“I’ve spent as much time over the last 30 years as I possibly can because Italians seem so ambivalent about the modern world’s arrival.”
All Broads Lead to Rome
By Michael Wolff
Vanity Fair, September 2009

I just came back from an incredible few weeks performing in Florence and Catania, Sicily. As was the case with all of my previous performances in Italy the Italian public was attentive and interested. They showed up in force for the last show: one-thousand people payed homage in Florence. As a performer it was an unbelievably gratifying experience.

We were in and out of Florence and Catania, so most of my stay I was in Rome. I came back from an active audience and accolades to a city of inspiration. The architecture. The sculptures on street corners. The massive fountains.

Being around this grandeur made me feel very sad about the current state of Italy.

It was two years since I had last been to Italy. From the moment I stepped off the plane everyone I spoke with told me that the economic crisis had a huge negative impact. Conditions feel like they are getting worse. Friends in professional theater spoke about how their wages have been cut to almost unlivable levels. And it doesn’t look like this will change in the near future.

I spent an evening walking through the Roman Forum with a group of Romans. One of them turned to me and said: “You can’t invent such a fantasy of history as what you can imagine happened in Rome.” As they pointed out the significance of, what to me was a pile of rocks, I got the sense they were trying to prove something: “See, our country could be great, too!” It also was apparent that this pride takes a new dimension in a time of decay; they are especially proud because they do not have much as a country to be proud of now — and haven’t for a long time.

In The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman he asks: “Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?” Because if you have more memories than you are on the decline. During the course of my stay I didn’t hear one hopeful comment about the future of Italy. When I heard about the nation as a whole it was about one of two periods: Ancient Rome or the fascist period. Fascism was when things went from bad to worse (or temporarily better, depending on who you talk to). But, Ancient Rome — that is the time to remember! Current events? Too despicable to talk about with self respect. All memory and no forward thinking.

The Italians are waiting for someone, anyone, to step through the levels of corruption and muck to do something, anything, to improve the economic situation. Yet, most remain cynically inactive and brooding on the past.

I went to Paris abrasive-ly resistant to spending time in a country I was taught to hate. I left a beret-wearing Francophile shouting “Viva La France” at random intervals. The reason for the change was finding that France is a magical place where ordinary rules do not apply.

Here are the top ten things that make Paris a mystical wonderland:
11-Butter is not fattening.
10-Public pools have co-ed bathrooms and showers where no one is sexually harassed.
9-Bread, cheese and wine have their own places in the food pyramid.
8-The most one waits for a subway is not at all to thirty seconds on a normal day, and four minutes on a bad day.
7-The best thing to drink after a morning run is a coffee.
6- It is not necessary to tell people to turn off their cell phones before a movie.
5- Muscle relaxers are over-the-counter drugs.
4- Buying new clothes is not necessary when there are one-hundred years of the finest fabrics and designs at your disposal at a bevy of decently priced vintage houses throughout the city.
3- A forty-something woman can dance on the bar in a chain-link mesh shirt and still be the hottest thing in the club.
2- A photo of a topless women does not make a movie or an advertisement or a television show or a piece of art pornographic.
1- You can have two kids and a husband and still find yourself in a lesbian bar on New Years Eve.

Actor Patel is more than a person. More than an actor, really. He is an experience. He is the kind of guy to blast Hindi music at seven in the morning, break out in dance and song for no apparent reason and incessantly take pictures of nothing at all. I tried to video him to give all my readers a taste of what he is like, but he froze because he was speaking to a camera and not to his audience, which is really anybody and everybody who is surrounding him.

Actor Patel (who really calls himself Actor Patel — we call him “Actor” for short) played a character in the movie I was shooting in India. He was not staying at Vijay Vilas, the lovely beach resort where most of the actors were, and was instead was sucking it up as a shabby joint. At dinner the second night Actor told me how he has not been sleeping well. Beore I could stop myself an offer to take up a bunk in Grant’s, a fellow actor’s, room, flew out of my mouth. Grant almost threw a fork in my direction. That night Grant, the poor guy, was only able to get to sleep with the help of an Ambien, a blasting IPod and a pillow over his head. That was after Actor Patel made him partake in a photo shoot that included a lap top as a prop.

The next morning the cast discovered something very important about Actor: you can tell him to shut up. At breakfast he started going on a ramble that was half Gujrati, part Hindi and somewhat English (note: people who speak all of these languages fluently find him hard to follow because most of it is muttered) and Zenobia, who played his boss in the movie (character traits sometime follow you off screen) turned to him and said “Chotu [his name in the movie], be quiet!” And, miraculously he did. That was because he has a heart of gold and about the size of a football field. You can poke fun of him and he doesn’t mind — a long as he knows that you are his friend.


This is not to say that at our discovery that he is a sweet guy Actor stopped being irritating. The offers for life insurance (he sells it as a side gig — a dollar a day if you are under thirty!), puns that make no sense and a constant plee for attention all grated on our nerves. But, because he is a good person he was able to, as Grant put it, “worm his way into our hearts and infest our brains”. When filming was over Actor had to visit family somewhere else in Gujarat (however, Actor currently resides in New Jersey and is available for performance bookings all over the tri-state area which you can read about on his Facebook page) so was the first to leave. The remaining cast and crew spent a day at Vijay Vilas resort without him and the experience was not quite the same (although more peaceful). Actor told me before he left: “I am like a perfume — sometimes too strong, but when it fades out you miss it.” Yeah, we missed him.