evening to peruse the pubs, happening upon Carla Lovrin, a 20 year old, raised in Astoria, who’d moved to her parents’ native Croatia with her family five years prior. She was out with girlfriends that night, toasting to the single life, repeatedly referring to men as amoebas. Slavko was taken by her anyway, and, luckily for him, his friend knew her a bit. They won a place at the girls’ table. “But I didn’t think she’d ever take me seriously,” Slavko says. He was right. “The skinny stranger was a fast-talking charmer who used slang I’d never heard before. How annoying,” Carla wrote me in an email. “I disliked him right away.” So when they said their goodnights, Slavko presumed he’d never see her again. The next morning, he woke up feeling compelled to find her, already keen to the idea he had found the woman he wanted to marry. And it wasn’t long after he tracked her down that he told her as much. “He was persistent,” Carla wrote. “After a week of hardcore BS and charming he let it all go and was genuine, honest, and intelligent. I was shocked.” They were soon inseparable. During that same time period in Astoria, Carla’s brother, Chris, was living at a friend’s home. He made the jump to Croatia with the rest of his family in 1995 when he was seventeen, but moved back to his personal homeland after six months, partially because he didn’t speak Croatian well—and also because he wanted to finish school. In need of money, he took a variety of jobs, notably painting gypsies’ apartments. The painting provided frequent work for him since his fortune-telling clients avoided paying rents by pulling off latenight moves, switching apartments with other clans in on the scam. Chris finally began studying massage therapy after years of jumping from job to job. “It dawned on me one day that I just wanted to help people,” he says. So once his sister, Carla, moved back to New York with Slavko, her new husband, in 2003, another of Chris’ dreams—that of playing music—began to become a reality. In New York, Carla pursued performance and Slavko worked in construction. Chris had once found Croatia a challenging place to live, and Slavko felt the same way about America because he didn’t know any English. But he and Chris were able to “speak the language of music,” as Carla put it, and they started jamming together in Carla and Slavko’s kitchen. By 2004, Chris was nearing the completion of his massage therapy coursework, and was wondering how he would come up with the tens of thousands of dollars needed to open his own business. “On the day of my graduation, I was driving around, thinking about how much money I’d need,” he remembers. “Then I got into a car accident, and eighteen months later I received my settlement check—which was the exact amount I needed to open my center. My lawyer told me it was a gift.” Chris has been doing massage therapy in Bayside ever since, and a few years ago, his sisters, Carla and Diana—who returned to New York with the rest of the Lovrin family in 2001—opened a yoga studio next door to his business. In 2007, Carla volunteered her husband and brother to perform at a theater where she worked. Reluctantly, Chris and Slavko took the gig, playing the three ethnic Balkan songs they’d written. But a talent manager who’d been looking to find an act just like them offered to book shows on their behalf. With time and synchronicity—as Chris calls it—the band has grown in numbers and popularity. Chris and Slavko have met the numerous members who’ve come and gone through friends and by just being in the music scene. As little sisters do, Carla and Diana bugged Chris to let them into the band. He caved a couple years ago. “I love that it has become a family band,” Carla wrote. “We’re all up on stage, celebrating together. We’ve come a long way.” By the time the stilt walker appears in a Bad Buka T-shirt halfway through their set at the Beer Garden, she’s dancing among dozens of people who’ve gotten up from their tables, some with their kids, to more closely experience the bad noise—that’s the band’s name translated from Croatian—while mingling and drinking with the longer-tenured fans, seamlessly, unaware that all this music, dancing, and love would’ve never happened if not for one fateful night out for some beers. To get their new album and find out about upcoming shows, check out Bad Buka’s website: www.BadBuka.com Gypsies
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