Zoë Stagg

Though I’ve never mounted a production of Two Gentlemen of Verona, and giving no thought to the actual feasibility, I would make sure the Two Gentlemen were like Statler and Waldorf, but I digress.

However, this duality seems present in my now-two-weeks-old Italian existence. People either come up to me, asking questions entirely in rapid-fire Italian leaving me dumbly blinking and, for the first time in my life, unable to give directions. Directions are my schtick. Or just when I get all confident that I blend, I’ll go up to a counter with a bottle of Coca Light and the shopkeeper won’t even bother telling me the price in Italian, he’ll just show me the receipt with the number of Super Dollars (€) required, printed on it.

Despite not being able to give directions, let alone ask for them, I had a friend stopping through Verona this week, and what better time to wander off onto the Italian rail system. Did I manage to purchase tickets and change trains twice and actually find him on the other end? YES I DID. Was I impressed enough with my feat that I haven’t stopped talking about it yet? SEE ABOVE.

Verona is gorgeous enough that I wouldn’t have wanted to see it with anyone but someone who takes pictures for a living. Without much plan (because clearly I never make them) we set off for the big sights with a “surely you can’t miss a 20,000 seat Arena made in the year 30 A.D.” Which I’m now realizing, if you believe the hype, that Jesus was actually still alive then. Heckyes biblical vomitoriums.

If vomitoriums are my #1 favorite historical reference, moats are totally next. The Castelvecchio was wandered through, the views stunning and exploited photographically, and…okay, yes, there may have been novelty pictures taken with the treasure trove of medieval art held inside. We’re horrible people.

Though I don’t speak Italian well enough to ask directions to Juliet’s house (even though we ended up accidentally walking past it, such is fate and unfortunate poisoning) I can order at a restaurant like…enough of a local that it’s like WHAT IS OLIVE GARDEN DOING? NotFoodispitaliano.

Stick with me kids, you won’t starve.

After lunch, an event in itself, we walked outside into the most surreal and gorgeous light in the history of sun hitting the earth. It sparkles, that city. It might be the reflected romance of the millions of “R + J 4EVA” graffitis scrawled outside of Juliet’s house.

It makes you sort of believe in love, this place.

And it really makes you believe in olive oil.

True story, because I have street smarts 4 DAZE sometimes it becomes necessary in the course of human events to appear as though you are talking to yourself, rendering you either: on the phone and someone will know what happened to you or; crazy.

When I have to use this strategy, I recite the opening Chorus part of Romeo & Juliet. It’s so romantic, saving your own life.

And so it is, that I’m going to fair Verona this very day where I shall be for the 01.01.11 FIRST!!!!!1!!! #1 New Year’s Whoohoo. It shall be lovely and completely free from awkward suicide pacts.

Also true story: in freshman English class, Mr. Witten stood in front of the TV during the love scene of this version of R&J (the Leo version didn’t come out until I was in college) and said, “Here’s where they shake hands.”

That must have been some handshake, you know, to make you want to take poison and all.

OKAY! I’m out! Lie thou there, with your alike in dignity, and have a Happy. If you should meet an Apothacary on the street, DON’T TAKE WHAT HE’S SELLING. See: awkwardness above.

Resolutions are fine, but I’m more in love with starting projects than making declarations. Though most of my 2010 “resolutions” were geared toward my big leap into the Army, I squeezed in a project I felt wildly passionately about. In 2010 I fundraised and ran for the women of the Congo, 2009 was for veterans and Honor Flight, and now 2011 needs a focus. A mission. Something outside of me.

Adult literacy occurred first, since my Twinkle Star Subway Experience—but I want to get my hands dirty this year. Raising money is good. Doing stuff is gooder? And as I’m currently in a country where today I raised my total vocabulary today to like 17 words including “mountain” and “yeast,” I don’t think I’m in much of a position for hands-dirty helping.

You know what I do have access to? An elementary school and a Girl Scouts of America outpost.

I’ve written about Blessings in a Backpack before—I thought it was here, but an awkward search through my archives reminded me that it was back in my blogging-for-hire days. But I’ve definitely talked about nutrition and food politics, and with new childhood nutrition legislation hitting at a time when the American economy still isn’t so shiny, it’s time to break it down.

Kids need to eat. Everyday. Not just school days.

Blessings in a Backpack makes sure kids have a backpack full of easy-to-prep, nonperishable food to take home over a weekend that might otherwise have been long and hungry. With 62% of kids on the Free or Reduced Meal Program at school, and over 12 million kids at risk of hunger, this has to happen.

SO. Here it comes. With the kids’ organizations and local parents in mind, The Big Backpack and Fund Drive of 2Kelevens is ON.

Details, to follow.

You realize that you live in a world where one can buy a bottle of wine festooned with pictures of golden butterflies and the words la dolce vita, and that it is just about the precise beverage equivalent of Mariah Carey and Lindsay Lohan’s tattoo.

And you realize all is good.

  Except even Lindsay gets a phone…

Squirreled away at training for most of 2010, I have a hole in my experience of popular culture—kind of like the year we lived in England left a 1987-sized gap that seems mostly My-Two-Dads in nature.

I missed out on a lot. I did not see the A-Team reboot in theaters. I didn’t see the LOST finale with the rest of the world. And I didn’t know that one of my favorite writers had a new book out.

Despite my wild digging of him, David Rakoff has never made my Klosterman Index—and I just figured out why. There are writers I love, who I don’t read. Not with my eyes, anyway. He is one of the writers who I will only consume if they’re reading their words to me themselves.

It’s not read-cheating by audiobook. (Nicholas Sparks, however, would be.) No, in this group, it’s as if their creations demand their own cadence in order to be consumed, the stress intended added quite deliberately and accurately by their own performance. 

Chuck Klosterman is usually one of these, though not entirely as strictly. Sarah Vowell is another. David Sedaris for sure. And David Rakoff is the King of the List. I own everything he’s written. And not a single page of it. So without visual reference,  he slipped my mind during the last ranking of the Index.

I will withhold my own review until I’m done listening, but I’m four months behind. When it dropped, the New York Times reviewer tucked this notion in the middle of his piece on it, “You wonder how many of these selections would be better said than read.”

Well, duh. Of course you do. “Reading Rakoff”: UR DOIN IT WRONG.

Or: How I Learned to Love Christmas Music Again.

I’m going to go ahead and admit it—I lead a pretty charmed and wholly lucky existence. I woke up this morning, Christmas Morning the Solo Show, and g-chatted with the Bro.

“What are you doing today?”

“Mmm. I’m going to run into the village. There’s this really old church, I’m going to see what’s cracking.”

The “really old church” is the Basilica di San Piero Apostolo, constructed in the 10th century on the site that St. Peter landed in Italy. I jogged up to the door, just to see if maybe I could peek inside, or maybe catch a few strains of organ from the doorway.

The door was entirely open, and I walked in. It smelled like dungeons and plagues.

Archways swooped heavenward and I tiptoed past a nativity scene and sneaked into the vestry. It was dark, and I could see my breath. Up at the front under one light was a group of people—and an organ. Holy Santa! I was going to get to hear choir practice? I AM KEVIN MCALLISTER.

I sat at first in the back, just to see if my workout-geared Whiskeypalian Americanness was going to get the boot. I didn’t. The choir warmed up, and I scooted forward. A short, kindly man in a puffy brown coat approached me. Sure I’d been made, I stood up. He grasped my hand in his flannely warm ones and said “Si, si.” I tried out a phrase that I wasn’t sure was Merry Christmas or Happy New Year, but I’d seen it on decorations. “Buone feste.” He grinned and said haltingly, “Happy holiday.” “Grazie, grazie.” And he went along to welcome more people at the door.

I was apparently not being kicked out. And I was also apparently just in time for church. I didn’t Google. Didn’t have a plan. Just showed up in time for Mass. Yeah. Charmed.

Watching families and old villagers greet each other, I figured I’d leave when the show kicked off. I didn’t know if I could pull off fake Italian, and fake Catholic. But just when I was about to leave, the choir ramped up “Joy to the World.”

I stayed. The lights came on, the pews filled, and the show started. Bells rang and everyone stood. From the back of this ancient church that’s seen every Christmas almost back to the first one, came altar children (girls, mostly) and the tiniest, baldest, most kindly looking priest in a sparkle of gold and red robes. The altar kids dangled their incense lantern doojobs and an acrid orangey smoke took place of the smell of ancient fester.

The choir sang, their voices lilting up to the roof, reminding me that oh yeah. The Italians invented soprano. I’m pretty sure the main event was in Latin, the banging of the chest to mea culpa, mea culpa sort of tipped me off. And then the gilded man took the podium and delivered what was probably the sermon in Italian. I caught only a few words, family, day, every day, every hour, but there was something about his cadence, his hand helping along his words, that made me not understand it, but…get it.

When he was done, exiting in a haze of lantern smoke, I recognized the gear up for communion. I slipped out the door, leaving everyone to their cup of salvation, and ran home.

Merry Christmas, you guys. And a little Buon Natale in there too.

Remember that one time when I was four and I forgot to ask Santa for a Huckleberry Pie doll and I was in tears because I thought I wasn’t going to get one, and then one of our family friends called pretending to BE HIM on Christmas Eve?

Dang it! This necklace is like that! Why elves, why must you forsake me on this the Eve of Santa?

Alas. It’s cute. So. Cute.

While it seems like I just roll around in the putrid bliss of own my horrendous taste, some of my predilections have reason. To wit, the reason Home Alone is in, and forever will be, in my top 5 films of all time.

Way back when Christmas morning was exciting enough to make sleep impossible after 0400, Christmas Eve was a corresponding horror show of antsy kids under foot. And since it was just me and my brother, that took some doing.

A tradition to…banish us from the house under the guise of not was invented. Every Christmas Eve, Frank took me and the Bro to the movies. Hot negotiations of which movie would please a big sis, a little bro, and an always-game septuagenarian would launch days in advance. Films that made the cut included the Disney Three Musketeers with Chris O’Donnell, Grumpier Old Men, and one of the later James Bonds.

And the first movie we saw as an exiled trio, was Home Alone. It is, and forever will be linked to family, to tradition, to special treats, and to Christmas.

PLUS. It’s insanely good and I can perform the whole thing, sing-along Rocky Horror style. AHEM, without the Googles, in order.

“Kevin. You’re what the French call, les incompetents.”

“Eleven, including me. Five boys, six girls, four parents, two drivers, and a partridge in a pear tree.”

“The cars are still here. They didn’t go to the airport…”

“I’m eating junk and watching rubbish, you better come out and stop me.”

“No clothes on anybody. Sickening.”

“A delicious cheese pizza, just for me.”

“You’re one of the great cat burglars Marv. You think you could keep it down?”

“Santy doesn’t visit funeral homes, kid.”

“KEVIN! WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY ROOM?” And say “room” with a Canadian accent.

Ooookay. And thus concludes the seasonal reading of the original and most important nativity story.

Kevin McAllister: The Reason for the Season.