At the Chicago Consular Corps Ball on Thursday, the consul general of Barbados was asked if he yearned for the tropical temps of his own country during this snowy spate of winter. Without a pause, the Hon. Andre Richardson King answered, “When you’re surrounded by so many wonderful people, the weather doesn’t matter.”
Ah, diplomacy. It was as plentiful as the white-tied foreign officials leading their bejeweled ladies across the dance floor at this 45th annual ball — held in the gilded, Versailles-like Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Chicago on South Michigan Avenue.
Here, the flags of the 72 countries with consulates in Chicago (Rwanda, China and Pakistan among them) lined the staircase sweeping up to the ballroom.
There, the Hon. Borys Bazylevskyi, head of the Ukrainian Consulate, told the crowd: “Our daughter [6-year-old Anastasia] has spent more years here than in Ukraine. Whenever we land at Chicago she exclaims, ‘Chicago, home sweet home.’ ” (Her mother later quipped that the girl has watched “The Wizard of Oz” one too many times.) And during the Grand March, when each consul general was presented by an emcee before walking to the fore of the ballroom, the crowd of 500 watched politely — unlike in 1989, soon after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, when the room booed China’s consul general.
But by 8 p.m., when the pre-dinner speeches had dragged on for 30 minutes — and dinner seemed as distant as a desert mirage — diplomacy began to wane. At one table, a man snoozed while seated upright. Another somnolent guest cracked, “It’s a good thing they didn’t turn down the lights.” Nevertheless, the night made $200,000 for the city’s trade and diplomacy non-profits, the World Trade Center Chicago and the International Visitors Center.
Finally, the waiters emerged with wine and four courses of international fare — including ribbons of smoked Canadian salmon, sea bass with Mediterranean ratatouille and Middle Eastern couscous. Between courses, the diplomats danced to the Stanley Paul Orchestra and mingled with their peers; the talk took the measure of world affairs. Hon. Daulat Pasaribu, Indonesia’s consul general, said grimly, “Last week, there were still thousands of bodies being washed in from the ocean.” Liberia’s Hon. Alexander Poley Gbayee, draped in a hand-stitched “chief gown,” described the tenuous stability in his ravaged country: “The 15,000 UN forces are there, and the peace is holding really good, so we are looking forward to holding elections next year.”
And Ukraine’s Bazylevskyi — who told of his grandfather, a priest, who was killed in the 1930s by the KGB, and his father, who spent 10 years in a gulag — lent a heart-rending poignancy to the chatter: “Everyone is happy that the people’s will has been victorious,” he concluded, “and our people have shown there is decisiveness to be within the family of democratic nations.”
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Lucinda Hahn is at lhahn@tribune.com.
