Night Rally
Ian Mitchell
On Saturday 28th August, the company Old-Time held a night rally for vintage cars around the streets of Moscow. It started at 11 p.m. at the Pioneer Cinema on Kutuzovsky Prospekt and ended at the restaurant Wine Story on Nikolskaya Street at 2 a.m., after which there was dinner and prize-giving. Last month I wrote about the experience of going on the day rally organised by the same company (“To the Volga in a Volga”). I noted how uncool it was to be seen in an ancient Soviet saloon. This time, I had the opposite experience, travelling in a lime-green, late-Eisenhower/early-Elvis Dodge Coronet 2-door hardtop, complete with space-age fi ns, thunderous V8 and enough space on the back seat to have cheer-leader sex with half the Nashville nubility. Now I realised what it is like to be cool. Young boys crowded round the star as he clambered in (alone, sadly!) to that back seat, finding it quite hard to manoeuvre an old body past a front seat which had been designed before the Age of Ergonomics. But arguably, it was the utterly unpractical concept of the car as a whole that made it so brutally cool. Certainly, many of the drivers we passed as we thrashed round north Moscow waved, hooted and gave other signs of approval at such a whimsical sight amidst the half-derelict factories and panelny doms of the Soviet wasteland. I felt my age again when many of the young boys I saw photographing us after we crossed the finish line on Nikolskaya turned out, on closer inspection of their hats, to be Militsia men. They put away their little batons and whipped out post-Elvis phones on which to take pictures for the folks back home—in Lyubertsi, one presumes, or Vykhino. Is that really what it means to be cool in Moscow? (See www.old-time.ru)
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