Do you know a Back-Handspring?

Do you know a Back-Handspring?

Setting: Gymnasium.
Characters: Annika, Vera, Nadia, Olga, Larissa, and Bela are gymnasts. Miss Károlyi is their coach.

1987

Olga: Do you know a back-handspring?

Nadia: I can do a quadruple-back-handspring.

Vera: That's impossible.

Annika: It's real.

Vera: Evidence? You're a monkey!

Olga: Monkey see, monkey do. La la!

Annika: If you could you would -- but you can't so you won't.

Vera: You're talking out of your leotard.

Nadia: I pull quadruple-back-fulls all the time.

Larissa: I've seen it.

Vera: I haven't.

Larissa: I have. Seeing is believing.

Annika: Sort of...

Olga: Wires!

Larissa: It wasn't at the circus. It was at Nationals!

Larrisa: Here is a very excellent description, with diagram. I quote, "Start with a short run and end it with a skip or skuff on the right-foot, as weight goes forward on left-foot whip arms down fast, crossing right over left, bend at the waist, not at the shoulders, the hands should be almost together, this immediate twist of the upper body gives faster and closer turn and snap down, feet should be together in inverted position, keep elbows straight throughout, get a good shoulder push for the snap down, land flat-footed, facing the starting position, with arms up."...

Vera: So?

Larissa: It's from the E - G - C. European Gymnastics Committee.

Vera: You're from the E - G - C! You're from the moon!

Larissa: I'm from my mama. And my mama told me she saw a quadruple-back.

Olga: My mama told me you're a Hippopotamus.

Larissa: She said: Minsk, '82, third round floor, open, Nastia Liukin...

Vera: Shoosh!

Annika: Where's Miss K?

Olga: Can Miss K do back-quads?

Vera: She's with Bela doing bars. Why?

Annika: Miss Károlyi! Miss Károlyi!

Miss Károlyi: Yes? What is it?

Vera: Miss Károlyi, these girls say there is such-a-thing as a quad-back-handspring; but I say: no, that's impossible!

Nadia: That's my usual warm-up!

Vera: Yeah right!

Larissa: Oh Miss Károlyi! Tell her it's so!

Annika: Teach us a back quad Miss Károlyi!

Miss Károlyi: Girls, do you really want to know a back-quadruple-handspring?

Vera: No way! I won't even try!

Miss Károlyi: My God girls...

1992

Olga: Woo!

Annika: He he!

Nadia: You stuck that back-quad girl!

Vera: Now I know.

Larissa: Wow! She did it Miss Károlyi.

Miss Károlyi: That's right girls. You can't just believe everything people say. You have to believe in yourself.

Interesting Topic

.

Vera is the scientist, and egoist: only evidence will satisfy her inquiry. Larissa is authoritarian knowledge. Olga is volatility in general. Nadia is mystic-belief. Bela is the perfect subject-object, she has no lines and no character. Annika is me.

Miss Károlyi is Márta Károlyi. Annika is Annika Reeder, Nadia is Nadia Comăneci, etc.

Back-handspring is obviously God. The girl can say that she "knows" a back-handspring, not when she has objective evidence supplied by authorities, but first person experience with the thing.

The extreme understatement of little girls bragging about gymnastics suits is a joke on both many BBS groups that argue all the time, and also on the high seriousness God is treated with.

The metaphysical and the moral unite at the end, when Vera wins in '92 (though this is unreal, Věra Čáslavská was fifty years old at this date).

(I re-did the images and some of the lines a little, and format, I'll repost below if it comes to a final form soon.)