Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 26, 1991 TAG: 9103260208
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BATTIATA THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WARSAW, POLAND LENGTH: Medium
The pupils - 43 bookkeepers, secretaries, college students and homemakers - pricked up their ears. It was table-manners night at Warsaw's School of Elegance and Charm.
"Each dinner guest should be placed 55 to 75 centimeters apart, never closer," the teacher said. "This will make your guests feel at ease."
The charm-seekers - most of them from cramped apartments where etiquette is often a casualty of other people's elbows - nodded gratefully and filed the advice away for a more affluent day. They put it in the same rose-colored envelope where they'd tucked away guidance about caviar - "always serve with a spoon of pearl or ivory; never silver, it changes the taste."
Etiquette is a growth industry in post-communist Poland. All the rules are changing. The smart money says that if you want to live well-with a big dining room full of caviar spoons-you'd better learn how to behave.
Poland's only charm school has seen such a surge in interest since the fall of communism in 1989 that it can't find enough classroom space to accommodate all who want to enroll.
"Part of the idea of communism was to be a member of the group, as opposed to having your own personality," said school founder Ryszard Swierczewski. "We teach people how to distinguish themselves from the others. Until now, there was no incentive or benefit for things like appearance or etiquette. But new horizons are opening up."
It's not just ambition that's filling the charm school. Many pupils, according to etiquette teachers, are searching for the common courtesies and a noble code eroded by four decades of communism.
Besides learning table manners, the students, most of them women, attend five weeks of night school on subjects including: the proper way to put on a coat, how to muzzle a drunken dinner guest, how to flourish a business card and how to win when dealing with the boss.
"It's not that I'm going to be a goddess after this course," said Marzena Szczudlinska, a 24-year-old bookkeeper at a Warsaw power station. "But if you want to find a new job, you have to present yourself."
"Maybe it's asking too much to think that the right clothes will cinch a job, but I think it can help a lot," agreed Elzbieta Hanusz, her 28-year-old co-worker. "The changes in Poland are very fast now. I could lose my job tomorrow, so I'm trying to be prepared."
A rented classroom strewed with papier-mache petits fours and silverware diagrams may seem an unlikely setting for sea change, but the school is one of the staging grounds for Eastern Europe's next great revolution - the one inside people's heads.
The school, along with dozens of new self-help, fitness and holistic health centers in Warsaw, is part of a conceptual leap that millions of East Europeans are making in their pursuit of happiness, Western-style.
"People in Poland are traveling now, we watch Western television, and we notice that we have gaps in our own education," said Wanda Macialowicz, a restaurant school teacher who moonlights at the charm academy. "We want to catch up with the others, to stop being Cinderellas."
For many women the classes are the first time, in a culture where men run the show, that they have been encouraged to be ambitious for themselves.
"Many students come to us hunched over in the psychological sense," Swierczewski said. "We try to leave them more self-confident."
The school started out training hostesses for trade fairs, but Swierczewski, gauging his market, quickly broadened the curriculum to include everything from assertiveness training and the power of positive thinking to aerobics and how to dress for success.
On a recent evening, women rushed into the school's steamy vestibule, handed sleet-encrusted coats to the man behind the cloak counter and rushed to the bulletin board. Munching on hard rolls or puffing cigarettes, they scanned the offerings: a choreographer's tips on posture, a psychologist's lecture on how to get mad productively and an acting class where students rehearse imaginary job interviews.
It wasn't just that the state ideology frowned on etiquette as a bourgeois affectation. The Eastern Bloc's rush to industrialize squeezed millions of country people into city apartment blocks, and then fractured family life by assigning parents to long and clashing work schedules.
"Before communism families had one common meal, but after, it became more difficult, because everyone worked and everyone worked different hours, and parents had no time to teach these things," said teacher Macialowicz.
The result is a society where in daily life, from the butcher shop to a snowy sidewalk, surliness is routine.
At the moment, the Warsaw charm school is one of the few places for a courtesy-minded person to turn.
Most students said they expect the $41 tuition (roughly one-fourth of the average monthly salary) to be the best investment they'd make this year, even if the metamorphosis from factory mouse to mistress of the universe is a slow one.
"For at least 45 years, all these things have slept in human beings, because everyone was stuck in the same gray circle," said Ewa Paitek, a 29-year-old mother and full-time hospital bookkeeper.
by CNB