Thursday April 12, 2007

Well, I looked
…  I looked and looked and on one particularly embarrassing occasion, I actually stood at the top of a tower and yelled, “Luigi!!  Come find me!!!!” at the top of my lungs, tossing my hair around my head like a Baywatch babe in the ocean breeze.  Not really.  But I did keep my eyes open and scanning as we wandered around Italy’s little Riviera (and Mari Ellen lent her eagle eyes to the task as well)…  It took until supper on day #2 to find a adequate Luigi stand-in.  He was our waiter that evening.  Tall, dark-haired, tan-skinned…and strikingly blue-eyed.  Quite gorgeous, really.  And quite disinterested in the wind-blown, sun-burned and blister-crippled tourists we were.  He was so uninterested that he simply quit waiting on us after a few minutes, which was actually a relief, as I’d been trying to improve my appearance by running my fingers through my hair for a while and had only succeeded in getting them so hopelessly tangled that they’d ended up stuck in the nest of wind-whipped messiness.

Waiter number two (after Luigi quit on us), was Guido.  He looked a little bit like this:

Now, granted, he’s a little bit farther down on the seduction scale from Luigi, but at least he acknowledged our presence in his restaurant and didn’t seem in the least surprised by the fact that Mari Ellen had to use the butter knife to cut my fingers out of the tangled hair I’d been so desperately trying to finger-comb minutes before.  I’m told it will grow back nicely and cover the bald patches in another month or two.  Guido was nice, in an “I’m an Italian waiter, so keep an eye on your purse” kind of way, but he wasn’t exactly enamored with either of us.  It was sadly mutual.

Then came…drum roll, please…BRUNO.  Bruno was the restaurant’s busboy.  He was also pushing 70-years old, balding and just a bit rotund.  He kept to himself until we were about to leave, then turned up at my side like a long lost friend with a big smile asking why we were leaving so soon, patting my shoulder, and trying to speak English (he failed).  He asked me if I was American and suggested that maybe I came from California (he must have caught my Baywatch routine earlier in the day), then he patted what remained of my hair and told me I had to have Italian ancestry, as my hair is so dark.  He clearly hadn’t noticed the 1,245,497 freckles that had erupted all over my face in the 10 hours we’d already spent in the sun that day…no real Italian sports the kind of terminal freckles I suffer from!  He gushed and smiled and spoke to us as if we understood him…….and I found myself sending Renee an ESP message that went something like this:  “Hey, Renee, I appreciate the prayers, but could you be a tad more SPECIFIC next time???  I’m not asking for a model or anything, but “moderately tall, generally dark and bordering on handsome” would be a definite plus over the “short, squat, bald and ELDERLY” your latest prayer produced!” 

I know you’re thinking I’m exaggerating, so I must support my story with a picture.  I won’t lie to you and say that it’s of Bruno, but it IS someone who comes close to capturing his poise and allure.  I caught him reading a magazine on the beach on our first evening in the Bay of Poets: