Hello, dear friends!
I sincerely welcome you to the record of short stories by Šimek and Grossmann, which Jirka Grossmann and I wrote first for the Olympik club in Spálená Street, and later for the Semafor theatre.
We read most of them in Visiting Days, which were at first actually literary and musical evenings. They are also well remembered by the singer-songwriters Mirek Paleček and Michael Janík, who appeared as guests on these programmes. That's why I invited them to the public recording of this album, so that they could bring us a little closer to the atmosphere of the former Visiting Days. And now let me say a few words about the stories, especially the ones I read on the record. Their writing was certainly influenced by the fact that I had been teaching for some time and Jirka had come to my classes about twice, disguised as an inspector. When I started teaching at a nine-year high school in Prague Střešovice, I was entrusted with teaching music education among other subjects. Whoever heard me sing knows that it was a crime committed against me and the children. When Jirka found out, he laughed - for too long and loudly, in my opinion. But everything bad is good for something. Thanks to the fact that I taught music education, the short story "The Educational Concert" was written. Another event of school life, which certainly cannot be forgotten, and which we have not forgotten either, is undoubtedly the conscription exercise, as the other story is called.
Once, when Jirka was lying in the hospital on Charles Square - by then he was already attacked by illness - we wrote a short story "How I got sick" in the room reserved for us by the chief physician. You can see Jirka's great spirit in it. I really admired that in him, even during his illness he never lost his sense of humour. One of our most popular stories when we were still playing in the Olympik club was a story called "My First Party". We had to read it, wherever we appeared, the audience wrote about it, copied it themselves. Years later, a young man remembered it at a discussion and asked us if we would ever describe a student party. And we promised then that we would try. "The Graduation Party" is one of the last stories that Jiří Grossmann and I wrote. And if on this album one of our first stories "Quido is looking for a bride" is included at the end, it is because I remember the beginnings of my collaboration with Jirka perhaps the most fondly. We were undoubtedly influenced by silent slapstick films, which we loved and willingly went wherever they were showing. That's why even in "Quido" people are pushing each other a lot, even throwing whipped cream at each other.
Yours Miloslav Šimek
