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.