Police Tape and the death of the Three Little Pigs

The Day after we bid farwell to Breon we came across a school in Catanzaro that would changed the world of children’s theater as we knew it. The show Three little Pigs, the Audience 90 or so 5-7 year olds. We knew something was amiss when after the children were ushered in that they were not told to sit, we asked one of the English teachers why, and she said we cant make them sit or they may get cold and the parents will complain. Hoooold up, there was an expectation to make 90 5-7 year olds stand for an hour show, within five minutes of the story telling we went out and told all of the children to sit and continued as the noise in the poor sound quality gym began to grow with the children’s craziness and excitement. During the story telling we teach the songs and the dances that go along with the show, that have the little ones jumping, hopping and skipping in excitement. However during this storytelling one of the teachers pops behind the curtain to tell us that could we please make sure the children didn’t jump to high or skip to high or they might fall down. What are the children made of, fine china? They cannot skip or jump to high, ok team one struggled on as the children got increasingly louder and louder in our poor acoustic gym.

The English teachers who answered to the regular teachers stood by helpless to quite the children as the regular teachers just sat and watched us slowly get drowned. We stopped frequently to quite the children and as the show started we stood backstage wondering if we indeed would be able to finish the show under the dull roar of small voices. When the Three little pigs and the big bad wolf appeared the children started to jump on stage punching and kicking us, as other children throughout the whole show attempted to sneak around the sides of the stage while the teachers still sat idle by. We at this point did not think that we would finish the show but also that we just might get murdered by the 90 small children should they decide to rush the stage as a whole. At one point when I entered as the big bad wolf four children began to fight for my tail and I almost took off my mask in frustration and left the stage. I went to one of the head teachers saying that we could not finish the show if they did not do something and their response was to call the janitor in to play bodyguard and he also brought along police tape which he strung up along the front of the stage between a desk and a chair. Police tape to hold back a mob of children, absolutely absurd. Maybe ya know the teachers could actually try asserting some control over their children, no they went with police tape. We finished the show and a second show of Robin Hood which was a breeze in comparison, took picture of our police tape, then as we were leaving took the tape as a trophy. We used it as headbands in the car, a reminder that we had survived the ordeal, although or performance of the Three Little Pigs did not.

Baby B the Beach and a 17 year olds birthday party

My temporary replacement to our group who would spend a week with us was Breon, or Baby B as he was nicknamed as part of our boy band we formed named Carmax, my boy band name is Molly Danger (who knows why). We found ourselves traveling from the heel to the southern coast of the toe, Sella Maria, within 5 minutes of the beach. The four of us did a couple of super easy fairy tale days, and ushered in the weekend with a night of heading out to the clubs. This night started with a nice dinner and a few drinks at the hotel and we tried to head out of the our abandoned hotel(we were the only guests, and the one hotel owner). We spent an hour and a half trying to get though the gate until we had to wake up the owner to let us up, bravo team.

When we finally made it out and to the town with the clubs 30km away (around 3km to a mile I later discovered), we came across a club called the Ace club which seemed to be bumping. We got conned into paying g 8 euro’s at the door, and it turned out to be a 17 year olds birthday party with weak drinks and one room with a disco ball and a tiny dj booth. We had a solid high school dance party to strobe lights and left amused and convinced we were easily the oldest people there. The search for a real club continues, and after our TomTom led us up a super tight alley we spent an half an hour squeezing out of streets that are not ment for anything more than smart cars and horses. The search led us to a massive club called Atmosphere. This big rather nice club had a line stretching for a while and it probably would have taken an hour to get in, but Baby b has some Italian friends.

Outside the club Breon sees a friend he made when he passed through the area on a previous tour named Pasquali. He ushered us past the line, got us discounted Vip tickets and in to the club in under five minutes, the club was gorgeous and absolutely packed, with stiff drinks and a live performer with dj to boot. The live performers name was La Bouche, and he wrote and orignally performed “Be my Lover” from the night at the Roxbury Soundtrack, we were all very stoked because it’s a ridiculous song, the dude was quite middle aged rocking a white tight suit and a some dancing girls. We smoked cigarettes in the club and befriend the group of guys that Breon had met on his last visit, and finally commuted back to our abandoned hotel by the sea around four am.

Hotels, Cars and Trains

End stage Rome, Enter southern travel
We bid a fond farewell to the tiny awkward flat in Rome we called home and hit the road. Before we left we had a wonderful free business meal with Maria, who her and her family have become one of my many Italian relatives. We left to enter the world of long car rides and hotel rooms. After a 5 hour car ride down south we chilled at a hotel for the weekend were due to lack of refrigeration, where forced to chill our beers in the beday. It was around this time when I received the call that I needed to go all the way north back to San Remo for a meeting about my visa. For some reason the fact that I had a student visa was not enough they needed to see me in person, and Acle had just sent me far south for one promotion day, just so I could catch a solid 14 hour train ride back north, sweet(sarcasm) Yep the 14 hour dream journey started at 11pm at night where I left my worried team mates, got on the train with a dead cell phone, no ticket because I had never gotten the fax from the office, and not an English speaker in site. After a half an hour of charades with the ticket man on the train they sat me down in a cabin for a few hours till a different ticket person who spoke a little English came along to help.

The trip took three trains, they woke you up every few hours to check your tickets, and one time when I left my empty cabin to go to the bathroom around 3 in the morning, I returned to have the cabin I was in filled with a group of African girls who had spread out and taken all the seats and my bed, super sweet(much sarcasm). I arrived in San Remo looking like I had slept in a ditch and went to the police station to find out I they couldn’t even meet with me till the next day, and settled in for an evening in San Remo. After a few hours the next day waiting in the office for the police computers to come online(yep the polices computers were down, that must be safe) I took care of all the silly visa stuff and the office had been kind enough to book me a train ticket back to my group, this trip, an easy 18 hour journey on three different trains.

This beast of a journey at least had a night train to relieve some stress you would think, oh no no no. This was to be much funnier and less easy. The wonderful language barrier showed its head again here and I could not find my night train, after searching up and down the train for some clue to what the ticket in Italian said. Exhausted after a few hours train ride so far I looked for a sleep car with an empty bed and found one bed in a packed 6 person room left. I crawled in to it only to be woken twenty minutes later and kicked out at two in the morning by a ticket man to a spray of angry Italian because I apparently was in the wrong car. I stood in the hall weary and exhausted with no clue where I was going to sleep or what I was going to do till a different ticket man came bye, I showed him my ticket and he said” oh you are in the first class cabins” in english. I dumb founded was ushered to my own private cabin in the front and thankfully got seven hours sleep before I changed trains. I climbed into the bed of my private room and thanked any god I could that I was not found dead from travel exhaustion in the hall. I arrived to meet my group dazed as all hell, but quite content to no longer be within site of a train.

LA to the R to Y to the Ngitis

I had been hacking up lungs for a good solid month and a half by this point, and it was not till I fell ill with a stomach bug as well that my throat totally closed up and something had to be done. I went to visit to an Italian doctor with Maria the most lovely head of the Rome office, who translated for me to the doctor who spoke very little English. The doctor looked down my throat and went “Mama Mia” and started laughing as him and Maria covered their mouths as if I was carrying the plague while I sat there with no clue what was going on, haha good joke Italians. Turns out I had Laryngitis, and that with the stomach bug and a fever from the medication had me bed stuck for two days, luckily Faye was able to come down and cover some English days we had coming up. A few days before on the weekend before I realize quite how sick I was we were checking out the Sistine Chapel. I was feeling awful but forcing myself to see the amazing place and the museum that surrounded it.

I sat down for a few moments on a bench to admire the chapel and was woken up by Emily who told me that I had fallen asleep for a solid 15 minutes. Luckily it probably just looked like I was deep in prayer and not dead asleep in one of the most famous chapels in the world, but if anyone was going to nap there why not me. Also on my list of things I saw while I was quite ill was the Popes crib, the Basilica that sits right in Saint Peters Square. This church was absolutely massive and stunning, very different from the smaller beautiful Sistine Chapel. This Basilica was stunning, towering pillars, arched ceilings and filled with statues and paintings.

At least if I was deathly ill, I was deathly ill in Rome.

Do like the Romans do
We are bad tourists. Good drinkers, but bad tourists. We managed to miss the on two different occasions the Colloseum, which I might say is open very infrequently on the weekend which is very very stupid, as well as missing an AC Roma game and we showed up five minutes late to the pope speaking. We did manage to go out drinking at a place that was within site of the Colloseum, and there is something quite awing when you are having a drink within sight of thousands of years worth of history. We also manage on a few different occasions to procure some free drinks which I can take no credit for and can lay the credit at the feet of miss Liz and miss Emily. These two pretty girls managed to convince many a nice gentleman bartender to give us free drinks for the evening, but then we had to deal with the repercussions of driving around at 3 in the morning with Rocko(a bartender we think) and his friends all who spoke no English as they attempted to give us a ride home. We eventually with some drunken brilliance, at a traffic light all jumped out of the car with fear that they might kidnap us and then caught the first cab home. The girls also had to deal with the bartenders giving them calls for a few days asking them out on dates in very broken English.

Also adorning these nights of fun was a ridiculous pub crawl with a splattering of English speaking tourists, Americans, Canadians, English, Germans and an extra Aussi. We virtually found this rag tag pub crawl, crawling its way to four different pubs and spured by a free hour of drinking at the first pub, free shots at each following pub and discounted drinks(bullshit they were 9 euros) on top of a free t-shirt for 20 euro’s. The results, various pub crawl members disappearing along the way or going home early far to inebriated, others throwing up in the streets and still others being carried/ dragged along by friends, I was probably one of few survivors who walked in my door at the end of the night and that’s not saying much.

During the weekend days we recovered from the exhausting weeks and nights on town and eventually learned a bit about sightseeing. We hit up the Sistine Chapel, the Popes Basilica, the Colloseum (on our last weekend), the Roman steps, Pantheon, Columns, Runes and a plethora of other ancient cool looking things, not bad considering our runs as Italian tourists.

Team Roma, NUTS
Roman inner city kids are NUTS! Country kids public schools and some private schools are the sweetest kids, they even ask for autographs after the shows kind of sweet, where some inner city catholic school kids are devil spawn who think they are too cool for school and their crap doesn’t stink. Imagine performing for kids who would rather be outside smoking, or be are so rowdy that there teachers can barely control them, yep they are the bastards. Our first few weeks were a mix of these, but luckily with every bad day there was three or four good days of children that make you totally love the job, we have collected at least a dozen cute kids we wanted to take home, a few nuns, and a stray dog our two that were all to cute to leave, so we packed them all into the trunk.

Also in the NUTS category are Rome Drivers who a) don’t know were the direction buttons are in their cars, b) think their horns are directional buttons as well the thing that controls every other aspect of the car and c) manage to make rude hand gestures while smoking and talking on their telephones at the same time. Overall very talented people.

Italians love to feed you, if you are foreign and like to be fed find a nice Italian family, say you want to be there American child, and you are in. There are many of them and I have adopted around 30 Italian families, don’t be telling them though I got each one feeling super special as if they were my only family. Italian food and wine is amazing and they know it, I think it becomes a contest for them to tell you it’s not much of anything when they have served you a four course meal that seems fit for a king, and they say they usually do better. In this mix we ended up at a Catholic school were nuns cooked us a four course meal with wine in the middle of a the day between shows, I fricken love nuns.

We were still rehearsing every fricken night for the first two weeks of tour which was a tad annoying, but once we got most of our stuff down it was time to have some fun.

so....

i have four new blogs sitting on my computer, i just cant manage to get to a point were i can find an internet point to send them, so stay tuned for some good fun posts i promise