La Voce Italiana According to Me

I am a female singer.  I am not a man and not a tenor.  I still sing Neapolitan songs.  Contrary to popular belief, being a tenor is not a requirement for singing Neapolitan songs.  Being able to sing is a requirement, preferably with a voice that is not painful to listeners.

There are Italians who can’t sing, but there are so many who can sing that most of the world thinks all Italians can sing.  We prefer to leave non-Italians to their illusions in this matter because this particular stereotype can be good promotional material for those of us who sing professionally or own restaurants.  There are many Italians who have done other things with their lives that have nothing to do with singing.  We are grateful to Guglielmo Marconi for inventing the radio, to Antonio Meucci for inventing a telephone about 5 years before Alexander Graham Bell got to it and to Leonardo da Vinci for inventing a bunch of things that don’t work but show what a genius he was.  I won’t mention Napoleon Bonaparte.  He started out Italian, but ended up French, which is okay with the Italians because they don’t want him, anyway.

Nobody cares if HE can sing or not.

Where was I?  Oh, yes.

I have a pretty large repertoire of Neapolitan songs and, like most singers, I love to show off.  Most of the time I do this in socially acceptable ways, such as in front of an audience that is expecting it.  On the other hand -- consider this a warning to anyone contemplating knowing me -- I might burst out into O Sole Mio or Torna a Surriento at any of the following times:

1.                   While waiting to be seated in an Italian restaurant.  I did this once.  Really.  Nobody asked me to sing.  It was not that kind of restaurant.  The people I was with wanted to kill me first, then hide.  I was singing well, too.  Some people just don’t appreciate my efforts to bring joy to their lives.

2.                   In my apartment.  This is safe, as long as I don’t have angry neighbors descending on me with torches and pitchforks.

3.                   On the street.  See No. 1, above.  If I am with people at the time, they will probably speed up and pretend they don’t know me.  In that case, I can stand there, sing and let people give me money.  I haven’t tried this yet, but there is a first time for everything.

Neapolitan songs are fun to sing.  They are Neapolitan because (1) they were composed by Neapolitans and (2) they are in Neapolitan dialect.  For those of us who studied standard Italian, this is a challenge.  Neapolitan dialect is to Italian what Jamaican Patois is to English.  If you have ever heard Jamaican Patois, you know what I mean.  Only a real Neapolitan can sing that dialect right.  The rest of us can only do the best we can with it.  We don’t care.  We sing it anyway because, as I said, those songs are great fun, even if you are embarrassing your companions in public.

I am not the first woman to sing Neapolitan songs, and I won’t be the last.  There’s no reason why male singers should have the best songs, just because most of them were written by men from a man’s viewpoint.  If anyone is looking for reality, I can’t help them, but if they are looking for someone who can sing the pants off Core N’Grato, complete with high notes and molto emozione, I’ll do it, even if there are two or three tenors present, hyperventilating because they think I have no business singing a first-person song about a man who loves a woman who can’t stand him and that one of THEM should be singing it because they are men.  To this I say, “Deal with it.”  If you want reality, watch the Kardashians on TV.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll travel to the nearest Little Italy and look for a restaurant.

Tenor Getting Attention

Pampering Myself Silly

The Front Part of My Left Foot,
With  Blue Polish

I would enjoy pedicures if it were not for one thing:  my feet are ticklish.  I mean paralyze-the-nervous-system ticklish.  Yes, they are that bad.

So why do I get pedicures, you ask?  I have two reasons:

1.    When my feet are smooth I am less likely to end up with holes in the expensive support stockings that I have to wear because the veins in my legs don’t work properly.  I more than make up what I spend on pedicures by not having to buy so many pairs of those damned things.

2.     Plain old ordinary vanity.  This is not logical because I almost never wear sandals, even in summer.  The only beings who see my feet all the time are me and my cat, Harmony.  Harmony doesn’t care if I have neon colored polish on my toenails and smooth heels.  She’s more interested in staring out the back window at the local urban life forms, both animal and human.

Cat in the Act of Not Caring About
My Feet

Pedicures are great at first.  I immerse my feet in a luxurious whirlpool bath with blue stuff in it and it feels really good.  If I could just stick my toes in the spot where the whirly water comes in and leave them there indefinitely I could be happy for the rest of my life.  Then the pedicurist makes me take one foot out of the safe comfort of the water and prop it up in front of her.  It’s all downhill from there on.

No matter what she does to my feet – clipping my toenails, massaging my arches, scraping my heels, buffing the nails – it tickles.  Sometimes it tickles just a little, sometimes it tickles a lot.  What should be a luxury spa experience becomes an involuntary jerky, giggly sitting dance.

It occurs to me that tickles are like pain.  If something hurts and you focus your mind on how much it hurts you are going to make the pain worse.  If you don’t think about it so hard, it doesn’t hurt as much.  I figure that if I apply this principle to my ticklish feet, they won’t tickle so much.  This works fairly well until the pedicurist touches one of my feet in the wrong way, and the spasms and giggles are suddenly back, worse than before.

All things must come to an end, however.  When this whole procedure is finally over, my heels are smooth again, my feet are clean and doused with sweet smelling lotion, my toenails are shouting with color and I am happy in the knowledge that my support hosiery bill will be smaller again.

Thoughts of the Day

1.  It is better to turn on one air-conditioner than to curse the heat, especially when the heat index is up around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

2.  If everyone but turns on one air-conditioner, the whole world will be cool … until the circuits are overloaded, causing a huge blackout.  In that case, everyone is cooked.

3.  When that happens, everyone should put on bathing suits, go out into the yard and squirt each other with a garden hose.  This is a perfect excuse to revert to childhood, which we all secretly want to do, anyway.

The Donald Trump Groupie and Fan Club

Humor is one of the best ways to battle hatred and bigotry.  It is in that spirit that I post this piece.  I believe that Donald Trump and his ideas are dangerous, and I strongly hope he will not be elected.  Using humor is one way to fight against him.  I usually steer clear of political humor, but I feel challenged to write this.

Kathy Minicozzi

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THE DONALD TRUMP GROUPIE AND FAN CLUB NEWSLETTER

August, 2016

First off, the person who always edits everything I write, Annabel Lee Longfellow Stump, got mad at me yesterday and stomped out.  I counted on her to correct my grammar and stuff because she went one year to Community College before she flunked out.  So I got nobody to put this in high toned language.  My ten-year-old son, bless his heart, went in and corrected my spelling and put in some punctuation and took out some bad language, so at least this isn’t illiterate.

(I deny any involvement with this newsletter other than some minor editing, which was done under parental duress, and the ideas presented here are most emphatically those of my mother, not me.  The author’s unnamed ten-year-old son.)

Why do we drool and pass out over Donald Trump?  Well, that guy is HOT!  Okay, he looks like an old orangutan, and that hair isn’t going to ever lie right on his head.  He’s stuck on himself, he’s insensitive, he’s bigoted and he’s bad tempered.  But there are other things about him that cause us to ignore how he looks, talks and acts.  He’s super rich, he has a lot of power and he’s famous.  You can overlook a lot in a man if he has those three qualities.

And we all know he’s hung like a horse.  He said so himself, in front of the whole world.  And sticking his hands in the air was a lot more classy than showing himself.  You got to give him credit for that.

You hear a lot about a wall he wants to put up down along the border to keep the Mexicans out.  I got nothing against Mexicans.  Some of my best friends are Mexicans.  My daughter went out with a Mexican til I chased him off with a shotgun.  I’m just afraid the whole country of Mexico is sitting down there waiting to sneak across and steal all the low-paying, crummy jobs that a lot of us depend on and marry our kids and make us all speak Spanish, even if we still have trouble with English.  Well, Donald Trump has promised to protect us from all the poor folks down there who want a better life up here, and he figures building a wall will do it.  I don’t know how he figures to keep people from learning how to go over that wall, but I’m sure he’ll get up a plan of some kind.

As for that family who lost their son in Iraq, I’m a little suspicious of anyone named Khan.  You remember that Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan?  Well, it makes you wonder.  That Khan in the movie was a villain.  And his name was Khan.  Now we got a family named Khan.  Would you feel sorry for them, with that name?  I think our Donald remembers the movie and can’t separate those people from Ricardo Montalban with white hair and wrinkles.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it because I don’t have a better one.

As for Hillary Clinton – well, isn’t one president in the family enough?  They just got to have TWO?  The rest of us don’t get that right.  Just cause she’s real smart and experienced and all don’t mean she has to go in and hog the president job for the Clintons.  She ought to give someone else a chance.

Yes, I know our Donald likes to talk and he says things he ought not to say in front of people, but I believe with all my heart that he don’t mean a lot of it.  He can’t mean a lot of it cause he’d be stupid if he did.  You also got to admire his wife for not knuckling under to what other people wrote for her to say.  She heard some good things from other people and used them.  How was she supposed to know that people actually pay attention to what Michelle Obama says?

Some people are scared that our Donald will turn out to be a dictator or something.  Well, I kind of like the idea of being told what to do.  When I have to think too much my head hurts.

Respectfully submitted,

Melisande Albina Dummschlager (“MAD”)

President

The Donald Trump Groupie and Fan Club

  

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DISCLAIMER:  Aside from the name Donald Trump, all of the names in this piece came out of the author’s imagination and are not meant to represent any person, living or deceased.  In addition, The Donald Trump Groupie and Fan Club is a figment of the author's imagination, and not meant to represent any group in existence at any time.