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Luca Spaghetti’s birthday falls this year on America’s Thanksgiving Day, so he wants to do
a turkey for his birthday party. He’s never eaten a big, fat, roasted American Thanksgiving tur-
key, though he’s seen them in pictures. He thinks it should be easy to replicate such a feast
(especially with the help of me, a real American). He says we can use the kitchen of his
friends Mario and Simona, who have a nice big house in the mountains outside Rome, and
who always host Luca’s birthday parties.
So here was Luca’s plan for the festivities—he would pick me up at around seven o’clock
at night, after he’d finished work, and then we would drive north out of Rome for an hour or so
to his friends’ house (where we would meet the other attendees of the birthday party) and
we’d drink some wine and all get to know each other, and then, probably around 9:00 PM, we
would commence to roasting a twenty-pound turkey...
I had to do some explaining to Luca about how much time it takes to roast a twenty-pound
turkey. I told him his birthday feast would probably be ready to eat, at that rate, around dawn
the next day. He was destroyed. “But what if we bought a very small turkey? A just-born tur-
key?”
I said, “Luca—let’s make it easy and have pizza, like every other good dysfunctional
American family does on Thanksgiving.”
But he’s still sad about it. Though there’s a general sadness around Rome right now, any-
way. The weather has turned cold. The sanitation workers and the train employees and the
national airline all went on strike on the same day. A study has just been released saying that
36 percent of Italian children have an allergy to the gluten needed to make pasta, pizza and
bread, so there goes Italian culture. Even worse, I recently saw an article with the shocking
headline: “Insoddisfatte 6 Donne su 10!” Meaning that six out of ten Italian women are sexu-
ally unsatisfied. Moreover, 35 percent of Italian men are reporting difficulty maintaining
un’erezione, leaving researchers feeling very perplessi indeed, and making me wonder if SEX
should be allowed to be Rome’s special word anymore, after all.
In more serious bad news, nineteen Italian soldiers have recently been killed in The Amer-
icans’ War (as it is called here) in Iraq—the largest number of military deaths in Italy since