Several years ago, a friend and I decided to become Italians.
We weren't talking about moving to Italy, or lying about our ancestry for a professional opportunity. This didn't mean we were going to cover our living room furniture with plastic, or let a family dinner devolve into a shouting match. We weren't trying to be real Italians.
"Being Italians" just meant that we would pretend for a single, beautiful day, that we were Italian men. Or our imagined version of them, anyway.
La Dolce Vita
Being Italians wasn't our first idea. Not by a long shot. My friend Dan and I had previously pretended to be sailors, cowboys, and German lawyers. Most of these make-believe affairs involved meeting for drinks at the marina, smuggling flasks of bourbon into an Old West Museum, or talking about law in a beer garden... whatever was appropriate for the outing. The only constant in these "make believe days" was two grown men pretending to be something they were not, and getting drunk while doing so.
On this occasion we decided to be Italians. Rules, of course, had to be established. Through email negotiations, Dan and I haggled over the quintessential Italian (and Italian American) experience: what do Italians do? What do Italians wear? If we only have 12 hours to be Italians, how will we spend them?
Here are the answers we arrived at, based on our own warped perception of Italian culture:
Italians love their mommies. We decided to make a rule that we must bring up our saintly, hard-working mothers, and praise them at least once an hour.
Italians are stylish and fashion-forward. We agreed to dress in the fanciest clothes we could find.
Italians love business and haggling. Thus, we needed some sort of a hustle to concern ourselves with, something we could call "this little thing of ours" and discuss in hushed tones. Ultimately, the business we came up with was shopping at yard sales, and, if the mood took us, selling our bounty online for profit.
Italians love Sambuca. We would try some.
Italians like to sit in gardens and smoke cigars. We would need to obtain a cigar and find a garden.
Italians love good music. We discovered this playlist to listen to as we traveled across town drinking and making deals at yard sales.
Italians love food and wine. We decided to visit a fine Italian restaurant and enjoy cuisine from the old country.
Sambuca, music, food, a mysterious side business, and praise for our righteous, loving, perfect mommies. We were finally ready for the esperienza autentico Italiano.
Italian Day
When the day finally came for my friend and I to transform into Italians, I knew I had a task ahead of me. I am not very fashionable, and I am not very cool - this much became clear as I searched my closet for something that would make me look like a suave mediterranean man. There wasn't much to work with.
I eventually settled on a black turtleneck and some dress shoes I hadn't worn since a wedding that was several years in the past. These items didn't get me far, so to help sell my look I slicked back my hair with copious amounts of gel, and strapped on a broken dress watch. Would this fly in a Roman disco? Maybe not. But I felt that perhaps I looked Italian enough to get into a poker game in New Jersey.
When Dan arrived at my condo it was obvious that I had been outclassed. His hair was slicked back like mine, but he wore black Wayfarers, form-fitting slacks, elegant leather brogues, and capped off his ensemble with a beautiful vermillion scarf that he had wrapped casually around his neck. Bravissimo.
Looking the part and ready to go, we decided to get properly liquored up before leaving my house. We were hoping this would make us feel loose and cool, like real Italians. The Spotify playlist kicked on, and I uncorked a bottle of Chianti, since we had not yet acquired Sambuca. But as we sat at my counter-top dressed as Italians, sipping wine with music blaring, an unexpected event took place: my wife and her sister came home early from a shopping trip.
The sound of a door. Shopping bags rustling.
"Hi babe, we're home ear-..."
A moment of stunned silence. My wife and her sister - two actual Italian-Americans - stood horrified and confused by the scene laid out before them. Dan and I, hair gelled to our scalps and dressed like eurotrash, were drinking before noon and listening to accordian music.
"What the fuck are you two doing?" asked my wife.
"We're... being Italians."
My wife looked at her sister. Both of them seemed concerned.
"You're being Italians? What does that mean?"
The next ten minutes were spent by Dan and I trying to explain that, over the past several weeks, we had coordinated a day to get drunk, go to yard sales, and talk about our mommies. This, we explained, was our perception of the core Italian experience, and we just wanted to try it out for a day and see how it felt.
I can't say my Italian wife or her Italian sister understood our explanation, but they did seem to accept that, whatever the hell Italian Day was, it was more or less harmless. Their horror slowly turned to amusement, and before long the real Italians were questioning the imposters about the parts of our plan they didn't understand. Luckily, we were ready for them.
"Why are you going to yard sales?" - Because Italian men like to do a little business, ya know? Wet our beaks. Put a finger in the pie. Get a piece of the vig.
"Why is Dan wearing a scarf?" - Because it is our understanding that Italian men like to wear scarves. We googled it.
"And you think that stupid fucking turtleneck makes you look Italian?" - Not by itself, no. This is an ensemble. Have you noticed my broken watch?
When the ladies were satisfied that Dan and I were just mentally ill and not up to anything criminal, they went in the other room. And after enduring their interrogation, I decided that I needed a little something extra to get me out the door.
"Do Italians drink whisky?" I asked Dan, reaching for a bottle of Buffalo Trace.
"Uhhh probably not."
"Hmm. Well this one does," I said, pouring a glass. "Oh, you know what we haven't done yet?"
"What's that?"
"Talk about our mommies. I'll start. My mommy is such a goddamn wonderful woman - she is a saint on Earth, an angel from heaven, and when she dies, I shall write to the pope to have her canonized."
"Oh yes," said Dan, eager to get in on the game. "My mommy too. My mommy is the purest, sweetest woman in our village, and she cooks a Sunday gravy that is the envy of all the wives for miles in every direction."
"Let's call an Uber," I said, coughing as the Buffalo Trace burned its way down my Italian throat.
This Little Thing of Ours
I'll never know what our Uber driver thought when we got in his car that day, stinking of cologne and dressed like idiots. But I'm pretty sure I can guess what went through his head when we ordered him to Ca Del Sole, the finest Italian restaurant in Burbank: "that place is only two blocks from here - this is a waste of my time."
But this is Los Angeles, my good sir, and nobody walks on these sunny streets - not even Italians. Onward!
This cavalier attitude was short-lived, however, because when we arrived at Ca Del Sole it was closed for the day. This was severely disappointing; eating Italian food was a fundamental part of the experience we had so painstakingly crafted for ourselves. But, after a brief discussion with Dan about our options, I remembered there was another Italian restaurant several miles further into Burbank, so we spurred our driver towards it, with visions of meatballs and garlic bread dancing in our heads.
Much to our consternation, this restaurant was closed as well. Our Italian tempers got the best of us, and we became frustrated nearly to the point of giving up on the day altogether. But then we saw it: a grungy Mexican restaurant on the other side of the street with a sign on its door that read "Open". Dan and I exchanged a look, and we knew what we had to do.
A young man was tallying receipts at the cash register when we made our entrance. He looked up at the two of us - sweating, over-dressed, be-scarfed, and hungry - and raised an eyebrow. It may have been the outfits, or it may have been my hair, because sometime during our car ride it had started to un-slick itself, and had risen into a sort of gel-clumped bouffant that made me look like I'd spent the night in a park.
"Table for two," said Dan politely, folding his Wayfarers and hanging them from his shirt. His hair still looked great, the bastard.
As we settled into a vinyl booth and examined the sticky plastic menus we'd been given, I vocalized the question that was on both of our minds. "Do Italians eat Mexican food?"
"They do now," responded Dan. "I want beef taquitos."
"Margarita is an Italian name," I observed, picking up the cocktail menu. "I think Italians might enjoy drinking Margaritas."
"Oh yes," responded Dan. "They would."
Several stiff drinks went by while Dan and I talked about how our mothers were saints, and their cooking was the best in the town, and where was a young man to find a wife who cooked as good as his mommy, and had we heard that cousin Lorenzo was apprenticed to a local cobbler, and so on and so forth. We also talked about our business - the buying and selling of trinkets from yard sales.
"I don't see how it isn't a good idea," I explained. "All we need is some cheap crap to hawk on Ebay. People do it all the time."
"Uh-huh," nodded Dan, accepting yet another Margarita from our waiter. I don't think he believed in the business quite like I did.
We were significantly lubricated by the time our food arrived, and had already discovered a yard sale on Craigslist to hit after lunch. If the advertisement was to be believed, it held great promise for this little thing of ours, and we were excited to see what kind of garbage we could turn into molto denaro.
Thirty minutes later, an Uber deposited Dan and I onto a residential lawn that was strewn with junk. This cache of used goods was being watched over by two heavy-set women in camping chairs who eyed us with suspicion. And I can't say I blame them, because Dan and I looked decidedly less suave than we had in the morning. Bleary-eyed and giggling, we stumbled through mounds of their discarded belongings, grinning and eager to do business.
By now, mint-scented hair gel was dripping down my forehead in the heat, and splotches of dried salsa resembling the Hawaiian archipelago spotted my turtleneck. "You just leave the haggling to me," I whispered to Dan. "I know how to cut a deal."
This particular yard sale had either been picked over, or these women had nothing of value to begin with. VHS tapes of movies like In The Heat of the Night, children's dolls with missing eyes, a broken sewing machine... it was going to be tough for our business to make anything from such worthless shit. But we were Italians, goddammit, and we were shrewd. Our proud people gave the world aqueducts, pasta, and Roberto Benigni. Surely we could make a profit from something here.
"How much is this?" I asked, hauling a six-foot, fully articulated plastic skeleton out of a pile of Halloween decorations. "This would look good hanging from my balcony."
"That old thing? Oh, you can have it for free," said one of the women, rising from her camping chair and waddling over to me. She had short, grey hair, and looked like her name might be Fran. "I honestly just want to get rid of all this stuff. I'd consider it a favor if you just took it."
"Nonsense," I said. "This is a yard sale. You deserve to be paid. Besides, it's a fine skeleton. Here - take $10."
"Oh no, I really-"
"Take it. Here," I shoved the bill in her face.
The woman shrugged and took my money. I saw Dan looking at me from behind a pile of old magazines - apparently this negotiation did not impress him. "Fuggedaboutit," I muttered, dragging my skeleton to the sidewalk to delineate that it was no longer for sale.
We poked around the trash heap a while longer, and I wound up buying a wooden jewelry box for my wife. It looked like someone had ripped a mirror out of a heavily vandalized McDonald's restroom and attached driftwood to it. It was absolutely hideous. I figured my wife could put her rings in it, and if not, I'd just hang it on the balcony next to the skeleton. If one item didn't scare the neighbors, the other might.
Dan bought a beat up paperback edition of The Martian. I say bought, but I think the women let him take it for free. They really didn't seem to want any money, and I was beginning to suspect that this was less a yard sale and more two women trying to liquidate clutter in the aftermath of a Hoarders episode. Whatever it was, we finally had some trinkets to show for our venture. And so with our business concluded, we summoned another Uber.
After stopping at a liquor store for Sambuca and cigars, we staggered back into my condo, dragging the life-sized plastic skeleton and a battered jewelry box behind us. We were greeted by the same two Italian women we'd left behind - my wife and her sister - who looked at us with thinly-veiled contempt.
"What the fuck is that?" asked my wife, eyeballing the skeleton as if I'd traipsed in with a dead cat.
"It's a halloween skeleton. Don't worry about it, it's for the business."
"This little thing of ours," said Dan, touching his middle finger to his thumb and bouncing his hand.
"It looks like it came out of a goddamned dumpster," said my wife. "I don't want a fucking skeleton in our apartment."
I had suspected this might become an issue, and I was ready for her.
"Don't worry, I'm gonna hang it from the balcony," I said, dragging the skeleton across the living room carpet as my soulmate watched in disgust. I opened the glass sliding door to the balcony and kicked the skeleton out onto it. "But I'll do that, like, later."
"Don't forget her gift, dude," said Dan, holding up the old jewelry box.
"Oh yeah, I got you something, babe."
My wife got up to examine the jewelry box, but was obviously not pleased with it. Looking back, I'm not sure who would be. It was in the garbage can within minutes.
After the gifts were exchanged, Dan and I retired to a pair of folding chairs behind the building, settling on a patch of public grass where residents often take their dogs to defecate. We played Italian music on a small bluetooth speaker, lit the cigars, and opened the Sambuca.
"Have you ever had Sambuca before?" I asked Dan, pouring us each a small glass.
"No."
"Me neither. But the Italians, they swear by it."
We took our first sips. The speaker played a relaxing accordian tune, while the sun cast a mottled light on the grass below us, shining down through the trees overhead. It was magic hour now, just before sunset, the time when everything is somehow prettier, more special.
"This Sambuca tastes like shit," said Dan.
"It's the worst drink I've ever had in my life," I agreed.
As Italian Day waned into Italian night, things continued in much the same way. More wine, more Sambuca, more talking about our saintly mothers until we fell asleep. The next day, we awoke as Americans, and immediately felt less sophisticated for it. Dan departed my condo, no doubt eager to get home and shower after spending a night on the couch. I took the opportunity to rinse the gel out of my hair, watching as my Italian heritage swirled around the drain and vanished forever.
We had accomplished our goal. We had become real Italians. No matter how you look at it, the day was a success. And although Dan and I didn't discuss Italian day for a while after it took place, we did tell other people about what we'd done. Soon it was common knowledge among those who knew us that, at one point, Dan and I had been Italians.
As time passed, the legend of Italian Day grew. People in our lives began to request that we have another make-believe day, and that they be invited to it. My mother asked if she could be sailors with us after learning that Dan and I wanted to spend an afternoon watching White Squall, eating popcorn shrimp, and drinking rum in his beachside condo. Co-workers and social acquaintances made similar inquiries with regularity.
Dan's own sister was so eager to join us that she even pitched some of her own themes - "Russian Bolsheviks on a Train Traveling Through America", or "Austrian Mountain Climbers at a French Chateau". We rejected these as too specific; they were missing that certain magic spark, that je ne sais quoi that made Italian Day so successful.
Yet strangely, in all the years since Italian Day took place, we have yet to do it again. Although that's not to say that we won't. Dan and I have spent significant energy rebuffing attempts at infiltration from outsiders, while privately discussing our own ideas for a sequel. A strong front-runner is Cajun Day, where we would dress my dog like an alligator and sit outside drinking moonshine in our bare feet. I've also pitched "Mongolian Day", where we would build a Mongol War Tent out of bed sheets and drink fermented yak milk while listening to Tuvan throat-singing.
So far, none of these plans have come together. But I think that they should - and not just for Dan and I. Everyone can benefit from a little make-believe. Life can be difficult, upsetting, or otherwise just monotonous, and we all need to mix it up once in a while. There's nothing wrong with a little escapism, even if you have to co-opt another culture for a day.
If you ever need a break from your life, do yourself a favor - buy a few bottles of liquor and call yourself Romanian for an afternoon. You're pretty much guaranteed to have a blast.
Epilogue
A year or so after Italian Day, I found myself strolling through Spagna, which is an upper-class shopping district in Rome. It was Christmas, and the whole neighborhood was festooned with twinkling lights and wreaths, strung across the meandering streets which define that city. I had been drinking Sambuca and wine for days on end, eating pasta, and haggling with shop owners over cheap leather goods like purses and wallets.
And it dawned on me in this moment that, as absurd as Italian Day was, Dan and I actually hit the mark on what it meant to be Italian. Sure, we had Mexican food and broken jewelry, but the core experience was authentic. Strolling, drinking, haggling, not taking life too seriously - we did it all. And here in Italy, I could confirm a uniquely pleasant fact: we would fit right in.
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