A Run through Rome....

Is it seven am already?

Coffee…..check…I’m not running this morning so the babysitter can sleep in. Kids are still asleep...hallelujah..I can say this as it is not Lent.

Coffee pod…push button…..this is so much freaking easier than an espresso machine.

Milk..milk…found the milk.. Caffeine going through the veins….bliss….I’ll just open the back door to get a cross breeze going…and....and...

and there is a pool in my backyard.

I’m just going to do that thing they used to do in the old school cartoons, where I get a knife or a safety pin and stab myself in the arm until I wake up.  Ouch…ok that hurt…one more time…oh crap that pool is still there.

THERE IS AN ABOVE GROUND POOL IN MY BACKYARD!!!!!

You know, I’m too nice. I’ll take the Phish music and I’ll take the unemployed men getting mad because they can’t throw a boomerang and catch it like my intelligent six year old, but a pool?  NO!!!!

I’m done…I’m over all of this crap. I need an outlet…I’m going to see a movie this afternoon.

Which one?  That’s a no brainer….To Rome with Love  it is…

I gave myself a little liturgical challenge last spring. I told forty stories about forty times I went to theaters and what happened when I got there. I did it-but one of my favorite directors was missing.

I didn't tell a Woody Allen story-and not for lack of them.


I have many a Woody Allen story. A lot of them include the nerds I went to high school with and a couple involve college beach trips, but maybe the neurotic Jew just didn't have space in a blog collection leading up to the death and resurrection of Christ. I'm sure he'd thank me if he cared.


We can all find a little Woody Allen in us. It's easy really. You just look around you and make observations and connections to other things in your life and past about everything you see. OUT LOUD..don't sugar coat it. Don't filter it for your grandmother. Just say it. And you can't be embarrassed or worried about what someone else is going to think. Just put it out there-and you have a Woody Allen film. He won't do bonus commentaries for his DVDs. He says the movie is all you need to know about the movie. He has a point.


The critics-the people who are paid to go see movies and tell other people what they think about them-are 50/50 this time with Mr. Allen. To Rome with Love is four stories in Rome going on at once-they never connect in anyway other than you can tell Woody wrote them.



I’ll spell them out:


1) One average working man gets a taste of the celebrity life style.

2) A small town couple finds out how much fun extra curricular trysts can be

3) A retired music producer discovers a mortician that can sing in the shower

4) An American arquitect wants to visit the country he studied in during his twenties


I don't have all day, so I'll just focus on my favorite vignette. Alec Baldwin is the architect stumbling around his old neighborhood looking for what was once his old apartment. He meets a twenty year old kid who happens to be in school for architecture and knows exactly where the apartment is and takes him there for coffee. OK, I was slow on the uptake during the Sixth Sense, but I figured this one out pretty quickly.  Duh...


I was loving the film and picking apart the dialogue and comparing Ellen Page in this to the time I saw her in Juno when we were both pregnant. Listening to her character name drop to the young architect cracked me up. She liked Gaudi and the Sagrada Familia? Always let the conversation go on a little bit longer to make sure they can keep up and aren't just telling you what they want to hear. Did she like Park Guell too? How about the Casa Batllo?  Everybody and their brother knows Gaudi and the Sagrada Familia.

She didn't even try to be adorable about her ignorance- I would have said:

 I only know Gaudi, Frank Loyd Wright, IM Pei, and Maya Lin. Four famous architects for a trivia game but I can't help my son put a Lego set together past the age of seven.

 As I was over analyzing the phone rang silently. Yes, I was that movie patron. My phone was making noise during a fine arts cinema production.

 The old me would have gotten irritated with this. But the new me has three kids at home and left the theater to answer it.



It was the property manager of my house.


PAGE! HOW DARE YOU PUT A POOL IN THE BACKYARD FOR YOUR CHILDREN! IT NEEDS TO COME DOWN!


I didn't put a pool in the backyard. The girls upstairs did. I am sitting in the hoity toity town of Madison, CT watching a Woody Allen film with possibly ten other people all way older than I am while everyone else is in Branford watching Ted or Magic Mike. This is my life. I can't go to a theater without something happening.

I tried to be polite and handle this quickly because with every second I spent on mundane stupidity I was missing brilliant self-depricating witty dialogue we only get once a year and Woody is pushing 80 so how many more of these movies do I have??? (sob)

I cleared my throat and channneled him, to my property manager.  I tried to think of what Woody would say if he were the 37 year old mother of three in a new life setting she didn't really plan.

UM, seriously, it wasn't me that did it. Yes, I have three children that would be more than happy in a germ filled pool without having to go anywhere strapped in a carseat.  Sadly for them, I enjoy taking them around other people to swim so that they acquire social skills they wouldn't get sitting in an above ground pool in my backyard swatting mosquitos.  God knows I have broken rules before and will more than likely break them again.  When I was eleven I got in trouble over Judy Blume books, just last year a principal accused me of sharing a porn DVD with another mother via our children's backpacks, and that one boyfriend in highschool almost had to go back to drug rehab over me,  but putting up a pool in a backyard that doesn't belong to me isn't on that list. OK I don't have time for this I need to analyze a film- Bye.

Then I had to quickly run back to my seat and not irritate the old ladies behind me.

ahhhhh wit again.

 I hate the word cute-so I'll say that the film is a quirky little romp through Rome that could have happened almost anywhere. Not his best, not his worst. If you love Woody Allen you will love this too. 

Other than Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters, this one stirred up some emotion in me.

Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg are ingrained in my brain forever-no kidding.  Kind of a post traumatic stress disorder moment, if you will.

I'd love to wander around Sevilla, Spain and see my twenty year old self. I would run into her on the tippy top the the Giralda tower. She would have this thick head of red hair and be wearing socks that match her shirt.  I would tell her three things:  1) Start learning about autism other than Rain Man. 2) You are writing all those letters because you love to write, keep doing it, and 3) buy hair gel.


Everything else she could figure out on her own-including how to be witty and get a pool out of her backyard.

Thanks Woody-see you next year!

P.S.-I ran 12 miles today in the heat.