Criminy! Forgot another band!

One of the best t-shirts I ever got (and I'm pretty sure I still have it...yes, I'm sure I do) was from the band The Prayer Chain, which I saw once or twice with Ian back in 1993. The band's logo was this really cool design of chain links in an oval with the name in the middle. Well, the t-shirt sports a modified version of the logo, with the words "Prayer Chain" in Cyrillic lettering, promoting a missionary trip they were going on as a band to the former Soviet Union. The back of the shirt says in English and in Russian: "Saint Petersburg, 4-25-93."

Having grown up during the Cold War, Soviet-era iconography has always fascinated me. While in Hungary, I bought a Hungarian Army Home Guard pin (kind of like the National Guard, I guess), which features an AK-47 machine gun and a large red star with the words "Home Guard" in Hungarian aross the top. Pretty cool. I put it on my old Levi's jacket (the one with all the patches and one sleeve that is held together with safety pins, a result of being cut out of it after hitting a tree on an innertube with Jenny T. at Winter Camp in February of '93 - I believe K Murphy J references it here, and, yes, I will be posting about that infamous tube ride, and Ian's misplaced shout of "Ocean!"

When we hosted our exchange student, Hanna, she saw me wearing that shirt one day, and did a double-take, not expecting to see something written in Russian on one of her American host dad's shirts. She also was kind of puzzled - it seems the idiom "prayer chain" doesn't mean anything in Russian, and was, in fact, nonsense to her - like naming a band "Aspirin Armchair" or something.

When we get to Ukraine, I intend to spend some quality time in local shops to see if I can get any old Soviet stuff. I'm sure it's still around - I mean, Ukraine was a Soviet republic for 70-something years, so it shouldn't be too hard.