"We have a Russian, we have a Muslim, we have a Jewish, we have Ukraine, and nobody fight!" says Raisa Chernina, who organizes Brooklyn's only "Your Highness Grandmother Pageant" alongside her husband, Alexander "Sasha" Sirotin. For the ...See more"We have a Russian, we have a Muslim, we have a Jewish, we have Ukraine, and nobody fight!" says Raisa Chernina, who organizes Brooklyn's only "Your Highness Grandmother Pageant" alongside her husband, Alexander "Sasha" Sirotin. For the past nineteen years the pageant culls the best and the brightest of Brighton Beach's Soviet émigrés under two conditions: "She needs to be grandmother, of course, and she has to love life," says Chernina.
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