The phrase “la vita quotidiana” never hit me so hard as it did during COVID-19, when a dystopian reality hit the world in a wave, like 80,000 fans at Yankee Stadium moving as one amoeba, rising falling and watching the wave move through the stands. I saw COVID-19 coming, like everyone. I had the privilege of a door to close to keep the virus out, human contact out, and money enough to get food and medicine delivered right to my door.
Here’s my artist’s daily life now without la vita quotidiana. I wake up I check my handheld screen, make espresso and it’s never as good as if I was in Napoli, but it’s a placeholder for la vita quotidiana I am not living. I drink the espresso and look at my gallon of Sicilian olive oil on the counter with the picture of the carrozzella, another placeholder for the trees my grandparents harvested as youth field workers, landless peasants. I open another screen, type on a keyboard, conscious to keep my fingers and neck from stiffening. Hours and hours dissolve while my brain works almost not attached to a body. I turn to the piano keyboard, working on the lead sheet of “Fly Me to the Moon.” I take a break to eat. I go into my audio cave—two walls where I glued soundproofing to the walls and threw a sleeping bag over a makeshift lean-to. I can’t explain the architecture of how I rigged this, but I can try—I zip gunned a framed canvass to the underside of a corner shelf, and stuck a four-foot length of scrap wood under it as a leg. I didn’t bother to measure or cut the leg, so it’s on a diagonal. However it fits. Perfect. Sturdy. Holds the roof up. Over the top goes the sleeping bag. This is my audio cave.
I record podcasts in there. Yes, I talk to the walls. As a kid in the Bronx this was the ultimate nightmare: once you start talking to the walls, you know you’re in trouble. The people in the white coats are “coming to take you away.” That was a popular song lyric in my youth. “They’re coming to take you away hah hah, they’re coming to take you away.” Maybe you remember it, you baby-boomers out there. I’m aiming for a hundred stories, a Decameron, because that one Giovanni B. did something admirable with his plague. So, why can’t I?
I survived 2020 with a stack of N95 masks. How I got them is a story in and of itself--an under the table deal, what we used to call on the street--a racket. March 3rd, 2020 another fellow actor friend in NYC told me, “Annie I know a guy who sees what’s coming. He’s warehoused N95 masks, hand sanitizer, and packets of alcohol wipes. Meet me on the corner of 13th and 6th and I’ll hook you up.” Like a drug deal, my buddy, let’s call him Adam, jumped into my car without me even pulling over, as I drove eastbound on West 12th. He directed me to an undisclosed location. Take a right here, the next left, pull over, wait here, I’ll be right back. I gave him some cash, and he brought me double what I paid for. “You’re gonna need this,” he kept saying. “You above all.” I didn’t know I wouldn’t see him for over a year from that moment. We were all going, into effect, underground. Back to our caves to face whatever home life we’d created or failed to. Adam saved my life. Spleenless and immunocompromised with lungs already with fibrosis from radiation from a teenage bout with Hodgkin’s Disease, I was not slated to do well if I came in contact with this mysterious virus with its protein spiked crown, each sure to mutate.
I telephoned my old doctor, the hero who saved me in 1981 at Sloan-Kettering. “I’m just calling to say hi,” I said, “I don’t have COVID.”
“If you had it, this would be a goodbye phone call,” he said to me. “Ten or fifteen years from now it’ll be discussed how the hemoglobin structure of Italians made them more susceptible. We look at malaria now, we see how people with variant hemoglobin structures are differentially affected. But you, you’re from Bari, your bloodline is really Constantinopolitan. You’re not really Italian. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it in terms of hemoglobin structure. That might actually be protecting you from the path of the pathogen.”
I face-timed Rome every day. Friends. Friends like family with a newborn baby who wouldn’t see the face of strangers the whole first year of his life. I wondered about these babies of 2020, without interaction with other babies, without the sounds and smells of the cities around them, without faces except the ones they lived with in confinement. Sheltering-in-place. In Rome and all over Italy, my friends and family were in “la zona rosa”—red zones; they couldn’t leave the house without a reason or written permit. There was no passeggiata. La vita quotidiana had come to a halt; la dolce vita,--on stop. I’m thinking of emergency brakes, I’m thinking of those old cassette deck players, a simple square was the icon for “stop” and someone’s thick finger just pressed it, pressed it hard. Stop. Italy was two weeks ahead of New York in terms of the COVID wave so talking to my friends I knew what was coming ahead of time to New York. I braced myself. Stocked up on any food available for delivery. Dove deep into writing and painting still lifes of lemons. I thought about the long de-evolution of humans in society; As kids we studied the local communal living in Iroquois longhouses where extended families and communities cooperated to survive and held ritual for spiritual awakeness and healing. How did humans devolve in post-colonial capitalist society to believe that each human being needs to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? As President Obama once pointed out --What if you don’t have boots? How did we acquiesce into living apart in “apart”ments, literally naming the trend? How did we isolate and warehouse and medicate our elders into zombies in “old age homes?” And how do these words not stick in our throats as they writhe out of our mouths? How are humans praising whatever deity on one hand and not caring for elders on the other? How do companies have individuals each paying a couple of bucks a month for invisible “cloud” space, the intellectual closet space and $12 bucks for this, $18 bucks for that, for audio files, website files, and then poof, one “php” change and it all evaporates like a Buddhist’s “I told you so.”
The other day I took an N95 masked walk on City Island with another fellow actor. A City Island elder hippie wise woman stopped me in the street:
“What’s your birthday?” she accosted me in a friendly “I see through you” way.
“Six-one” I told her, “Marilyn Monroe.”
“Ahh yes,” she said, “That’s right. What year?”
“63,” I told her.
“Ahh, yes that was a good year.” She nodded putting it all together and getting to the root of my soul: “You don’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s not. That will be a lifelong struggle. And constant creative ideas. You can’t turn it off.”
“Yes, thanks,” I said. “I’ll take all the free advice I can get.”
And so, in search and hope for la vita quotidiana and la dolce vita once again, this one artist signs off for now, going to pop a croissant in the toaster, and dream of la cornetta di crema and the daily flow of a life in community with human touch I once knew, as I stare at screens of light, cup my hands over my eyes to give darkness as a gift to my brain, and keep breathing knowing full well every breath is a privilege while I have it. One day, one day, the breath will fly free. For now it stays with me, comes back home.
THANKS:
Annie first gives thanks and abbracci forti to Greg Cioffi and Emily Dinova who Annie claims she was the first to see them fall in love, love at first site, while overlapping in the costume shop in Manhattan Plaza. Like all memories this one has a few puzzle pieces: the audition where Greg showed off his chest hair, then the costume room where Annie overlapped with Greg, and a minute later spotted Emily in the crosswalk on her way there. BAM, it was a cosmic event. Crosswalks are the place of city cosmos. Greg and Emily were cast as lovers in Tony n’ Tina’s wedding. Annie was cast as Grandma. The rest is artistic history. Here we are. Annie celebrates la vita quotidiana that Emily and Greg have so artfully woven together. Graziemille to Adam Feingold, Emily Jordan Agnes Kunkel, and Sanford Kempin.
Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
Author, poet, performance-artist, actor, director, songwriter, and activist
Author, poet, performance-artist, actor, director, songwriter, and activist, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is a consummate cantastoria, one who sings epic tales in the piazza and walks with a big stick. She has promoted audience participation in hundreds of performances everywhere from the Arthur Avenue Retail Market to the Guggenheim Museum to the Napoli Città Libro festival. While sheltering-in-place alone, she embarked on a solo Decameron, with a nod to Boccaccio, to tell one hundred original stories, in her podcast, "Annie's Story Cave” which can be heard everywhere.
Forthcoming are two memoir essays: “The Wallmakers / I Muratori,” (KGB Bar Lit Mag online) edited by Pat Zumhagen; and “Another Spring” in the anthology “Talking to the Girls, Personal Reflections on The Triangle Factory Fire” (New Village Press), edited by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti. Lanzillotto’s books include the double flip book: Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light; and Pitch Roll Yaw, (Guernica World Editions), L is for Lion: an italian bronx butch freedom memoir (SUNY Press; finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award), and Schistsong (Bordighera Press.) Her original albums include: Blue Pill; Never Argue With a Jackass; Swampjuice: Yankee with a Southern Peasant Soul. Lanzillotto was on the founding board of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition. She is the Artistic Director of Street Cry Inc. Member of Theatre 68. All love and thanks and in memory of the ancestors.
LINKS to Annie’s work:
· Podcast: “Annie’s Story Cave” is on every platform and: StreetCryInc.org.
· Books: order through any bookstore, or here http://www.annielanzillotto.com
· Audiobooks: https://www.audible.com/author/Annie-Rachele-Lanzillotto/B00APRVO9E
· Original albums: annielanzillotto.bandcamp.com
· Paintings: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/annie-lanzillotto
· Icewoman Performance Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3FimguzDxs
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