Being an extra is like being a bird. You do nothing for hours and then must provide a few moments of window dressing before flying away without being noticed. Sometimes you are. Take the cardinal whose cell phone went off twice during one of Law’s speeches. Or the cardinal who wouldn’t stop talking after “ACTION!”
Or me blowing a scene with one turn.
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As I sat in jam-packed Curva Sud, the A.S. Roma ultras’ one-time home that has long since gone quiet, I sensed for the first time this growing phenomenon on the Italian sporting scene. Italy, the winner of four soccer World Cups and where soccer rivalries resemble provincial wars, has gone rugby mad. And on Saturday, the rabid rugby fans were treated to the Alabama Crimson Tide of world rugby. New Zealand’s All Blacks won the last two World Cups in 2011 and 2015. They won the inaugural one in 1987.
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When you’re retired in Rome, you don’t have many bad days. Mine usually consist of not getting enough foam in my cappuccino or getting in a fight with my landlady. Stress and anger left my life when I left America nearly three years ago. But for one horrific 12-hour stretch over Tuesday and Wednesday, I was in the middle of a country I no longer knew. I was trying to ward off a right-wing mob scene’s maniacal fervor of uneducated, fascist, sexist and racist Americans from towns I’ve never heard of and now never want to visit. Donald Trump’s election was the worst day of my life since 9-11.
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Have you ever read Latin? It reads like something off an Egyptian wall. It’s a language nearly as dead as Gaelic. Even the Catholic Church campaigned to bring it back into services around the world.
Now try memorizing it.
Now try singing it.
Now try singing it for TV cameras which are currently showing to millions of people around Europe and, in February, all over the U.S. It is my second scene of my “acting” debut. I am one of 120 men dressed like Vatican cardinals inside a hangar-sized studio in Cinecitta, Rome’s legendary old movie complex.
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I play an American cardinal, one of the many nameless bodies that form a fluid red or black background as Jude Law maneuvers through scenes. We’re shooting a breakfast scene and I’m sitting two chairs down from a cardinal who’s about to die. My job is to eat slowly, look over calmly and appear expressionless as the cardinal falls to the floor. But did I eat too many grapes? Could Sorrentino tell I was choking? I KNEW I should’ve eaten the breakfast roll!
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Cutting down to five required some ground rules. I ruled out pizzerias. I wrote about those in May. I also included nothing that’s listed in Lonely Planet. I trust Lonely Planet’s restaurant recommendations but I’ve walked on every path in Rome. The best restaurants are on the paths less beaten, even by LP. Making it easier is including a disclaimer that these may not be the five best in Rome. They may not even be my five favorite if I went back to all of them with a more critical eye. I have a whole new list by Jan. 1. The depth of restaurants in Rome is that good.
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The purpose of the trip was to downsize. Since moving to Rome in January 2014, Public Storage twice jacked up my rent from $100 a month to the larcenous price of $158. Emptying it will save me nearly $2,000 a year. Hell, that’s almost as much as I spend on wine. Besides, I will not pay $158 a month for furniture I’ll never sit on again and clothes I’ll never wear again. What good are college sweatshirts in Rome? I look so American I could have hopped off a Chevrolet commercial. If I walk around in a USC sweatshirt, ’ll look like I hopped off an American Express bus.
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Italy badly needs a Colin Kaepernick. Racism has been as much a part of Italian soccer as corner kicks. Italy doesn’t play its national anthem before Serie A contests but it would illuminate the problem if someone, some time, showed up at a stadium wearing a red Kaepernick jersey. Who could do it?
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On the first floor of the Palazzo Spada, in a small, quiet courtyard, is the real thing. I stared at it for 30 minutes before I finally figured it out. It’s a colonnade, an open-air hallway lined with columns that looks at first glance about 25 meters long. In actuality, when you get closer it’s about 8 ½. How? Why?
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I had a travel experience that will never make “Lonely Planet” or the Los Angeles Times. Penthouse? Almost. That’s why I’m writing this here. The famous literary magazine (Hey, it does have fine writing, too!) loved the tale I told of a trip I took to a hotel that specialized in erotica. You’ve heard of hotels that cater to families and pets and football fans. Welcome to Playa del Carmen where the Reina Roja Hotel caters to sexual deviants. Sadomasochism. Pool-side sex. Lighting out of a brothel. The Reina Roja, while also functioning as a regular hotel, invites anyone to explore their sexual fantasies — or find fantasies you never knew existed or never thought were legal outside Nevada.
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