Art
T has an art project where she has to photograph and draw or paint images of the walls of Lucca illustrating a realist or precisionist point of view. I'll let you see it when it's done. Meanwhile, F did an art project of his own.

Giorgia modeling a daisy chain.

T is inserting a pitchfork in this photo of reluctant British tourists to make it a celebration of American Gothic. Little Genius.

Here is more rehearsal footage from the fancy gym. As it stands they published an album of 100 photos from fitness night and I do not appear in any of them. I have taken to counting how many times I greet someone and they don't bother to answer me. One girl is up to six. I'd love to talk back to them in English, but then I'd run the risk that some of them might understand. My friend Ian has come up with a brilliant solution in which I read them Ru Paul style in pig latin.  I could, for example, say to them "Ood-ga orning-may aters-hay." "Ee-say, ow-hway ude-ray ou-ya an-ca eb-ay oday-tay?"which of course means, "Good morning, haters. Let's see how rude can you be today." I have bigger problems because Alessandra and Daniela keep dropping their poles and have almost assassinated me twice. One time it came so close to clocking me on the head that the trainer Andrea said, "Oops there goes Metamorfosi from the schedule."

I am sure that when there is no mirror in front of us it will be physically impossible for us to stay in sync and I won't know what to do when so we will all bump into each other even more than we are now. Sigh.

The Birthday Boy
The funny thing about F is that even though he speaks very little and he speaks very slowly, he loves himself a big birthday party. He also likes crowds and people and togetherness. I talk too much and to everybody and one time when we were at Coney Island on a crowded summer day I got so freaked out that I couldn't move while F smiled and hummed the Coca Cola jingle "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony . . ." The point is, we had a mesmerizing combination of food and people for F's big day.

Usually the focus of our get togethers is food, so it was a fun challenge to have the Hilfiger twins be the first to arrive with their mother. The first thing you need to know is that their mother does not speak Italian or English and we don't speak any German. The second thing is that the twins are now crudists which means they are vegans who only eat raw foods. The third is that they are working themselves up to being only solar powered and living off the "light" as they call it. Wonder twins: Activate.Their mother is a great baker and does not know what to do with them. F was prepared with a pepper crudite' served with a spicy tahini. He also served them fennel and zucchini with different spices on them. They could not resist and ate a few pieces which made their mother smile. She was happy to eat F's gorgonzola bread and paid the twins no mind when they clucked their tongues and shook their heads at her.

Next to arrive was T's friend Giorgia's dad Simon. He brought homemade scones, homemade jam and clotted cream. The twins' mother was in heaven. Then a funny conversation took place when Simon proudly presented the twins with the scones and they told him their current dietary restrictions. Simon, being very English, was mega polite about the whole thing and said something like, "Ah, light, you say? How illuminated of you both. I should put myself on such a diet and lose a few hee hee. So, no scones at all then? Right. Just so. As you wish, of course."

Then came Elena and Angelo, Simonetta and Davide and their little girls who eventually discovered that T and her friends Giorgia and Natasha were hiding upstairs and convinced them to play hide and seek, monster tickle style. Chaos and girl shrieks and thunder down the stairs. Last to arrive were Giorgia's mom Cristina and our friend Nick who explained how to windsurf  in pantomime and with sketches of wind flow to the delight of all the guys who are determined to give it a try this summer which will be truly blog worthy.

Our backyard that we don't have to mow - thank goodness.

T with Giorgia's doggie.

Our present to F was tartufo/truffle pasta, the special gourmet, very exotic tartufo butter which will make your head spin off it is so good, and lovely green pistacchio butter. And also a lot of LIGHT.

Seriously, this is the best shot of me and I look like I am farting for effect.

So funny I forgot to laugh . . .
I give up. I really really do. I was exhausted from the late night rehearsals for the show in June, but the first class of the day went well. I came home and took a 20 minute nap and I got myself together to do the second class. Even Gwenyth Paltrow doesn't do more than two hours of the method a day. It's exhausting. It went well, though. Cue the ominous music.

I went home and washed up and went to the hair salon. The owner was rushed and I should have probably gone straight from work because at the end of the day things can get sloppy. Instead of washing my hair he just stuck some hair pins in it and sprayed the hell out of it. When the pins came out I had this very elaborate lacquered 20s style tight curl down one side of my face. It looked ridiculous. I had just wanted one Great Gatsby kind of wave in the front to go with the music which I stole from the soundtrack for my Fitness Night exhibition. He realized it was not going to work and I explained I needed something less formal so he started to brush it out. We heard a ripping noise and it felt like my scalp, but it was just the brush going through all that hair spray and the knotted hair underneath it. When he finally got the knots out it was flat and damaged looking. I begged him to just wash it out and put one curler in it. Apparently, I know nothing because he said this would be impossible. Impossible? Yes, impossible. He started over and it was such a mess that he didn't even charge me and closed the shop. I had five minutes before I had to leave for the photo shoot so T did my hair and she did a really good job, but by the time I got to work it was already back to its original frazzled state.


F and I got stuck in traffic. I ran in the doors of the fancy gym two minutes before the call time. I was surprised to find all of my colleagues were out in the garden area by the pool eating pizza. I hadn't even eaten dinner because of the hair fiasco and since I had to pose for the photo in a huge light gray tee shirt, I had planned to tie a belly knot to expose my midriff and make the shirt look less horrendous, so I couldn't eat the pizza. Instead I had a sip of champagne while our boss Giacomo gave possibly the worst pep talk in the history of the world. It felt like we were getting yelled at.

Then we all went upstairs for the photo. I had asked one dozen different people whether I needed to wear the gray tee shirt they had given me from Reebok for the photo since last time I had major wardrobe problems and the results were humiliating. Everyone, including Giacomo said yes. When we gathered together I was the only one wearing that tee shirt. Most of the women who also work in the main sala or the pool had matching outfits with bright pink jackets and the only two other girls who didn't had black ones with gray words on them. We took the photo. I could not have felt less welcome in the photo if I had crashed a black tie wedding in my sweats and heavy gold metal rapper chains.

This guy Erald was always in the changing closet when I was muttering about how I was going to die. He only said one word of comfort to me and that was "passera'"/it will pass.

The guys with Ilaria -- the substitute swim teacher who is super nice.

Dani the swim teacher, bikini lady, and the curly haired teacher.

I have never even been to the pool. This is stolen from Facebook. I have no idea who these people are.

Giacomo gave us new black tee shirts to wear for the evening. I had asked him specifically when we had to put them on and he had told me that I was to wear the gray one for the photo and the black one for the night. Everyone walked off to do their own thing after the photo and so I went down to the changing closet to put on the black shirt and commiserate with Lisa who had a contact lens problem in her eye. I came back upstairs to find everyone laughing and saying how great the photo came out. It turns out that they all posed with the black shirts for the group photo. The one that counts. I was just approaching as they took the final shot. Giacomo looked at me pitifully and asked where I had been. I can't explain to you how humiliating it was that they didn't even notice I wasn't there. My main goal for the whole night was to be in the staff photo because no matter how hard you work if you are not in the photo no one remembers you were even there afterwards. He took a photo alone with me and said maybe they could add it in afterwards. Whatever.

Me with a nice client. This photo was taken my the nice substitute swim teacher who drives me home sometimes. It will never be seen again.

Then I went to work in the model casting area where I was told the night before by the snarky office lady that  I was to pitch in "like everybody else."  This particular woman

always speaks to me like I am a hopeless idiot. It's true that I don't understand some of the things she tells me, but mostly that is not because it is in Italian. It's just because she is always talking about some rules that make no sense. When I finally found the right area, Laura from the legal office told me that we were to find women over 50 years of age and convince them to take a test shot for a chance to walk in the gym's fashion show in June. It would have been easier to convince them to have dental surgery just for the hell of it. Laura just sat on her rear filling out the entrance forms with them and told me that given my amazing Italian verbal skills (laugh now), I should go out and do the scouting. It was so sad. They all said they were too ugly to be models. Only two really skinny and busty ladies wanted to do it. The other eighteen were bullied by us into doing it. Then Laura explained that after we got their age and dress size and personal information we would later be rating them privately on a scale of one to ten based on their physical attractiveness. This made me want to vomit and I refused to give anyone a number, but, apparently, she had no such qualms.

Model photo casting

I am not in these photos. At my job this means that I don't exist.

At a quarter past nine the classes started and Ginetta's legendary Tribal Fusion class with a live drummer was a big draw. She had about 80 women crammed into a room that feels full with half as many in it. Then it hit me. Since no one had ever asked me about what my class was going to be like or even if I wanted to teach it or if I was available that night, I had planned a standing legs class using a little support stick for balance. Earlier in the week I had told Giacomo that was my plan and he was skeptical. I told him there were 30 flex bars and he said that I might have more people than that so I told him that there were 20 additional sticks and that we could use the bar that runs around the peripheral wall. He didn't object further, but I had not ever dreamed that there could potentially be 50 or more people for my class. I have taken her class and it is exhausting so I wasn't sure if anyone would stick around for mine afterwards. It could take twenty minutes just to distribute the sticks. I frantically started asking coworkers if they could be on hand to help me out with that. I tried to remember the class that I had spent about ten hours practicing and creating, but nothing came to mind. I have nightmares that are pretty much identical to this.

I tried to warm up in the dressing closet, but there was no room so the Zumba king felt sorry for me and took me into the men's room where he assured me no one was changing and I stretched out on the dirty floor in there. Then I found that my friends Serena and Bianca had come and so I burst into tears in the client changing room and still couldn't really impart to them why I was upset. After that word got around to my coworkers that I was upset and people started asking me if everything was great every fifteen seconds, and I had to keep saying si, tutto bene.

I am Martin the Zumba King.

Ginetta had done her class in the dark, but my leg work needs some explanation so I turned on the lights. That was probably a bad idea. Then while my friends Serena and Bianca were helping my coworkers, to distribute the sticks, I realized that Ginetta was wearing that damn mike pack. I have never used the microphone since the first time when the gym had some technical problems and I had to rip it off and yell. My music was so loud and half the time when I spoke I couldn't hear myself. I tried to communicate that to Giacomo, but he shook his head at me as if to say it was all fine. It wasn't. I ended up improvising half of the class and forgetting a large chunk of what I had prepared. My coffee and sugar dinner wore off after the first ten minutes and all of the sudden I felt like I was going to die. I wasn't sure if anyone could hear me and I didn't even know what I was going to do next so cuing was out of the question. instead of speaking Italian I made military drill master sounds which Italians think are hilarious and some of the younger girls started echoing me and laughing. I don't even know if I did the full half hour or if anyone liked it. I never want to go back to work. Ever.

This is a shot of my class. There weren't that many people. There is a mirror in the background.

Here is the zumba class that followed mine. Claudia is in the center there. She told me she missed my class because she was in the other room watching a different class.

This is Sara making the famous Zumba Eeeha Eeeha noise.

Here is what I missed out on by not staying at work until after midnight:

So Far
Well, unless I am hallucinating in Italian, I think Jerry Lewis, that is, Ricky told us that we are going to be wearing white masks on the front and back of our heads and iridescent paint down our limbs. I think it is likely that I will not count things correctly or be able to see, and that I will bump into my coworkers and possibly fall off the stage. I also think that as much as I wish people had been kinder and had gone more out of their way to explain things and spend time with me, I am not going to hold grudges. I am going to wipe the slate clean even for the ridiculously bubbly Zumba girl and allow better relationships to happen. (And if I am wrong and they end up being just horrible human beings, I am going to order an insane number of pizzas to all of their home addresses and let them pay for it.)

This is what our esteemed choreographers came up with so far:

Round 2
I waited around for two hours. They someone asked me to run in a circle and I got a muscle cramp and pulled a muscle in my foot. Two of the girls have some gymnastic ability. They had to do somersaults over the tubes and splits and back bends. It hurts me just to think about it. At the end of the night my boss said goodbye and the curly haired instructor said goodnight and all of the women stood in a circle for about eight minutes eying each other. I guess no one wanted to be the first to go. Not much was said. The regular dance choreography for the twelve females is slotted for the next rehearsal.

On Friday I teach a class at 9,30 in the morning. Then I go home and have lunch and go back and teach a class at 4,00. Then I go to the hair salon at 6,00 and I just got a text message saying that I need to get into those MC Hammer pants for a staff photo at 7,30. Then they want me to take photos for them at the model casting activity. At 10,30 at night I teach again and then I will go home unless it is important for my job security that I do the Harlem Shake in costume at midnight. My life could not get any weirder.

Does anybody else think Ricky or Reeeekeeeee looks like Jerry Lewis? Check it out: 

There he is on the far left. The leg belongs to the curly haired teacher.

Okay, Jerry wishes he had those abs. But still!