Jenny’s Place What moves a young girl to the endless long hours, week after week, practicing and improving and perfecting, year after year, ignoring the sore knees and swollen ankles and endless refitting of ballet slippers, decade after decade, to achieve a single moment in life which truthfully can be said to be perfect, that cannot be improved upon by any human power, a precious moment when her body and the music are so at one with each other that at her final bow, men and women leap to their feet in a soul-shaking thunder of applause?
Jenny Payavla has a theory. She believes that cooking is a branch of choreography. 'Where else besides ballet and cooking,’ she once told me, 'can a seven-year-old girl learn how to move millions?' Jenny owned The Well of the Turk, whose blue-and-ochre sign waylaid me one day on a hot afternoon meander when Χανιά was mostly napping but the light/shadow contrast was perfect for pictures. I’m not much more than a point-and-snap type when it comes to pictures, but good light is good light and the hours from one to three in the afternoon in Χανιά are like accompanying Monet and Renoir on an en plein air day. The Well of the Turk sign fronted a vibrantly painted blue and yellow building, its yellow brighter than the liquid lemon of the sun. Describing the sign as 'blue and yellow’, though exact enough, is about as close to the reality of the thing as a medical school student explaining motherhood to a midwife. Those colours denominated the building’s exterior, the steps, the doors, the dungeony iron-barred windows. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of such discordant tints, perhaps the fact that they were so massively proclaimed, that enthusiastic photographers would spend hours there
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