A Round of Applause

I forgot to mention La Bimba's other big breakthrough: she claps her hands. If my neighbor C. is reading this, she is probably thinking, "Oh La Bimba has been clapping her hands forevs." It is true that she had grokked the concept about a month ago, but she was just lightly tapping her fingers together, her hands in an A-frame position, emitting no sound. Now she slams her hands together, full palmar action. You can hear her from the other room! So now when she dances her fabulous shim-sham-shimmy, she alternates between Fosse hands and clapping, her mouth wide open, having a grand old time. Still, I hope she grows up to become an accountant.

During one of the gazillion ultrasounds that my OB did during my pregnancy, we saw La Bimba with her hands together in front of her chest. The doctor said, "She's praying," to which I replied, "No she's not. She's doing that Neapolitan hand gesture that means, 'What do you want from me?' or 'What the hell'd you do that for?'" Here is little visual guide to Neapolitan gestures, hardly comprehensive.

I just downloaded and watched season one of The Office. Steve Carrell is too funny. Really. He is too funny, like it's too much, it's actually painful to watch at times. Can someone in the know let me know if it's worth downloading seasons 2 and 3? Or is it just so much of the same? Do any relationships develop? I still haven't gotten Sky and probably never will, so the occasional iTunes download is my only hope, and the DVDs my mamma brings me from the States. Thanks, mamma!

The chocolate cake I baked the other day came out great. It had yogurt in it. NB: it had yogurt in it. The cake is gone. Next up: yellow cake.



Hey! I am planning a seder at my house on April 2nd, first night of Passover. The Husband is being very unsupportive. I think he is afraid I am becoming religious. Fear not, dear man, that is not going to happen. One of my closest friends from college became an orthodox Jew a couple of years after we graduated. She is now married with, at last count (we're not in touch anymore) four kids, and lives in an orthodox Jewish enclave north of NYC. She did not grow up remotely religious. The last time we spoke she told me she was worried about me because I was making a bad decision being with a non-Jew (she was right about that guy, but his Gentile status had nothing to do with it) and that nothing is inevitable because God decides (this in response to my comments on the situation in Israel/Palestine...I think I said something controversial like, "War is inevitable"). I suppose nothing is ever inevitable, just very very likely.

She and I were great friends, had a lot of naughty fun in college. People change, paths diverge, yarmulkes are crocheted, Jews marry Italians and have little matzoh-pizzas. La Bimba is a delicious matzoh-pizza. Maybe that's what we'll have at the seder: matzoh-pizza! With bitter herb topping!

I printed a Haggadah, the Passover text, in Italian. All the prayers that made me squirm once I understood them now sound great. Here's an example, the 10 plagues: sangue, rane pidocchi, bestie feroci, mortalità, ulcere, grandine, cavallette, oscurità, morte dei primogeniti. Don't they sound pleasant compared to the English: blood, frogs, lice, wild animals, disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, death of the first born. Boils! Ewwwww. And you're supposed to eat after that? All the wine-drinking is probably to keep your appetite up. Anyway, I am looking forward to my first Italian seder. It won't be kosher and we won't throw out the bread in the house, so it will be just like I remember.

Gesu' Giuseppe e Misha

I had to delete that photo of the dude with the dog from the last post. It was bugging me. In order to do so, I had to delete the whole post and the comments went with it. Why can't I figure out a way to delete a photo from a post without having to delete the whole post? I need Blogger For Dummies.

There is much to report. La Bimba started pointing at things. She had already been gesturing toward things with an open hand, looking a bit like Eva Peron addressing her masses from her Buenos Aires balcony, but now she actually points with her little index finger. I told you she was a genius.

As for crawling, she is moving fast...backwards. She scooted backwards until she hit a wall and then turned ninety degrees and began scooting along the wall until she was half under the couch. The Husband said, "Where'd she go?" Had we found her any later she would have taken up with a band of dust bunnies and lord only knows where that would lead.

Yesterday was San Giuseppe, Saint Joseph, La Festa del Papà, Father's Day. I sent my Dad a Happy Father's Day all'italiana email and explained that Joseph was Jesus's dad, in case they forgot to talk about that in Hebrew school, and this got me thinking about poor Joseph, Giuseppe, let's call him Peppe, and how Jesus's adoptive father (stepdad?), i.e. God, gets all the credit for Jesus's martyrdom, resurrection, and subsequent movie, television, and book rights. Then my mind went further down the blasphemous path and I thought about God and Peppe as Jesus's gay dads. I sure hope I'm not pissing anyone off right now. Just sharing the inner workings of a sleep-deprived mind.

Have I blogged about my former fear of Jesus? As a child, my parents took me to Mexico. I was around five, maybe younger, maybe not, maybe six We went into a church. Everything was going smoothly until we came upon a room with about fifty crucifixes, each about a foot tall, hanging on the wall. I had never seen (or at least never noticed) a crucifix before and the little bleeding naked-but-for-loincloth man times 50 freaked my wee ass out. I ran out of the room only to careen into the church's epicenter, the nave or pulpit or both, where an enormous, larger than Jewish-girl-from-Brooklyn life Jesus hung on a built to fit cross. His wounds were gushing blood. It was like Carrie (though I hadn't seen Carrie at that point...still haven't seen it come to think of it...are you sensing a fear of blood theme yet?). I tore out of that holy place screaming and continued to whimper about what I had seen into the night.

I stopped whimpering the next day, but it took a good five to seven years for me to stop being afraid of seeing Jesus again. My parents took me to many a major European capital, thus many museums, and I had to ask before entering each room, "Is he there?" Even the milder depictions, the earlier works, the Dutch versions made me splutter. Add San Sebastian, John the Baptist, and the rest of the bloody gang, and you've got yourself a bonafide Christianity phobia.

Growing up Jewish in Brooklyn is like growing up Swedish in Sweden: you don't even notice. Up until recently there were more Jews in Brooklyn than in Israel and I bet the scales tipped only after a large number of scary right wing Brooklyn Jews made aliyah (the return to Israel) and set up a bunch of illegal settlements. So it was quite usual for a five-year-old to not have ever heard of or seen a velvet painting of Jesus. No one told me who he was, why he was all over the map, literally, why he was suffering so. I think knowing about him or Him would have helped calm my nerves or at least given me a mantra to work with, something like, "It's okay. It's just the son of God. He's suffering for my sins. It's okay."

My best friend from high school is an Irish Catholic and one of her sisters is an ordained minister (I think) and is married to an Episcopal priest (I think you call him priest) and I used to love to hear all about the Catholicism, all the rites, pomp, circumstance, glory, stained glass, chalices, etc. Real theater plus you got to choose a saint's name at your confirmation. I was always obsessed with names and wished I could have chosen one to add to mine. I remember an Italian girl on my block, Andrea, who told me she was going to choose Rhonda. Was there a Saint Rhonda? Time for another web search!

Now that I've exhausted that tangent, let me tell you about lunch in Bacoli. The food was good, lots of seafood served on fake scallop half shells. But the conversation a group of young Romans was having was great. They were arguing about homosexuality -- disease? nature? genetic? -- at the top of their lungs. The Husband, at the top of his lungs, said, "Sono un poco fascisti i romani." The couple at the table next to ours agreed. This is one of the things I love about Italy. You can call people fascists to their faces and they don't get up and smash a half-eaten lobster tail in your face. People are openly fascist just as they are openly communist, Christian democratic, anarchist, no big whoop.

This was all very interesting, but I was busy being proud of myself for recognizing the group of homophobes as Roman. I got it from the accent and I got the accent because most Italian films are made in Rome and the on screen youth talk exactly like these kids were talking. Same tone, same rhythm. Cinecitta' and shit.

Last bit of news is that I took a dance class last night with a guy named Bruno Valentino, who danced with Bejart and Forsythe {fyi, big names in modern dance}. I had a grand old time doing the neoclassical thing. In brief, neoclassical dance is classical dance, a.k.a. ballet, with your ass stuck out, your foot flexed, and your legs in parallel. It's huge in Europe and the jury that lives in my head is still out on what to make of it. It's very fun to do because it's pretty extreme and exagerrated, but it can look too affected for my tastes. I'm sure there are clips of the aforementioned choreographers' work on YouTube. If you check it out, let me know what you think. Oh, and BIG thank you to D. for sending me the link to the Charlie Rose interview with Baryshnikov. Very entertaining. Baryshnikov is simply the greatest male dancer ever ever. If you think Nureyev, I don't agree. However, the interview features a clip from White Nights, the film with Gregory Hines and Baryshnikov, and though you can see Baryshnikov is flawless and can do anything, Hines is more interesting to watch, looser, more playful.

Oh, how I miss dancing every day and talking about it and writing about it!

One last thing, promise. The dance space where I took the class is called Mudra, is literally a 5 minute walk from my house, has a bar, a gym, a theater space, a yoga space, a pilates room, and a steam room. Crazy. The anglophonic yoga class may have found a home!

Giù Jew

The weather was eerily perfect today. The Husband, La Bimba and I went to La Gaiola today. Part of Posillipo, it's a hidden little cove, a tiny beachfront down a winding two-way road that's wide enough for one car, so you have toot your horn every two seconds to warn oncoming traffic that you're not up for a game of chicken. The water was crystal clear. There were a couple of sunbathers and seabathers (one in a turquoise speedo, tossing his long black curls around in the wind), a family with one of those tall, thin, long-haired dogs (kind of like the one in this photo), and a bunch of workmen, fixing up the joint for the Comune. It was so peaceful, the air so fresh and clean, it was hard to believe we were still in Naples.
There are so may seaside gems in and around Naples, and a balmy weekday in March is the ideal time to go check them out. Imagine the road I describe above in deep summer with it's cacophony of car horns, billowing plumes of diesel fumes, cars going forward, cars going in reverse, pedestrians, motorinos, screaming teenagers. Oy. Not relaxing.
On a completely unrelated note, since the gingerbread, I have officially gotten back on the baking train. I baked a horrible batch of butterscotch brownies (though The Husband liked them) and there is a one-egg cocoa cake cooling in the kitchen as I type. (Did you dig that alliteration? I definitely did, dammit).
On another utterly unrelated note, I know you will all be very sad to hear that I am missing a conference at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, entitled, Practicing Jews: Art, Identity and Culture. My good friend N. is performing in it and there is going to be talk after talk about Jews and Art, Jews and Dance, Jewess Jeans (maybe?! who remembers the Gilda Radner Saturday Night Live fake commercial? "Jewess Jeans: you don't have to be Jewish to wear them...but it can't hurt!"). I'm now wondering if I'll ever return to academia.
Return, you ask? What, have you been there before?
Yes, yes. BA, MA, MFA, lots of letters just hanging around in the junk drawer. I think school is my element, whether university or dance studio. I love to study. I love to study dance above all else. Everything about dance interests me: taking class, performing, rehearsing, reading dance history, writing dance criticism, theory, discos. My current dance life is limited to reading dance blogs and grooving around the house with La Bimba (who happens to be a fabulous dancer...she doesn't walk yet, or crawl for that matter, but she can rock out, wiggling her little pelvis until the wave reaches the top of her head and she flips over...such talent! such grace!).
I gave up doing a PhD in Russian Literature to write dance criticism and to dance. I realized the PhD was not for me when (1) I found we were reading more theory than novels, stories, poems and (2) I found myself doing an immediate about face every time I entered the library. I love libraries for about 10 seconds. Then I want to scream and dance up and down the stacks. (I actually made a short dance piece for my friend M. that involved her running down an aisle of books screaming, "Silence! This is a library! Silence! This is a library!")
Later, I did an MFA in Dance. So here I am, all laureata and shit, and not using any of it. Maybe one day, but doubtfully here in Naples.
I am trying to start a yoga class for English speakers. Any of you expats in Naples interested?

Wake Up and Smell the Teine?

The first time I asked an Italian barista for a cup of decaffeinated tea, I said, "Un tè decaffeinato, per favore." The barista, looking crisp in his white shirt and black vest, shouted to his co-barista manning the espresso machine just inches away from him, "Un caffè decaffeinato!" I quickly corrected him, "No, not a decaf coffee. A decaf tea." He looked at me as if I were on a rare field trip into reality and said, "There’s no coffee in tea." I said again, thinking, My Italian is not that bad, is it?, "No, I don't want a decaffeinated coffee. I want a decaffeinated tea, tea with no caffeine", and he said, "You mean deteinato, no teine," and I said, "What?" and he said, "What?" and I went on my way without getting my tea.

From this encounter, I deduced that (1) there is no caffeine in tea, (2) there is, rather, a mysterious substance called teine in tea, (3) teine functions much as caffeine does, i.e. it makes you jittery so some people need it to be removed. This was all quite disconcerting since I, and every other anglophone I know, grew up thinking tea had caffeine in it. It never occurred to me that the caffe in caffeine related solely to coffee and that to decaffeinate coffee was to de-coffee it in some way. It logically follows, thus, that tea would have to be de-tead or de-teid as the case may be.

Wait a minute... Have I once again fallen into the trap of dubious Italian logic? Somebody dope slap me!

This is not the first time I have doubted certain Italian truisms, not the first time I've slipped on an Italian tautology and landed on my sorry American ass. And I'm not talking about superstitions like the upside down bread or the hat on the bed. I'm talking about things, usually food-related, presented as facts. (Food commericials make up the largest slice of the advertising pie in Italy. I learned that on L'Eredità). One of you fabulous expat bloggers mentioned the miracle yogurt drinks Italians tout on TV. Today, I'm here to talk about tea.

I was reminded of the whole tè deteinato conundrum when, yesterday, my American neighbor pal C. pulled out a box of Star Tea deteinato. Under the big blue DETEINATO banner were the words "tè senza caffeina," tea without caffeine. Eureka! This bit of information led us to believe that either (1) there is no such thing as teine and Italians simply cannot shake the gnawing belief that tea should have its own word for decaffeination (like womyn instead of women) or (2) there is such a thing as teine but it has nothing to do with caffeine. To Scooby Doo this mystery, a little web research was in order. This is what I discovered... (things get a bit technical and boring from here until the last graph, so feel free to skip ahead, though I know you, reader, are so gripped by this enigma, you just have to crack the code)...

The Garzanti English-Italian Italian-English dictonary defines deteinato as detanninated and offers tè deteinato, detanninated tea, as the example of usage. Tannin! Of course! I knew about tannin, but is it the same thing as caffeine?

The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines tannin as follows:

"Any of various compounds, including tannic acid, that occur naturally in the bark and fruit of various plants, especially the nutgalls, certain oaks, and sumac. Tannins are polyphenols, and form yellowish to light brown amorphous masses that can be powdery, flaky, or spongy. They are used in photography, dyeing, in tanning leather, in clarifying wine and beer, and as an astringent in medicine. Tannins are also an important ingredient in tea."

An important ingredient, the scientists say.

The same dictionary defines caffeine as,

"A bitter white alkaloid found in tea leaves, coffee beans, and various other plant parts. It is a mild stimulant. Caffeine is a xanthine and similar in structure to theobromine and theophylline. Chemical formula: C8H10N4O2."

What do you say? From these definitions, it is pretty clear that caffeine and tannin are not the same thing. And though I don't know for sure if Italians are removing the tannins from their tea instead of the caffeine, aw shucks, I'm pretty damn sure they're not laying a finger on those poor amorphous masses, yearning to be free. So, why why why is the tea deteinato and not decaffeinato? I might have to ask an expert. Know any tea experts? Anyone? Bueller?

Yesterday, while I was scarfing down The Husband's delicious melanzane fritte, he looked up at me and said, "Sai una cosa? Mangi troppa frittura." I eat too much fried food? Is that code for "you're getting fat and you have acne?" It seems that eating too much fried food, even if that means in my case, a handful of fried eggplant 2-3 times a week, will damage your liver. The Husband -- my coffee drinking, cigarette smoking, hash partaking, wine-beer-grappa-amaro swilling, cornetto eating health nut.

Rather than turning to the web for justice, I took up my fork and pushed the remainder of my frittura into the trash.

Polly-O

My friend had her baby a half hour after my post. Brava! Auguri! I'm going to visit them in the hospital tomorrow. Can't wait! More blogging from Maternity Mayhem.

I am at a loss, here, simultaneously reading a novel (Alice McDermott's After This), a magazine (Zoetrope: All Story), and a bunch of half-written short stories I keep promising myself I'll get back to and finish one of these days. Why is follow-through such a bitch? I had the same problem with tennis.

To avoid the writing I would like to be doing if I weren't so petrified of what will come out, I am baking. My first gingerbread is in the oven and the cinnamon-ginger-molasses smell is wafting through the apartment. If it tastes half as good as it smells I will dance a victory dance. I love Italian sweets, but sometimes I crave a chocolate chip cookie, yellow cake with chocolate frosting, cheesecake (made with Philadelphia not ricotta), gingerbread.

Speaking of ricotta, do you Americans in Italy remember eating Polly-O ricotta and mozzarella cheese? If so, can you imagine ever eating it again? I used to make baked ziti for myself after school. I would use Ronzoni pasta, Prego tomato sauce, and Polly-O cheeses. I thought I was quite the Chef Boyardee, and that's just what I was (if you've ever eaten Roller Coasters you know what I mean). Now I am spoiled by the pasta al forno and all the other red sauce inspired piatti here in Naples. There is no going back to Polly-O.

I could write a novel just about how and what I ate growing up. I should start that novel, too, huh? Oops! Gotta run. My gingerbread is calling me. Pity.

Schlemiel Sch-Lamaze-l

Today I went to Ospedale Fate Bene Fratelli to visit a friend in labor. I told the guard that I was the sister when he told me visiting hours were over. He let me through. Unfortunately, my friend was being monitored, i.e. was strapped to a table watching her contractions dance by on a screen, a tickertape memento cascading to the floor like a slinky. Il tracciato as it is called was happening in the delivery room, so I was not allowed in to see her. I left some snacks, a New Yorker magazine, and a note by her bed.

Her bed was one of six or eight – I was too overwhelmed by the number to take an official count – in the room. Every bed seemed to be occupied by a whalesomely (yes, that’s whalesomely, not wholesomely, Mr. Spellcheck) pregnant woman or a brand new mom. Every giant belly or drowsy breastfeeder was surrounded by one to twelve family members. Husbands, grandfathers, brothers, uncles came in and out, never allowed to stay for long since someone else’s wife, daughter, sister, niece always had to whip out a boob or try on a nightgown. I do not understand why they don’t have those convenient curtains around each bed. The female relatives are there to do what the nurses are supposed to do, and if I weren’t so North American (and my poor friend, still in labor as I type, so English) this giant family affair cum public display of nuova maternità would be fantastic, lovely, so old world and bosomy. Add to this festa atmosphere the orderly who was singing Neapolitan songs at the top of her lungs while wheeling trays of food to the patients, and we have ourselves a veritable Dancing Under Vesuvius Maternity Party Ward.

If during my labor I had had to stay in a room with fifty million other women, Neapolitan women (sic), I don’t think I could have hacked it. My labor was thankfully very short, very fast, however, so perhaps it wouldn’t have been too rough. For my laboring friend, however, I think it has been quite hard.

One thing I noticed about the hospital is how clean it was. And it didn’t reek of hospital, of sickness and cleaning products, like an American hospital does. The clinic where I gave birth was also stench-free. How do they do that?

Last I heard my friend was at seven centimeters. In bocca al lupo!!!!

And before I forget, in addition to still trying to turn lefties into righties, it appears that Neapolitan doctors advise moms of children with outies bellybuttons to tape them down so that they might become innies. This happened to my friend C. She did not return to that guy. Also, no bathing (tub or sea) for at least two hours after a meal. Do not get me started on that one, I’ll just get upset. I mean, I just want to dunk La Bimba in some nice warm water after a meal. It would be so much easier to keep her less sticky. Alas, such are the compromises one makes in a multicultural marriage. At least The Husband lets me feed La Bimba avocado, even if he does ask repeatedly, “Che roba è?”

Green Eggs and Prosciutto

We made it to the Pantheon! La Bimba was asleep in the stroller, but I'm sure she caught the building's vibes.

I forgot about all the nuns and priest tooling around Rome. And the liturgical garment stores. A few years ago, a friend and I witnessed a clergyman (higher than a black-frocked priest, lower than the Pope...bishop? cardinal?) trying on a hat, one of those pointy bishoppy hats. We watched through the window as he shook his head, up and down, side to side, to see if the hat would remain on his head. One store, De Ritis, has an attractive female mannequin modelling a whimple. Do you think nuns go whimple shopping together and Sister Mary Teresa comes out of the dressing room and asks Sister Mary Immacolata, "Does this make me look fat?"

I forgot about all the tourists, especially American college students in Trastevere, young women from Michigan or Arizona stumbling around in high-heeled boots, one drunk and laughing over the ankle she just twisted after having gotten a heel caught between two cobblestones, coming to the next morning with a purple elephant's foot. I forgot about how hard it is to find a bus ticket and that it is a bit of a risk to ride the bus without one. I forgot how beautiful Rome is.

I moved to Rome from Berkeley in August 2004. I lived there for eight months before moving to Naples. I am always happy to visit Rome and, shockingly, I am always happy to return to Naples. Naples is a drug and I am addicted. People in Rome often look like they are living la dolce vita instead of la vida loca alla napoletana. Lots of comfy, over-priced outdoor cafes, fancy shops, government types in pinstripe suits, lungofiume strolls at dusk.

Romans are awful drivers. They lack the consistency of Neapolitan drivers, i.e. they don't always and without fail try to go first, before the motorino, the pedestrian, the doggie. Sometimes they stop, sometimes they slow down, sometimes they speed up, sometimes they maintain breakneck pace. You never know what the hell is going on. And so many motorino accidents! I rarely see a motorino on its side in the middle of the street in Naples. As a Neapolitan typographer I know once explained: "If you have a one-way street, but it will save you and everyone around you time to go up that street the wrong way, you have to be an idiot not to do so. There is no sense in following traffic rules if they cause traffic." Smart.

My friend the journalist in Rome is coming down to Naples to write about smoking and helmets. I told him Neapolitans put helmets on their pastries but not on their heads or the heads of their children. I was being metaphoric, referring to the cardboard domes that are placed over pastries in order to protect them from getting smooshed. He thought Neapolitans put their actual motorcyle helmets over their pastries. I just love a good misunderstanding. It's like an episode of Three's Company!

When I was living in Rome, The Husband (then boyfriend) called me and started talking to me about work and how he was in a hole and was really down and was having trouble getting out of it. I made sympathetic noises whilst thinking how poetic he was, how depressed and poetic, when his narrative started to breakdown. When I was thoroughly confused, I said, "Wait a minute. Could you repeat that?" When he retold his story I realized that HE HAD ACTUALLY FALLEN INTO A HOLE AT WORK, had fallen pretty far down, and had trouble getting out of the hole. Isn't that great? The misunderstanding, that is, not the fact that poor Husband fell into a hole.

Being in a marriage where one spouse doesn't speak the other's language at all, and one spouse speaks the other's language fairly well, but that language is not really the other's language because The Husband is only truly comfortable in Neapolitan, can be very challenging, often fun, frustrating, humbling, exhausting. We have lots of misunderstandings, create hybrid terms such as "crankissima," and mix up our languages ("Tu sei proprio stinky"). It's like living in a Dr. Seuss book.

One of my main motivations for moving to non-English-speaking country was to get out of my habitual ways of thinking and perceiving the world by speaking in a language not my own. It worked great for a good long while, but now I think I've been here long enough to have returned to my old thought processes, neuroses, biases. I've just carved another passageway in my brain for my ancient issues to stroll through. Call it Via dell'Angoscia.