Flypaper For The Walking Wounded

I write this entire entry out of sheer joy for some of the situations I find myself in. I am in NO WAY making fun and thankful for the relationships I have forged with these and other people on my journeys.

Yesterday was a holiday, Liberation Day in Italy and many people were off work and, as I found out, at Piccolo Bar. By the time I strolled in around 5pm, many had been there a lot longer- they open at 11:00am, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that they arrived much closer to then. One of the funny ways I can tell when people have had a bit to drink is by the number of people who will go over to help themselves to the volume knob on the stereo. Whenever a song comes on that a drunk person wants to dance or (heaven forbid) sing out of key to, they will try to slink over to the giant knob and boost it as stealthily as a drunk can- which is usually not very well. Sometimes the bartender will catch them red handed and tell them to leave the knob alone or hear the level increase more than expected and either let it go or go over and correct it- I think usually based on how much they like the song being cranked up. It can be quite comical.

As I have mentioned, when people know you are a native English speaker, if they have any confidence in their skills, they will approach you to practice. This can result in people with minimal skill plus elevated confidence striking up a conversation. Add a few drinks and suddenly everyone’s an orator regardless of reality. But, I NEVER turn anyone down. I get people who I see regularly who will say “hello, how are you” and once I answer with “very well, thank you, how are you?” just say “goodbye” and walk away as their vocabulary is exhausted. I get others who have quite an interesting level of English. One young man in particular who will struggle to tell me he thinks Malta would be a good place for a vacation and suggested I buy frozen fish to bring home as a souvenir, yet speaks in detail about a (and these are his words, not mine) “leftist, revolutionary group that has quite an active anti-fascist presence in this city”! It makes me smile. Not laughing at his ability, but questioning how the complicated vocabulary supersedes the more basic.

Yesterday a woman came up to me and asked where I was from. I never met her before, but the bartenders know her as a regular. I told her New York and she said her name was Tiziana and that she was a big fan of the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Bulls! Her command of English was decent....I think- it was a little difficult to tell for sure with the slurring going on. It became obvious, quickly, that Tizi had had a few before she showed up and when her friends were ordering rounds of shots she was onboard for more vodka. As happens in the small room that is Bar Piccolo, once they down the shots, they retreat to the street to mingle and smoke. Not Tizi. She was content to speak with me for as long as I would lend my ear...which, it turns out, was just about two hours. The thing was that (as is common) when she is speaking English and comes upon a word she doesn’t know, she drifts into Italian. But since I don’t speak Italian, it takes me a few seconds to realize that this is not just slurred or accented English- and sometimes by the time I figure it out, she is back on English and now I have to correct my ears to follow the story. When she walked in, the song American Pie by Don McLean was playing. The volume had been cranked by a guy who wanted to sing all of the words he knew at the top of his lungs- which wasn’t all of them. Tizi confided in me that she found this song [gesture for vomiting]. I assured her it wasn’t that bad...was it? No matter, once the next song came on...Instant Karma...she proclaimed her love for all things John Lennon. That is when the conversation turned interesting. The next song was David Bowie and she was off on a tear. She is a big fan of glam and progressive rock and she wanted to talk about that. The thing is that my adoration of all things glam rock is inversely proportional to my dislike of much that is considered progressive rock. Everytime I tried to steer the conversation to glam and bands in my wheelhouse, she wanted to talk about Genesis, and ONLY Peter Gabriel Genesis, not any of that "Phil Collins crap Genesis- ONLY Peter Gabriel". She continued to throw out names of musicians and bands that I have either never heard of, or my knowledge is limited only to their existence. In the two hours I spoke with Tizi, there was a lot, and I mean A LOT of repetition, so I easily got about 20 minutes of this story several times...and there are still points I don’t understand. She asked if I knew the band  Spirogyra and their singer Martin Cockerham. I admitted that I had heard of Spyro Gyra, but didn’t know anything about them. She pointed to the bench seat behind us and opposite the bar. “Martin Cockerham sat in that seat! Right here” she said, going over and taking a seat in the actual spot she had been pointing to. While she was telling me the story I did a quick wikipedia search on Spyro Gyra, but didn’t see anyone named Martin in their roster of current or past musicians. Not calling her mistaken, but telling her that I must have lost something in translation since that name does not appear on the page. She grabs my phone and in her drunken state has a near impossible time typing anything into the Googles. Well, lo and behold Martin Cockerham was not in Spyro Gyra (the jazz fusion band from Buffalo, NY I was searching) but in the band Spirogyra, a prog band from England who were active around 1971. I had been schooled by a woman who could barely stand up without leaning on the bar! She then started the whole story again about how (I still don’t know why or how) Martin Cockerham wound up sitting in the chair in Bar Piccolo several years ago, calling her on the phone to have her come meet him here. By now the bartender is asking her to stop bothering me. To leave. “Tizi! Basta!” [Enough!] he yelled. But, when he looks to me for support in getting her out, I tell him I am OK with her conversation and it is no bother. He backs off, but she starts questioning him about if he remembers when Martin Cockerham came here and sat in that chair. He dismisses her and goes back to work, but I hear the whole story from the top again. We keep starting the story, but once it gets to a certain point, the details get a little sparse and a quick distraction is all it takes to hit the reset button. She told me that Martin died in the past couple of years, but when I tried to get details on that situation, I realized quickly that was futile. Eventually, Tizi goes outside to see her friends and I take this opportunity to email a friend of mine in the US who is a wealth of musical knowledge and a prog fan and from England...so if anyone else knows Spirogyra it would be him. In fact, this was his actual reply when I asked "Do you know a prog band called Spirogyra?" “Yep - fairly obscure folk/prog band early 70's. Known to prog nerds like myself - I am a fan of their singer Barbra Gaskin who worked (and still does) with Dave Stewart (the keyboard player, not the Eurythmic)” [with knowledge like that, you could see why he is my go to prison for stuff like this]. With this conversation as one sided as it was, I was hoping to get his response before I left so I could see if she knew anything about these other people- but, to no avail. While she hung outside, propped up by the to-go window of the bar, I took it as my cue to leave- lest she continue with more shots and I hear the same half of the story additional times. I grabbed my things and on my way out I got a photo of my new friend Tizi and I. I have little hope that I will run into her again before I leave, but if I do, I will try once again to get more details on this story of how Martin Cockerham wound up sitting in the chair in Bar Piccolo. 

I made my way home happy to have met a new friend...even if she won't remember it.

< say cheese > cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez

could you follow this conversation for 2 hours?

*3 seconds in she says for the first time that Cockerham is dead. I tried to find out how...many times 

*at 1:28 you will hear Alessio the bartender yell "Basta"