The Middle Pages

Cursing - how I miss Tony and the crew

I love to curse. I do a lot of it but not nearly as much as the folks in the picture. Some people think I do too much of it, but I do not think it represents poverty of language as much as it represents the fire, anger and ire in my character. If swearing offends you, GET OVER IT! And once you've gotten over it, watch this all the way through to understand the poetry and inventiveness of bad language in the context of one of the best written TV shows ever made, The Sopranos. It's over 20 minutes long and even I did not yet make it all the way through.

Click if you dare!

F%$K BIPARTISANSHIP

If I believed in any God (and I emphatically do not) it would be the Hebrew God - a deity who bears a grudge and has certain stubborn ideas. I too bear grudges better than most people I've ever met. I don't just "get over it". Lately the GOP has made it clear that they think as I do, and that's pretty scary. So my title stands. And if it weren't likely to get me arrested due to the early hour and staid neighborhood in which I currently find myself, I'd go shout it from the roof until I could shout it no longer:

FV<K BIPARTISANSHIP!!!!

The Infiorata in Civita Castellana

Civita Castellana is a town of about eighteen thousand about 30 miles north of Rome in the province of Viterbo where we have an apartment.

In late May, to celebrate Corpus Domini, the town puts on a lovely festival called the Infiorata. The older men and women go out into the countryside and into their own gardens to harvest flower petals and other natural materials (seeds, sawdust, leaves) which they dye as necessary. They get up at the crack of dawn on the morning of the festival and work communally to outline designs and abstract images on the narrow streets of the town, first in chalk, and then often in soil, filling in between the lines with brightly colored material to produce an effect not unlike a natural mosaic. The finished designs are like floral runners. Some have religious themes - doves, symbols of the evangelists - and others are just abstract jumbles of colors and shapes that delight the eye.

You have to get up early to appreciate them, because after an early Mass, the local priest and his retinue pass through town over these floral carpets and obliterate them as they go.

Here are a few images or you to enjoy of those wonderful ephemeral works of art:

 

 

Mystery substance

Ah, the holiday season. This image has nothing to do with the holiday season whatsoever. Interesting, eh?

What is it?

Give up?

It's sugar-free raspberry jello with cream! :-)

Stimulation on the Road - Nookie and Kittens

Louis and I encountered this lovely vending device on a pit stop along the E45 near to Citta di Castello on the way to visit my darling Matilda earlier this month.

Here she is as a kitten:

Edited to remove the words for the act of love and material in various forms that depicts this act so my ads will not eb blocked:

So how it works is this: trucker pulls up to the rest stop. He buys a strong coffee to keep him awake and a plastic card from the cashier to prove that he's over 18. He pays, knocks back his espresso and leaves, stopping at this handy kiosk on the way to his truck. At the kiosk he chooses the flavor of "stimulation aid" that is to his taste and the format of its delivery (book? magazine? DVD?) and retrieves it from the hinged door at the bottom. This really underscores the differences in how we Americans and the Italians view "racy material" and "the act of love". Happy trucker or business traveler sets off merrily knowing he has his delicious, sordid treat to look forward to! Happy trails!

The Crimson: quite simply the BEST PIE IN THE WORLD

I've see this recipe, slightly changed, in a couple of places on-line, but without the amazing crust that I first encountered it cradled in when I first tasted it some fifteen years ago at my mother's house one Christmas. It came from some magazine or other and I have lost my original copy of it. A few years later, I made it for Christmas at my friend Geraldine's house and she was smitten too. Then she offered it as a holiday pie in the market where she cooked and took pie orders. It's become a staple at her own holiday table. The pie is almost impossible to make in Italy due to the fresh cranberry requirement, not to mention the need for sour cream, frozen blueberries, cake flour and Crisco. The Christmas my son attempted to bring the required fruit Alitalia lost his bag and a week passed before we received it. By the time his clothes arrived they were all dyed a livid magenta that resisted repeated washings.

Here you are - tart fruit, glorious color, buttery aroma, flaky not-too-sweet pastry. In short, everything you could want from a carb-overload dessert in the holiday season. Oh - and don't forget the excellent quality vanilla ice-cream for that ala mode touch!

Sour Cream Pie Crust

1/4 cup plus two tablespoons sour cream
2 tablespoons ice water
1 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup cake flour
1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter
1/2 cup chilled solid vegetable shortening

-combine sour cream, water, sugar and salt in a small bowl
-combine both flours in a large bowl
-cut in butter and shortening with fingers or a pastry blender until mixture resembles coarse meal
-add sour cream mixture and stir just until dough forms, adding ice water as needed just until dough forms (avoid overworking the dough or it will be tough!). This can be frozen for up to a month
-turn dough out onto a floured surface, divide in half, form each half into a ball, flatten into a disk and wrap in plastic film.
-refrigerate for an hour before rolling out crusts.

Filling

1/2 small orange, with peel, seeded, cut into small pieces
4 cups frozen blueberries (approximately one pound)
12 oz. fresh cranberries
1 1/2 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch

-grind orange coarsely in food processor and transfer to heavy saucepan
-add blueberries, cranberries, sugar and cornstarch and cook over medium-high heat until thick, stirring constantly.
-cool completely

Assemble and bake

-preheat oven to 400 degrees
-roll bottom crust out to cover a 9 inch diameter pie plate and top crust to 12 inches diameter
-fill pie, cover with top crust, seal along edge by pinching
-decorate top with shapes cut from the crust dough and attach with milk
-brush top with milk and sprinkle with a bit of granulated sugar
-pierce top in several places to allow steam to escape
-bake about 50 minutes on a rimmed cookie sheet until the crust is brown
-cool at least one hour before devouring, preferably with a scoop of good quality vanilla ice cream, greek yogurt, or CUSTARD if you can get it!

You'll also find this as a Foodista recipe

Living in a psych ward

It feels like that. Everything starts out so seemingly normal. Then you discover the odd sex habits, persecution complexes, Republican voting predilections, sports fetishes, shoulder chips and overflowing testosterone. THEN you find out that two out of two of your seemingly normal house-mates are both armed! One a hand g*n, but the other has freaking shotg*n.....just in case. In case of WHAT for god's sake? Armageddon? Or just in case of aggressive pointing and orders not to mess with the freaking thermostat? Too noisy "lovemaking"? Blenders after midnight? Fiendish door slamming and spiteful chair scraping? I'm fifty years old. I'm too old for this juvenile crap. I miss my 1980s flat-mates, but they were wonderful women. Ah - now it's all much much clearer. So I'll be dreaming of g&ns for weeks and sleeping badly. Four months and counting till I can leave this flimsy East Side 60s nut-hutch and return to Italy...

Tom is 60

That's my next milestone too. How wrinkly will I be - if I am at all. Who knows? Lisa and Tom had a lovely potluck lunch party in Otricoli. Friends, neighbors, countrymen lending their casseroles and home-made desserts. I made a yummy mushroom concoction with various grains. It had an odd purple cast but a great flavor. Antonio and Rita - their nearest neighbors - attended. They were to start the olive harvest to next day and I am genuinely sorry not to be there for at least part of it. I helped them last year for a few days and actually enjoyed it despite an in-born aversion to all things countryside. Without my iPod it would not have been possible, of course.  It was meditation in nature. Watching and waiting at the frantoio was one of the highlights and I tried so many different just-expelled oils that the next day I suffered. Sort of the way I imagine our now-dead Ridgeback Milo (RIP lovely Milo) suffered in Connecticut when he had the bright idea to eat an entire jar of vaseline when we were out.....

Anyway.....here are a couple of pictures of that lovely warm day.

The lovely Rita -

  Lisa -

 

The birthday boy himself! -

Antonio -

Election Night

I had a great election night experience in Italy - an all-nighter well worth the effort. I was to return to Seattle on November but had warned evryone that I would not be coming back if McCain won the election. How relieved am I about the result? Very. Although it seems like we have front row seats for the end of American prosperity and decades of living on credit and beyond our means. As part of the set-up crew for the Democrats Abroad in Rome, we set out from Otricoli at about 9 p.m. Set-up started about 10 p.m. and volunteers arrived in a steady stream until midnight. Doors opened at the Roadhouse Grill at Stazione Termini at 1 a.m. and soon the place was nicely packed. About 450 people had RSVPd. The upstairs space was all tables and TV screens tuned to CNN. Downstairs, there was a pancake breakfast buffet and coffee. Last minute frantic phone calls had guaranteed a sufficient supply of maple-flavored syrup. I was glued to the TVs all night. As the crowd grew and the temperature rose, the results came in on CNN. A bank of Italian photographers and camera-people faced the TV spectators who cheered and screamed as the tide of electoral votes went the way of Obama. I had no voice for three days afterward. At 5 a.m. came the breaking news announcement and the room went first absolutely silent as everyone held their breath and then wild with cheers, tears, hugs and sheer amazement. Everyone was rapt at Obama's acceptance speech and watched McCain's concession with equal attention. I cried too. To be honest, I wanted Hillary and would still desperately like to see a woman as President - with the exception of Sarah Palin. Her I'd like to see set on an Alaskan ice flow and sent drifting of into open freezing water in her beauty pageant high heels, one-piece bathing suit and sash.....

I set off from Termini at 6 that morning and Rome was quiet, and her relief was almost palpable, or maybe that was just mine. Maybe it was the effect of lack of sleep. Given that I haven't pulled an al-nighter since about 1980, that is entirely possible. The light seemed a different color, the colors brighter, the dawn achingly beautiful. We stopped for coffee at an Autogrill not far from our exit. Pat had her "Roma Ama Obama" t-shirt on and her Dems Abroad Obama button. The woman at the counter greeted us with a happy "Yes we can!" (probably the only phrase she knew in English) and asked us where we were from. California, Chicago, and New York as it turns out - the entire breadth of the US was covered. In Civita, after a shower and a change of clothes that same morning, feeling too elated and energized to sleep, I set out to walk around with a goofy smile on my face and a lot of bounce in my step. I encountered our small town Mayor who congratulated me on Obama's victory although I had had no part in it except my absentee ballot. He hugged me -  he'd never done that before - and wished me well.

We're in a terrible place, largely thanks to bad governance in the past eight years. In my mind most everything that ails my country is Bush's fault. PERIOD. I just hope that an Obama presidency can put us back on the right path to begin to fix some of the things that are broken. Hurray for Rahm - I adore his partisanship and admire his brains and attitude. I can't put my disappointment and disgust about the Republicans aside and if that makes me a bad person, so be it. I've been saying loudly and at every opportunity since 2000 that a ham sandwich would be a better President than W. Admit it! You're just as relieved as I am to finally have someone with a decent mind and an IQ above 80 back in the most important job in the country. If you aren't, well, you should just be ashamed of yourself.

There is Repubblica TV video that includes our event here. Enjoy!

Things of the past - better unremembered - (dis-remembered??)

I always said I'd never blog because I never had anything to say that anyone would ever want to read or learn from. Who cares what I think? Hopefully no one does. This is not me in the picture, it's my younger sister (front and center with the awful cat-eye glasses she used to flush down the toilet with regularity), who is now a very distinguished academic, so I can't tell you her name because she'd KILL me. But it's a good picture, isn't it?

One thing I do regret is that I have such a lousy memory of my past. If only I'd actually written an obsessive chronicle of the events of my childhood surely I'd have enough material for several volumes of fiction. Who'd believe it now? I'm not even sure I would. And what would it serve? Maybe a "reality" check of my memories, nightmares, delusions? A road map that might explain what I am now by what I'd experienced? Who knows. When my mother was about to kill herself (she kindly hinted to us in advance about her intention but not the exact timing or method she'd chosen.........officer) I finally summoned up the nerve to challenge her with one of the off-hand things she'd said to me when I was in grade-school that I felt had scarred me for life, and she denied she'd ever said anything of the sort. Naturally, her memory - at least by that point - was worse than mine, but surely I hadn't *imagined* her comment.

What is it that my darling son will remember of an off-hand remark I may have made while he was growing up that might have had such force for him and that I, pathetically, no longer recall? He's a sensitive soul. I shudder to think about it. But does even that realization, fear actually, or its ephemerality for my mother, make me feel the sting any less or make that remark any less the center of my emotional DNA? Words can have such power.

Later, of course, I made the enormous mistake of mentioning her original accusation to someone, a friend of sorts, who flung it back in my face again later as a judgment, during an argument, and re-opened that old wound. Is there anything more painful that that?

Sure there is! But what a good way to learn that it's best to trust no one with those deep, dark secrets. Best to keep that sadness and sorrow inside until they become the rage that sustains you through your golden years and impels you to tell the kids outside to STAY THE HELL OFF YOUR LAWN. You've all been warned. Stay the f**k off my lawn. :)