Inside Italian Houses: From Padre Pio to the Proper Way to Hang Your Bra

Outdoor living in Italy

You want a house? Texas has houses. We're talking a Tyvek-clad, three-car-garage, big brick energy monster that sits in the middle of a "waterfront" subdivision/mosquito retention pond and comes with a fully sodded lawn and a tree. The tree is about the size of a umbrella and will take the years far better than your house. But you can also get your McMansion at the rock bottom price of $250,000 in a decent school district and with about 3800 square feet. You'll be close to swim team and the mall.

Italy isn't like that. First of all, houses come in three sizes: apartment-sized, house and castle. Apartment-sized flats for sale in Rome, for instance, start at about 300,000 euros and look like this: 800 square feet, a forest of satellite dishes, maybe a small terrace, and if you're lucky, a temperamental elevator. You try schlepping up five flights of stairs carrying two bags of groceries and a six-pack of water. It'll make you swear off religion.

Elevators in Italy are not the sleek modern kind we're used to seeing in the U.S. First, there's a door problem--as in, if you fail to remember to close the outside doors and the inside doors, the elevator won't work. That means you're walking, pal, hauling your groceries up flights and flights of stairs in flimsy plastic bags. All just part of the adventure!

Italian elevator--note the double set of doors

Roman flats are far from glamorous (most of them) and you pay a lot of money to live there. This is ROME, of course, so you don't care. Fewer steer horns, more linguine. Apartments in Rome are, comparatively speaking, mostly cramped and utilitarian. Many have plain white walls, spiral-shaped low-consumption light bulbs dangling on a wire from the ceiling, and a single bathroom. Mismatched IKEA furniture or grandma's hand-me-downs? Absolutely. The truth is, credit is scarce, and most people aren't willing to shell out thousands of euros for showroom furniture.

Italians don't care about making a decorating "statement". What they care about is family and functionality. And you can't have a house full of designer furniture and invite family over for protracted Sunday dinners if said family includes adorable munchkins with sticky hands. Family knows all about you, so why try to impress them? Half the time, they're the ones helping you foot the bills anyway, so if you're spending cash on new furniture, you'll have some explaining to do.

Italian Angolo Cottura or corner kitchen

Italians spend more money on cleaning products than just about any other country in the European Union. Their houses are usually spotless, especially the kitchen. And here's where it gets really good. Most Italian kitchens are no bigger than a largish American closet. They don't include dishwashers, appliance garages, double ovens or decent steak knives--but your average Italian can cook any American into the next century.

American idea of Italian food: overcooked spaghetti and extra cheese. Italian idea of Italian food: spaghetti cooked to exquisite perfection (called al dente or "to the tooth"), a savory homemade tomato sauce, and cheese, sure, but only as an appetizer. Food is a subject of worship here, which is very humbling because I grew up making dinner by pressing the buttons on a microwave.

The charm of air-dried laundry

In all the Italian homes I've been in, I've never seen a dryer. Italians love doing laundry. It's like a second religion to them. Laundry is air dried, slung on a line that stretches from one window to the next or across the street. I find it charming. My boyfriend finds it annoying. He says it ruins the aesthetic of beautiful old architecture. I'm sure he's right, but I continue to secretly adore the brightly colored T-shirts, sheets, skivvies and bras that wave gently in the breeze. They tell a story about the people who live there. Ergo, the old trope about "airing your dirty laundry", right?

Saint Padre Pio

No Italian home would be complete without its patron saint, Padre Pio, who was an old mystic that Pope John Paul II canonized. His claim to fame was the possession of stigmata, or weeping bloody nail-driven holes in his hands. Rumor has it he made free use of carbolic acid to keep the wounds open, but try telling an Italian grandmother that. You will find pictures of Padre Pio staring forlornly at you everywhere--restaurants, train stations, houses, stores. At first, I was a little creeped out by it, but now he's grown on me. Padre Pio is like a talisman against change. And Italy resists change with an unholy passion.

Roof line of Civita Castellana, Italy

Lawns in front of Italian homes you will rarely see. Italians do charming stone patios and terracotta pots overflowing with flowers. They do grape arbors and trellises and little cafe tables with folding chairs, even on their minuscule balconies. Italy is the land of abundance--spit anywhere and something will grow. Crumbling stone walls are covered in blood-red roses. Ivy clings to the insides of ravines and to the faces of old buildings. Come May, the air is sweet with the scent of night blooming jasmine. Italy is oleander, roses, grapes, cypress trees, artichokes and olive groves. Its flavorful waters, bottled at their source, taste of all the minerals in the rock.

Twenty or thirty lesser countries were sacrificed to make just one Italy. Work/life balance? They've perfected it. Delicious food? They've mastered it. Their way of life is completely different from what I was raised with in Texas--and I admire them fiercely for it.

In Italy, life is about family. Houses are about family. And family is always there for you. That's the Italian way.

For more about Stacey, click here.

ON MOVING TO ITALY: My Interview with Gillian Fox

You quit your job, sold your car and moved to Italy with two suitcases of your stuff. What made you do it? Had you been to Italy before? Did you know anyone there?

Life as a single mom is not easy. I was working seven days a week just to make ends meet. I had four jobs, three of which actually paid: I was a group fitness instructor at 24-Hour Fitness in Houston, a personal trainer for a select clientele, a writer for UpClose magazine and a freelance writer of novels. My critique group of twelve years met in my cramped dining room with my two cats and two kids. In hindsight, where I found the time to do any of this, I can’t say, but I did perfect the art of power napping in my car.

I was sitting with my bestie, Joyce Kaufman, one day in front of the computer and happened to see a sidebar ad for a writing workshop in Italy with Natalie Goldberg (of Writing Down The Bones fame). All I did was sigh longingly for the kind of life where such junkets were possible, and Joyce got it into her head that come hell or high water, I was going. Unbeknownst to me, she started passing the hat around to all my classes and collecting air miles from a generous Facebook friend, Jim Mazzei. Joyce called me about three weeks before departure and said in her droll, inimitable way, “Let me ask you something. Do you have a passport?”

The minute I set foot in Italy, I knew I was home. It was an eerie feeling, to tell you the truth, because I’d never experienced it before. I knew absolutely no Italian. In fact, the first thing I did after getting off the plane was hightail it into the men’s room because I couldn’t read the signs saying uomini (men) and donne (women). A bus collected me and about forty other American writers and took us to Villa Lina, a beautiful eighty-acre organic farm in a little town called Ronciglione. I was in heaven.

But poor Natalie did not hit it off with her students. Almost from the moment we arrived, Natalie laid down a moratorium on drinking wine. In Italy. She said it was because wine “polluted our instrument.” Personally, I hate wine, so I didn’t have any skin in the game, but even I could see how problematic this would be with ladies who came to Italy to write, socialize, and have a grand adventure in vino. By Friday of that week, the organizer had chartered a bus to whisk us away from Villa Lina where mutinous cabals had formed to plot Natalie’s overthrow, and take us to Calcata, which is an artists’ colony that sits on top of a rock in the Treja Valley.

 Sixty people of all nationalities live in Calcata. I was delirious with happiness as I wandered its cobbled streets and drank in its breathtaking panoramic views. I was sitting on the steps of a 15th-century church, former home of the foreskin of Christ (until it mysteriously disappeared one day) when a man walked past me, a gorgeous man that I knew at once was not Italian. I also knew he would turn around and talk to me, which he did. He claimed to be the grandson of famous American songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. His name was John.

Thus began the ecstasy and the agony of our passionate long-distance romance. We had an unforgettable week together in New York a few months later. I swapped personal training sessions for air miles so I could visit him in Calcata. In addition to our deepening relationship, I was also falling in love with Italy.

Houston is a thriving city full of wonderful people, but it’s never going to win any beauty awards. Sitting in soul-deadening traffic was a torment when all I could think about were crumbling Italian walls covered in blood-red roses. Instead of thousand-year-old churches, I had ten thousand screaming billboards. Instead of real coffee, I had burnt vanilla roast at Starbuck’s.

In the States, it’s all buy, buy, buy. In Italy, there aren’t even chain stores. Not many. In the States, I lived in a crappy apartment behind a mall. In Italy, John’s apartment overlooked a fog-strewn cobblestone street. A part of me was dying a slow death of heartsickness—not just because of John, whom I loved, but because Italy had taken up permanent residence in my soul. I wanted it so badly I barely let myself want it at all.

Then two things happened. First, my son turned eighteen, graduated from high school, and told me he wanted to live with his father who’d just bought a big house not located behind a mall. Then a few weeks after that, John invited me to move to Italy to live with him. We’d been doing the long-distance thing for over two years now and had reached a “do or die” juncture in our relationship. We were ready.

With my son flying the coop and my thirteen-year-old daughter eager to have me homeschool her in Italy, the decision was an easy one to make. I hated saying goodbye to my students, my friends, and my family, but a part of me always knew I was destined to be there. Was I panicked out of my mind? You can’t even imagine. I was betting everything I had and I was betting it against the house.

I was going to Italy on very little money, rolling the dice that my part-time writing could become full-time employment, and ruthlessly gambling on an untried relationship with a man who’d been a lifelong bachelor. But Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do,” and I’d always preached that kind of seize-life-by-the-balls philosophy to my students. Now I was about to put it to the test.

More than three years later, John and I are still going strong. We’ve been through good times, great times and lean times. Very lean. As in sometimes-we-didn’t-have-enough-money-to-eat lean. But Italy never really lets you starve. Italians are the most generous people in the world. They’re always ready to feed you.

My daughter’s tenure was disappointingly short. The culture shock hit her pretty hard and I promised not to keep her in Italy if she didn’t want to stay. Now she can’t wait to come back. Italy will do that to you. It works its way into your blood and you can never get it out again.

Nothing in this country works well—or at all. When repairmen say they’re coming to your house, that could be today or a month from now. But if you live with no expectations, along with a gentle understanding that life in Italy happens on its timetable, not yours, you can be very happy here. Unlike the United States, it’s actually affordable to live as an artist. I am surrounded by deliriously beautiful countryside, incredible food, and a fascinating culture.

Moving to Italy—doing something that terrified me—changed me on a molecular level. I will never regret it. I’m not afraid anymore. Of anything.

If you had to do it again, what would you do differently?

Despite having taken French, Russian and Japanese, I wish I’d studied more languages. You really can’t speak enough of them. Rice University in Houston (at that time) offered Italian classes. If I had come to Italy speaking better Italian, I wouldn’t hit these walls where the overwhelming urge to ask questions, obtain information, learn more is stymied by my inability to communicate. John speaks perfect Italian. He even does a radio show in Italian. But speaking it at home is a bit of a busman’s holiday for him, so I’m on my own.

Men and women, I’ve found, approach the language barrier a little differently. Like most women, I refused to open my mouth for the first year I was here unless I was absolutely certain that what I was saying was correct. Men just dive in. They don’t care that their grammar is road kill and their accent sounds as though they’re gargling rocks.

What advice would you give to someone who has the desire to pick up and move to another country?

Do it. Even if it kicks your ass, do it. Don’t use your age as an excuse. Don’t worry about not knowing the language. If you can point at something, you will always be able to communicate.

Comfort and ease are soft chains. You swap truly living for cable television and the bleak ugliness of modern American life. How will you ever discover what you are made of unless you put yourself to the test?

We think we have time, but we don’t. What we have is conditioning. We are conditioned to go to work, get married, have kids, pay our taxes, not ask questions.

Moving to another country is like living inside a soccer riot and you’re the ball.

Comfortable? No.

Safe? Probably safer than most cities in America at this point, but you never feel entirely safe halfway around the world from your family.

Exciting? Always.

Scary? For all the right reasons. You’ve never lived until you’ve taken the wrong bus, wind up in the middle of nowhere, have no minutes left on your phone, and don’t speak the language.

Being an immigrant takes a special kind of crazy. Know thyself. If you find yourself being ground down bit by bit by American life, shake off those soft chains. Go do something that terrifies you.

Any regrets?

I regret that most Americans, good Americans, have no idea that there is this whole other world out there, a world where healthcare is paid for, where no one goes into ruinous student loan debt just to get an education. It’s a world where food tastes like food—not like chemicals. The cost of living is actually affordable here (although consumables are expensive).

There are no FICO scores in Italy. Leases are usually for five years with another five-year option at that same rate. Don’t think you can come to Italy, teach English and make a living. Your self-sustaining lifestyle is going to have to be a bit more creative than that.

In the United States, the stress is killing us, the food is killing us, the lifestyle is killing us, healthcare is killing us, the cost of education is killing us. Italy has a different set of problems, but they’re sure not those problems.

If you think you can handle it, I strongly urge you to put yourself to the test. Give it a year, maybe two. See what happens. No matter how wild the ride, you will come back a better, smarter, stronger person. You will have taken Eleanor Roosevelt’s sage advice about doing the thing you thought you could not do … and you won.

More About Stacey

Why I Moved to Italy and Never Looked Back

When people find out I sold my car, quit my job, packed all my earthly possessions into two suitcases and moved to Italy, they tend to have questions. So I thought it might be nice to give a brief overview of the pros and cons of living here. FAIR WARNING: I’m crazy about this country, so expect absurd amounts of gushing.

Cons:

1. Things don’t always work in Italy the way they should. The ATM at the bank, for instance. It’s down a lot, especially when I’m really strapped for cash and in need of an emergency cappuccino. They say the wifi connection is slow, but I have my suspicions. In Italy, the afternoon pausa pranzo, or break, is observed with near-religious reverence, and if that means a bank employee can’t be bothered to reset a modem because he has to walk back to the house for a coffee, a cigarette, a home-cooked meal and a nap, you’re out of luck.

2. Every other day here is a national holiday, which means all the stores are closed. Stores are also closed daily for that pesky pausa pranzo, 1pm to 4pm, and on Thursdays for no reason other than they want to. You never know for sure when a store might be open, but for Italians, it’s fun to keep the foreigners guessing.

3. Italian pop music is ghastly. And Italian pop is all that’s played on Radio Subasio—and Radio Subasio is all that’s played in every coffee bar in or around Rome. Italians LOVE a power ballad, which is always wildly over-emoted, features the same three chord progressions, and is usually sung by some shockingly old pop singer from the early part of the last century.

4. Noise. Italians celebrate it. Marching bands, squalling babies, blasting car horns, blaring televisions (especially soccer matches)—but in Italian, even normal conversations sound like yelling. This serves to remind me of what a sadly repressed person I am, which is why I’ve learned to yell along with the rest of them and to swear volubly in Italian. It’s pretty impressive, to tell you the truth. I can teach you.

5. Italians don’t do good junk food. Most potato chips taste as though some clueless but well-intentioned individual took wood pulp, salted it, and then stuffed it in a bag covered in bad English. Crik Crok, for instance. Famous Italian potato chip company. Their national slogan? “Snack is fun”. It’s on everything, including their display cases. No one could be bothered to see if the English was right or not. Because #Italy.

Pros:

1. It’s so beautiful here, you are tempted to remove your eyeballs, polish them on your T-shirt, and then pop them back inside your skull just to make sure you’re seeing things correctly. Twenty or thirty lesser countries were sacrificed in order to make just one Italy. Whether it’s the ancient artifacts, the old churches, the priceless paintings, the ramshackle farms, the clear-water beaches or the quaint seaside villages, you are never the same after you set foot on Italian soil.

2. The Italians are so patient with my attempts to speak the language. I can understand Italian, but I’m not a fluent speaker yet. Unlike the French ***COUGH*** your average Italian is kind and helpful even when you’re blithely mangling the tongue of Dante. Writing in English all day definitely hampers my efforts. But to be fair, Italian is a bitch to learn. Think: Times Square meets the Spanish Inquisition. It’s both a beautiful and expressive language, one that requires many florid-sounding syllables strung together in a way that promotes the use of hand gestures, which are needed to speed things along.

3. The food. In Italy, oranges taste like oranges. Grapes taste like grapes. The difference between what food tastes like here versus what it tastes like in the States is shocking. When I go back to Texas, I always smuggle a little fruit in my purse—and LIE ABOUT IT ON MY CUSTOMS FORM because hell, yeah, I’m that kind of badass—and give the fruit to people who’ve forgotten what fruit is supposed to taste like. Their reaction is always the same: “Holy crap, is that fruit? It’s DELICIOUS!”

4. Italy holds constant reminders that you are going to die one day, and that’s because you are rubbing shoulders with history every second that you’re here. When you gaze upon an ancient aqueduct that has existed for over a thousand years and has been seen by millions of people who are all dead now, you tend to value what time you have left. This death thing is why Italians are not only fatalistic, but seek constant religious and sexual confirmation with people who are not necessarily their spouses, just to remind themselves that they, at least for now, are alive.

5. There are hardly any chain stores in Italy, which really struck me (coming from strip-mall Texas). What you will find are a gazillion tiny coffee bars run by families. And the coffee in most of them, as you can imagine, is divine. The Italian middle class is still kicking here, thanks in large part to the compulsive thrift and mattress-stuffing money management of Grandma and Grandpa. Houses are multi-generational and it is customary for children to live in them until … well, forever, actually. A forty-year-old man who lives with his mamma is not considered too hopelessly dorky to date. Mamma still cooks for him and does his laundry. Family is both the strength and the curse of Italy. If you find yourself in a bit of an Italian pickle, family is there to bail you out. If you find yourself in trouble with the Mob … well, that’s another kind of family.

I love this life. I love the church bells. As I sit here writing this in my little she-shed on top of the terrace, those bells are ringing now. I love the stuff that makes no sense to a non-Italian. I love the idiosyncrasies and even the dysfunctions. Italy is one of the most important love affairs of my life, and I am so happy to be able to share it with you.

Viva Italia!

More About Stacey

THE STORY BEHIND DREAM ON

 I like stories about working-class heroines. Maybe it’s a push-back against all the tinsely “Falcon Crest” television I grew up with in the eighties—the over-starched George Jetson snap-on 'dos, the glittering cocktail gowns, the sobbing betrayals.

Blech.

Give me a nice girl who maybe hasn’t had it so easy. Who doesn’t have a lot of money. Who’s learned something about herself because golden opportunities weren’t handed to her at birth.

That’s exactly why I came up with Cassidy Roby, heroine of DREAM ON.

Cassidy is a roller-skate waitress at a Saturday night fixture that is familiar to anyone who’s grown up in a small Texas town: The Dairy Queen. I don’t call it a Dairy Queen in my book, but that’s exactly what it is. I don’t call DREAM ON a Cinderella story, but that’s what it is—Cinderella, given a 21^st century upgrade.

 

SWEET DREAMS, the second book in my Dreams Come True series, is a riff on Beauty and the Beast (non-Disney version!) DREAM LOVER, due out in July, is Sleeping Beauty. When you read the series, you’ll immediately spot the parallels. Then you can write and tell me about them!

But let’s get back to Cassidy and her solidly middle-class upbringing.

Even as a child growing up with my Brothers Grimm anthology of trolls, witches and fairytale princesses, I wondered how difficult it might be for a girl with humble roots to adapt to the lush opulence of a privileged existence. We’ve all read that change is stressful, even good change. So what happens when you go from being a single mom in a tiny Texas town who works at a Dairy Queen … to dating the hunkiest, richest quarterback in the free world?

I’ll give you this example.

Let’s say it’s you who’s working at Dairy Queen. Long hours. Low pay. Afternoons spent unclogging grease traps behind the fryer. Now imagine somebody handing you the keys to his Lamborghini, the gate code to his palatial ocean view estate, and stuffing your closet with half a million dollars in designer gowns.

Sure, you’d love it. But wouldn’t it freak you out a little, too? With Cassidy and her Super Bowl winning quarterback suitor, Mason Hannigan, I wanted to see what happened when he opened up the world for her—including the downside, especially for a comparatively shy, soft-spoken woman like Cassidy, which is fame.

Cassidy hates having her picture taken. Poor Mason can’t stay out of the camera lens.

Relationships, even fictional ones—especially fictional ones—require sacrifice. In order for Cassidy to be with Mason, she has to come to terms with the spotlight, and Mason has to avoid making the same “putting work before family” mistakes that cost him so dearly in the past. That struggle is why DREAM ON qualifies as a love story and not just a romance. It’s why Cassidy and Mason belong together.

Hey, if love were always easy, wouldn’t everyone be doing it?

More about Stacey Keith

Why Failing Is The Answer To All Your Problems

In addition to being a writer, I've worked in gyms for most of my life.

In the beginning, I sucked.

I taught a step class (gymspeak for a box-type gizmo that you step up and down on, preferably choreographed and to music) where I started out with forty people and ended up with about three. All group exercise songs are composed around an eight-count beat; in step, you "cue" the next move on the fifth or sixth beat, and then execute that move on the seventh or eighth. It's a little like spinning plates on your nose--one wrong move and the whole thing goes crashing to the ground.

That ill-fated day when I taught my first step class, the more I kept screwing it up, the more rattled I got. The more rattled I got, the more I kept screwing up. People snatched up their benches, parked them in the equipment closet and then marched out to complain to the manager about what an incompetent dumbass I was, thank you. At seventeen, you feel these failures keenly. I took my humiliation out to the car and cried until I started hiccoughing.

As a writer, I've been kicked in the teeth so many times, I'm still spitting Chiclets. If I were to tally up even an approximation of how many times agents told me to go fuck myself (agentspeak for "I wouldn't rep you if had a cure for leprosy"), it would be somewhere between 2,000-3,000 rejections. Some of those rejections were quite stinging--in even a mild perusal of those emails, the word "hate" really jumps out at you.

As a men's magazine model (yes, I was one of those, too), you are leaving yourself wide open to public criticism and some of it is pretty scathing. I did a photo shoot about two months after having my oldest son and was still a little chubby. Jesus, you'd have thought I was a candidate for lapband surgery. "Put down the Twinkies, honey," one of my more vocal detractors wrote. "No one wants to see a fat cunt like you."

Then there are the more personal failures like divorce, bankruptcy, living in your car. Having kids (I produced two) feels like its own failure because no matter how much love and attention you give them, the world is cruel and you can't protect them from all of life's vicissitudes. They don't tell you that about having kids, by the way. The anguish of not being able to throat sock the little bastard on the school bus who keeps calling your kid "retard" leaves its own scar. If you're like me, you start devising ways to poison him instead.

There were men I loved who didn't love me back when I was too young to realize that the failure to appeal to them wasn't necessarily mine to own. Most people in their twenties lead lives of quiet desperation, paranoia and misery anyway. I was no exception. Many years would pass before I'd ask myself that most important of questions: This person whose opinion of me means so much...is this someone I respect and admire? The shock of realizing that I didn't felt like a tectonic shift to a girl who assumed everything was her fault, her deficiency.

But all those psychological train wrecks, those pies thrown in my face, the public humiliations and the private ones, made me what I am today: a motherfucking badass. I wouldn't trade them for Lottery money. They were my own personal Trial by Fire. They forced me to examine my own value system. They opened my eyes to the madness of society. They made me question everything I had been brought up to believe in--the sovereignty of money, the glitter of fame. By taking one on the chin repeatedly, mercilessly, savagely by life, I became stronger. No longer did criticism level me--but then praise no longer had the power to buoy me up either.

I understand the Buddha when he says, "The fingers pointing at the moon are not the moon."

People's opinions of you, good or bad, are more a reflection of their relationship with themselves than they are a true accounting of your value.

I'm not saying I'm great and anyone who doesn't think that is an asshole. I am not great. I'm just human.

What I'm saying is that no one gets to be an authority on you. Not even you if you don't have the stones to "go there" and figure your shit out for yourself.

Failure honed the blade I use to cut through the crap.

So do it. Seek it. Fail spectacularly. Fuck it all kinds of up. Welcome the howls of protest and outrage and criticism. Let them soak into your bones. Let them forge you into stronger steel.

Because only when your lust for life exceeds your fear of failure will you ever truly live.

Are you comfortable owning a failure? I'd like to hear if you'd like to share.

www.StaceyKeithAuthor.com

Schadenfreude is Dark Chocolate for the American Soul

No one wants to bang an actress over forty.

That's the prevailing wisdom in Hollywood--in the near-pornographic intimacy of high-def, you might see a wrinkle or a deflated boob or an ass that's a centimeter or two lower than it was when that actress starred in the rom-com that launched her career twenty years ago.

Can't have that.

Meanwhile, their male cohorts begin to look like thirsty old vampires with their crepey eyelids and liver-spotted pedophilic hands pawing onscreen love interests half their age. Hey, Hollywood is the land of dreams, and dreams die hard.

We depend on celebrities to show us a wildly idealized version of how our lives should be. Not only do we need them to be perfect, we will cannibalize them for being anything less. Jessica Simpson's high-waisted jeans and five extra pounds, for instance. The dust-up over Renee Zellweger's new dermal-filled, plasticine, Jesus-who-the-hell-is-that face. Pamela Anderson's freaky McDonald's arch eyebrows and vain attempts to remain fuckable. Pick up any magazine and you will see why the most aggressive paparazzi get paid big bucks to snap a bad photo of any woman who has the temerity to be both beautiful and famous.

Schadenfreude is dark chocolate for the American soul.

But here's the thing. I'm not going to bitch about Hollywood or "the system" or even the paparazzi. I'm going to point the finger where the finger needs to be pointed, which is at us. All of us. For our ghoulish fascination with fallen idols. We build them up and tear them down with the same vicious glee, forking over money at every news stand to see Tara Reid's "shark bitten" overly-liposuctioned tummy or a Kim Basinger "tragically" looking her age. There's a low-grade resentment among women. Why do these twats get paid millions of dollars? They're nothing special. They're flawed and human, just like we are.

Our critical eyes make them desperate. We take to Tumblr and Twitter and Instagram and the National Enquirer, poring over photos--damning evidence that these celebrities aren't worthy of the attention and money we give them. And the dissemination of bad photos may impact an actress's financial bottom line. An actress caught at a bad angle may not be considered for the roles she needs in order to pay the rent.

Like Heidi Montag, (she-of-the-ten-surgeries-in-one-day), these frantic creatures resort to expensive, invasive procedures, and they do it at increasingly younger ages. Heidi was twenty-five went she got her first face lift. And what did we do? We despised her for it. We flamed her for "cheating." After all, the rules are clear: don't expect us to treat you like a god unless you are one. And anybody who resorts to surgery is a false idol.

Because of us, women in Hollywood look as though they are made of vinyl. Because of us, they down Adderall by the handful, live on sushi and cigarettes, in order to even have careers. Only the few (Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson) who are lucky enough to be both talented AND beautiful are given any kind of a hall pass. Even news anchors are pressured to look as crease-free as possible. News anchors. Think about that for a minute.

So how do we stop this Juggernaut?

First, we take a good hard look at ourselves. What itch gets scratched when we see a bald Britney Spears going psycho with an umbrella on somebody's car? Are we proud of that morbid curiosity? Every time we click on a link that promises to show us celebrity cellulite, we are encouraging women-abusing vermin to gin up unflattering photos that will prove to us, once and for all, those bitches aren't better than we are. We relegate celebrities--and by extension, all women--to a trash heap of fuckable, unfuckable, and heading in the direction of unfuckable, regardless of talent. Don't do it. Don't buy the magazine. Don't fall for the clickbait.

In the end, if we want to see better roles for women in Hollywood and better women in those roles, women need to stop objectifying women. We need to move beyond our knee-jerk habit of comparing our bodies, favorably or unfavorably, to those of the celebrities we see. Our collective attention is meat for the consumerist beast, but if we start looking the other way, the beast has no choice but to find a different way to entice us.

www.StaceyKeithAuthor.com

My Great Italian Adventure: Roughing it in the Land of Permits and Pasta

Calcata Vecchia is a land that Time didn’t so much forget as exempt. You won’t see satellite dishes here, although there is a forest of antennae and wind turbans glittering from its red-tiled roofs. You can spot them from the path that wends its way up to Calcata Nuova, the new town, that one that isn’t medieval and doesn’t sit on a rock that stretches out of the Treja Valley like an odd, clay-colored mushroom.

No car other than the occasional three-wheeled Piaggio is allowed to pass beneath Calcata Vecchia’s sacred arches, so you march—laden with heavy groceries in flimsy, environmentally-conscious bags made of corn husks—up wet cobblestones that have been made yet more treacherous by pigeon droppings. You stop halfway, wondering if it’s really that hot, that steep, and that difficult or if you’re just that woefully out-of-shape. Then you press on, hoping the bags hold up so your acqua frizzante doesn’t go rolling down the hill with you chasing after it.

You’re always happy when you get to the piazza. To the right is a 16^th century church with an outrageously flamboyant priest who observes all the Catholic saints days, usually with a bullhorn. There was a situation a few years ago where a young woman stripped off all her clothes and wandered naked through the borgo. The priest was furious. Words were exchanged on the church steps—those same steps that a year later, as part of some bizarre Halloween ritual, a woman the locals referred to as “ham hock” stripped down to a bustier and 18^th century farthingale. I guess it’s all in the context.

But in the piazza you will see artist Constantino Morosin’s legendary thrones, three of them, sculpted out of the indigenous stone called tufo. Sometimes a cat is there, licking its paws before pausing to stare at you as though you are stupidest person on earth for carrying groceries in this heat. Both Calcatas, vecchia and nuova, are abundant in cats. In many cases, a cat will attach itself to you, and then you are obligated to feed it, worm it, and buy it shots. Fortunately, the vet lives two houses down and makes house calls.

Calcata Vecchia has restaurants, art studios, bodegas, shops and bars. The one you see as you first lurch into the piazza while your heart rate levels out is called Opera, and since they have wifi, you might even see me lurking there in a suspicious manner with my iPhone clutched in sweaty desperate paws. Il Gatto Nero (the Black Cat) is a feline-themed restaurant behind a charming red-lacquer door. Neo is the mascot, which is fitting since he is a black cat, and a woefully misbegotten one at that. He snuck into our house one evening and sprayed a first edition George Orwell. There was hell to pay, believe me, and I ended up sprinkling the book with corn starch, tying a plastic bag around it and then shaking it like I was coating a chicken leg. Worked, too.

No one in Calcata (that I know of anyway) has air conditioning. This forces you to live a greater percentage of your life out of doors. But it sucks when you sleep in the attic with your boyfriend who tends to starfish the entire bed and you’re so sweaty and sleep-deprived you actually grab a pillow and try dozing in the clawfoot bathtub. If we owned a refrigerator, I would have stuck my entire head in the crisper, but as things are, the best I can do is the tub or the kitchen floor, two ladders down, where I sprawl comatose on an orange blanket. When we make coffee in the morning (on a hot plate, by the way—no oven here), the whole room rises about eight hundred degrees and you curse your tragic addiction to coffee, but at the same time you know that nothing in this life or the next is going to keep you from making it, especially the Italian stuff, which pretty much ruins you for anything else.

What you are left with when there are few televisions, sketchy wifi, no cell reception, no cars, and no air conditioning is each other. The Calcatese are a passionate, wildly opinionated lot, given to altercations in the piazza. There was one last night. As a local theater group came streaming up the hill after their performance, with no agenda more Machiavellian than wishing to dine al fresco in the piazza, they were treated to their own private performance of two locals punching the snot out of each other. One of them, bloody and with his shirt torn, gave a bravura performance of his own, yelling obscenities at everyone for twenty minutes until the carabinieri showed up.

For the record, the carabinieri view the Calcatese with sneering contempt. We’re artists, writers, actors, and musicians, you see. Calcata Vecchia is actually known as paese di fricchettoni, or “village of freaks.” To the local constabulary, what happened last night is just further proof that we are, without exception, moral degenerates. And to be fair, that’s not entirely untrue. Heroin was a problem here once and perhaps a couple thousand parties might have turned into one big orgiastic fuck pit. But in the severest terms I will maintain that your average U.S. Senatorial kegger is far more debauched, especially now that the American public is too busy watching Backstrom to concern themselves with the character of their elected representatives.

Is it true that from time to time someone’s car gets torched? Yes. Do the carabinieri do anything about it? No. Do certain members of the local communist party occasionally get their pricy new chompers knocked clean out of their skull by put-upon fascist youth? Yes. Do the carabinieri do anything about it? No. Do local farmers sometimes come up to the piazza to sell fresh mozzarella, grapes, and honey? Yes. Do the carabinieri do anything about it? Absolutely. They drive those poor bastards off with a stick. Why? No permit. Italians adore permits. Permits are the god and sovereign of the Italian legal system—although those three words together may constitute the biggest oxymoron of the free world, right after United States democracy.

In many respects, life is lived here much as it was five centuries ago. And it has taught me in the most uncomfortable ways that every problem that humans create a solution for just creates other, different problems. Television, cars, air conditioning and freely accessible wifi = isolation (plus air pollution and lack of exercise, etc.). Yet all that togetherness = fighting. At least it does when you’re Italian. But even the days, and there are plenty, where I could really use a little more climate control, I never lose sight of the gift that’s been given to me as a stranger in a strange land. I am living life out loud—overheated, vitriolic, and always teetering on the edge of disaster. But there’s laughter (mostly at myself) and appreciation of what is best about the old ways and what is truly essential about the new.

Which compels me to ask: what’s the one modern convenience you think you could live without? I’d be curious to know.

www.StaceyKeithAuthor.com