Sal and I attend an Italian meet-up group to practice speaking Italian. Of course wine is involved so the conversazione becomes more lively as the evening progresses. And my Italian slips and slides around until I find myself speaking in tongues...just not Italian tongues.

I meant to ask my dinner companion what he did for a living but it came out as “When do you work?” He looked at me with a quizzical expressione and replied “After the sun comes up and until the sun goes down.” That was the extent of that conversation because I hadn’t a clue what he meant.

After my third glass of vino another speaker and I were hot in conversation. We. neither one of us had a clue what we were saying but carried on regardless. The person across the table was enthralled at our courage in conversing in Italian and asked us “You all are very good Italian speakers why is that?” To which I thought I was replying “Because we understand each other.” Turns out that what I was actually saying was “Because we piss on each other.” The words capiamo and capisciamo are very similar and it would have been an innocent mistake were it not for the loud laughter coming from the other seven speakers who knew what in the hell I really did say.

I say throw caution to the wind when trying to speak another language. But not in France because they’ll cut you a new liver in front of everyone and tell you to go back to America and never come back to Paris. Of course since I speak no French I would be likely to respond thusly “Why thank you I like your bosoms too!”

Ciao!

KK

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I like to go to the Italian meet-up because they do it at restaurants and I get to drink wine eat meatballs and pretend that I am in a café in Rome. I don’t understand most of what they are saying as I don’t speak Eyetalianese but I get the gist of some of it and meatballs make me happy. So do pork rinds but you have to be in a Kansas bar with a bottle of Tobasco sauce to get the right atmosphere for those.

Italians like to talk with their hands. You can understand what one of them is saying when they hold out their arm and slam their other forearm into the inside crook of their elbow. That makes the outward arm thrust up toward the sky. They do this to me a lot. I think it means either that they have a big robust penis or ‘I’m having chest pains.’ I keep meaning to ask KK what that gesture means but my post-menopausal short-term memory loss keeps me in the dark.

Wait a minute…she is sitting right next to me. “KK what does that gesture (I do it) mean?”

“Oh. ‘Fuck you.' Oh dear.” I have misinterpreted this and now I’m trying to remember things I said that would have caused this reaction from Italians…

Let’s see maybe it was the time I called Fellini a hack. Or perhaps it was the time I mentioned the theory that Michelangelo’s The Mona Lisa was really a self-portrait of himself in drag. Or maybe it was the time I spilled my red wine on that lady’s white Donna Karan crepe pants and then tried to wipe her crotch with my napkin and then there was the time…

Oh. I get it. I’m not going to stop going to the meet-ups though and now I’ll know when somebody is doing the Italian equivalent of shooting me the finger. Learning a new language is fun.

SalGal