I think it is all a fashion show and more about their appearance instead of concentrating on what they can to for the people," she said.

A 65-year-old American, she had seen a lot of presidents come and go, among them: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
"And who would ever dream that a movie star would become president?"

She said she really didn’t like to be too involved in the election.

"My opinion is formed by watching television or what is in the media. That’s where I get all of my information about the candidates. I don’t know about the law and I think we are all very ignorant in that regard. But, I believe that whoever holds that position should have excellent knowledge of the law," she said.

Leyla tends to vote Democratic, but has been known to split her vote between Democrats and Republicans.

"I always try to vote for the best candidate," Leyla said. "But when I look at all the millions of dollars we spend to vote I think that instead we should spend that money on our poor children. When we spend lots of money on things that don’t help people, I feel that America is going down not up."

She said that American laws keep changing to protect the criminal, but not everyone else.

"There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what is right," she said.