Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The ABCs of SNC: D is for... Dmitry

sweetpotatousa.org

Today I'm going to switch gears for a bit here and tell you a little about my favorite Ukrainian, Dmitry Kovalenko.

You may remember looking for Dmitry in our first issue.  Dmitry showed up on Twitter about two years ago, a sweet potato farmer from outside Kiev who loves baseball. It's a lot of fun to read back through his tweets.  One of his dreams is to someday have 1,000 followers on Twitter; you can find him at @ifromukraine.



Dmitry likes to travel and he's usually lost, particularly whenever he's in a national forest park. My theory is that he's searching for clues.  You see, nobody knows where Dmitry came from - he was adopted by his family after a villager found him in the forest as a baby. Because of this, he also doesn't have a birthday, which sometimes makes him sad. 

Before she died, his grandmother told him to "be the friendly to everyone" and Dmitry takes her advice very, um, seriously.  He loves his goats, Bianca and Luba, and his Boston Terrier, Oksana, and often travels with one of them tagging along. Back home he has four horses - Victor, Pyotr, Sasha and Professor Wiggles. He has a LOT of adoptive family in his village, most of them named Cousin Victor, all of them adventurous, and some of them are still alive.  He loves to watch Glee, although he changes his favorite character at the drop of a hat.

Okay, sure, Dmitry is the stuff of legends! But what does he have to do with SNC? Well, his "Best Friends In World" are the guys on the bus.  Sometimes he travels with them, and when he does he sleeps on the roof of the bus.  To our great delight, every once in a while mischievous Dmitry steals Ryan's iPad and tweets from Ryan's Twitter account. *giggle*      

There's only one known half photo of Dmitry (he says it's his best half), so we don't really know what Dmitry looks like, although the Chasers all have their own ideas. We definitely know that he is tall or short, a blond or a brunette, has long hair or short hair, wears glasses or doesn't and he wears a lot of plaid shirts or he doesn't. He also might have only one hand (or not). I think my favorite thing about Dmitry is his enthusiasm for life.  Personally I like to imagine that when Dmitry meets someone new he grabs their hand and shakes it up and down really fast and says, "I am Dmitry! I am SO HAPPY for the meeting of you!!!"

The only person who has publicly admitted to seeing Dmitry is current SNC Lighting Director, Blake Minor. In his SNC FanChat (more about that when we get to the letter F) Blake says that he has encountered Dmitry many times and it's usually really late at night or really early in the morning, and he confesses that he wishes he was half the man Dmitry is.

At this point - and probably for the rest of my life - I think of Dmitry whenever I see a goat or a sweet potato. And it always makes me smile.


Thanks to Angie and Dottie for submitting their "Dmitry" suggestion! I am so happy for the meeting of you! ;o)

1 comments:

Fab4tune said...

Never knew the backstory on sweet Dmitry...so freakin' hilarious! Thanks waterfallprincess :)

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