Wine or Gas

So the Accademia dell'Arte lived almost next door to one of the best places in the world: La Fattoria San Fabbiano. It was a winery and we spent a lot of time going to and fro. It was just so nice, being close at hand, we could walk there when it was nice, get our wine, and walk home, happy as could be with a big five liter jug of wine as our companion.

I remember being so confused the first time I went. It was myself, Kevin, Tyler, and our special guest David Jilg. hahaha!!!! David was there celebrating a break from his very difficult tours (*snicker*) of his sabbatical travels. It was really nice him being there! He chilled at the Accademia for a few days and would eat and relax with us. I remember he was there at the very beginning when very few of us knew any Italian and his little remembrance of the language was way more than what we knew. Every Wednesday would be Mange e Palare (Eat and Speak) when at dinner you could only communicate through Italian, which really became alot of fun later when we all got ok at it, but at first it was really hard and I spent most of the time asking David "Come se dice....this and Come se dice....that." It was really nice that he was there and while there he decided to consolidate luggage and left me a bunch of his toiletries and shirts and stuff, which was very very helpful (even though I soon donated most of his clothing to their costume closet!) haha.

David and me! (not in Italy though)

The wine getting experience was awesome though. What you do is take this huge five liter empty jug to them and they fill it with whatever wine you want, either an ok white table wine or an excellent chianti (we're in the middle of chianti country remember) and they would pump it up gasoline style full of wine. It was great. They even had the little spinners on the pump that ran numbers on "Litre" e "Euro" and you could watch as five liters were the equivalent of only 6 Euro!!!

WTF! THAT'S FREAKING AWESOME!

Italians Don't Celebrate Halloween

Why? I'm sure it has something to do with America's capitalistic economy and it's penchant for making a mockery of religion, but the U.S.'s pasttime of dressing up as ghouls, skeletons, and Hilary Clinton does not carry over its boarders. For example, and this we learned the hard way, is that Italians don't celebrate Halloween. Not one little bit. So maybe a few cosi Americani made their way to Italian vendors, but no, there's no door to door. No miniature Milky Ways or Granny Candies. Niente.

But did that stop a bunch of obnoxious American Theatre students who happened to be studying in Arezzo at the time? Absolutely freaking no way not! We partied hard and we encouraged all the on lookers at the bar that evening that this was how all American's behaved and a few of them even crossed to the dark side and painted mustaches on themselves for a feeble disguise!

In the true American fashion, we completely decked ourselves out. We had Dionysus, a knight, snake lady, date-rape victim, Borat, Captain Morgan, a beautiful masquerading lady, Bride of Frankenstein, and a P I M P!

We were awesome:

My Way Late Review of Wicked

So while in Italy I had the pleasure (displeasure?) of spending part of my fall break in one of the capitals of the world, London! Kristen and I went together and we stayed at her friend's dorm/apartment thing. One of the highlights of our sojourn to London was London's theatre! We spent the better part of our second day there frantically and confusedly searching for theatre's and making up our mind on what we were going to see. Apparently, while we were there, the London Universities were on Fall Break so the theatres chose that week to stop giving Student Rush Tickets which sucked and jacked up the prices for all the shows.

We eventually decided to see Wicked. Kristen had already seen it but graciously saw it a second time. We got cheaper tickets because we were literally in the back corner, but the show was still good and we didn't have to spend much at all! It was a "wonderful little piece of spectacle" as I began referring to it later. The show itself is kinda lame, but there were some really cool special effects, like when Elphaba chooses her path as the wicked witch and is lifted to the middle of the stage while she is belting and her cape encases the enter proscenium! Pretty cool!

It also had Edina Menzel in it, who was the original Elphaba from the NYC Broadway one. (she was also in original Rent) whatev. It was pretty sweet.

Here are some pics!

Pisa was LAME...

We were all so excited to be visiting the leaning tower of Pisa! I mean, how cool!! We had all only been in Italy for about 2 and 1/2 weeks and were totally in sight seeing mode. When we arrived, we realized that we would have to walk about a mile to get to the place where the tower was. And quickly into the walk, it became evident that this city use to be great! There were old universities, libraries, government halls, etc. There were incredible ancient fountains and ornate arches into parks and the like. But it was also evident that no one has cared about these things in a long time. The entire city was run down and it was a boring a gray walk all the way to the one bustling center of town where the Leaning Tower and the Duomo were located.

And the Tower was not all that big! Only like six stories.

Not all that cool...

And what made it worse, everyone was doing that stupid, "Look! I can hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa!" thing. Which is not to say we didn't do the same thing since we were there, but I mean, come'on! The city had a really cool river running through it and lots of cool old churches. I would have liked to have seen something of more interest. And unlike the Tower, not spent $11 to walk up six flights of stairs.

I'm Really Lame...

LibreAccademia Performance

Right before Fall break, we got our first opportunity for performance. It was at the local theatre/school (la Libre Accademia) that we had been affiliating ourselves with. We were broken into three groups and we performed five people scenes based on the Commedia conventions of Carlos Garcia and Katrien van Beurden and whose style I am currently teaching to produce my senior project at Rhodes College. Our topics and groups were:

War:
KK
Andy
Sprance
Ryan
Noelle

Immigrants:
Jim
Becca
Kevin
Elizabeth
Alyssa

Christopher Columbus
Chris
Aysha
Jesse
Tyler
Claire

The performance went great and it was so nice to have an audience for the first time that entire semester. The performance space was really cool too. It had a dome ceiling so the acoustics were great, and it was really nice that some of the music kids came to support. And of course, afterwards, there was wine, and thats all she wrote!

A Terrible Start

In the Fall of 2006, I was fortunate to spend the semester studying in Arezzo, Italy. There, I attended a theatre conservatory called the Accademia dell'Arte where I studied the Renaissance theatre genre, Commedia dell'Arte. But getting over there was the toughest thing ever! Beginning my journey in St. Louis, I had to take a greyhound to get up to Chicago to save some money on a flight and from there I was SUPPOSE to fly from Chicago to Boston to Rome. Nice and Easy right? Instead, because of some bad weather going from Chicago to Boston, I missed my connection flight and was forced to wait around in Boston for several hours. There, I called home and my conversation went something like this:

"Hey Mom.."
"Hey, are you in Boston?"
"Yeah, and I missed my flight to Rome."
"WHAT!?"
"Yeah..."
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm figuring that out...I call you back later."

I failed to call. I ended up flying to Frankfurt, Germany where I got drunk and passed out for a few hours. Before getting drunk in Germany though...I got drunk on the airplane to Germany. That was great. I sat in coach next to this old Italian lady. We sat there for 7 hours drinking wine and whiskey and she taught me a bunch of Italian rejection lines that I saved for future use, such as: "mi dispiache, ho gio preso un altro impegnio" (I'm sorry, I have another date). Cause I'll be honest, I love me some Italian women, but they're not all as hot as I had originally hoped. I found that many of them were slightly fat or mousy. Gross. Many were indeed incredibly hot though.

From Frankfurt I finally reached Rome. By that time I totally smelled cause I had been wearing the same shirt, jeans, and underwear for 72 hours. But of course, the airlines had lost my bags. Which sucked. A Lot. And when I say lost, I mean really lost. For three and a half weeks. I eventually had to go to this sketchy warehouse outside Rome and search for my bags there. Luckily I found them, and was very relieved not to have to borrow underwear any more. Thus was my terrible start. Amen.