A Couple of Little Stories

I Pooh - Last Friday, one of Italy’s rock-n-roll institutions, I Pooh (pronounced ee-pooh) played in the Prato, right outside our balcony window. Bill describes their music as “what Jefferson Airplane has become” (although Pooh has all their original members from the early 70’s), my aunt, who knows all things Italian, described them as “Italy’s version of the Who” (all Who fans would be offended at that analogy) and the local newspaper report on the concert the next day described the guitarist as the “best guitarist in Europe, in the manner of Jimi Hendrix & Van Halen” (whoa – that may be a stretch!). Of course, the newspaper also said they expected 100,000 to show up for the free concert, but only about 20,000 actually came. Isabelle fell asleep, but the rest of us had a lot of fun dancing and playing air guitar to these rock icons. It was great because we could watch them from our balcony and not have to go down into the crowd. It occurred to us later that the could have had a small party for those who would like the music, but not the crowd. I enjoyed the music (but I like almost everything), very 70’s-ish sounding, but really quite good and would be fun at a party – nobody would know who they were. I’ll get a CD and it will be perfect cottage or background party music. The boys liked them and Sam wants to download some I Poh onto his MP3 player. The picture is the boys standing in front of one of the 3 or 4 semi's used to carry the band's equipment as we were watching them set up.

My Little Bambina – Isabelle, right on “schedule” started big girl school (it’s called “first grade” but its really more like an advanced kindergarden program – its working out perfect for her) and lost her first tooth - middle right bottom tooth. Like all kids losing their first tooth it was hanging on by a thread for a couple of days, but no convincing, even from Sam who has had the misfortune of waiting too long and swallowing a tooth, could get her to pull it out or let someone else do it for her. Finally, on Tuesday morning, approximately 2 minutes before the school bus arrives, she decided it was ready to come out and pulled it herself. She came out of the bathroom with a big, slightly bloody smile and proudly showed us what she had done. Unfortunately, we could only indulge her glory of “girl who lost her first tooth today” for a quick minute and stuck her on the bus with a couple of paper towels and a quick word to Franco the bus driver. He told Bill (Bill thinks) that in Italy when the baby (“baby” is the term used young children, seems like most people use it to describe kids until they are about 6 years old) loses his or her first tooth you find a hole in the wall (everyone has plaster, so its probably not hard to do) and patch the wall with the tooth. I couldn’t really find anything on the web specific to Italy, one brief mention about the hole in the wall idea, but also another about a “little mouse” who comes and takes the tooth and leaves candy - apparently to insure a continuing supply of lost teeth! Anyway, since we are Americans, the tooth fairy on Europe-duty managed to find Isabelle’s tooth and leave her 2 euro. She was thrilled. And here she is, quitel proud to show off the new gap in her smile.