Early September last year, a simmering and sweet Charleston night, one by one my dearest friends and family ambled through the door and down the driveway into the garden at our home. With each entrance, the curtain was drawn and the actor walked on stage. There was the man dressed like he was heading out into the Castro district after hours in San Francisco, circa 1978. Short cutoffs, high white socks, puka bead necklace and Hawaiian shirt. There was the Farrah Fawcett big blonde hair and the macrame vest with red bellbottoms. There was Lee, doing his best to recreate Tom Petty with a leather vest with a cross on it and a blonde wig which didn’t work in even the furthest reaches of the imagination, but which made it so funny, you couldn’t talk directly to him without spitting with laughter. There was the Afro wig (appropriation, certainly), gold neck chain, unbuttoned nylon shirts, mood ring, and groovy t-shirts with wide leather watch bands. I welcomed our guests in a vintage Diane Von Furstenberg lime green paisley dress with jacket made in Italy. Only John Travolta in his white disco suit was missing.
It was my 70th birthday party and the theme was, naturally, the 70’s. I had lived through it. It was beautiful. Then and now, in memory. The party was small by design. Only eleven people would circle the table. My son, Alexander, his wife, Jessie and my daughter, Isabelle, had hatched the whole idea and flew in from New York to implement it. Izzy works in the food industry managing special events for Jean Georges, the founder of ABC Kitchen in New York. She’s a pro. Jessie plays the role of sous chef when they cook together, which is often. She does this willingly and admirably. (She’s a principal of a middle school by day so the sous chef gig is a breeze.) Zan sidestepped his day job for a couple weekends last year to take a bartending class and was in charge of shaking the gimlets for the night.
Here's the thing. Have a costume party and you pretty much cannot go wrong. You will laugh. A lot. All night.
So the night gets underway.
At some point, Isabelle, as hostess, invited everyone at the table to “share a story or some little memory of Alecia.” Around the table it went. Well, I certainly felt the belle of this ball. Isabelle started with a poem she wrote with the help of AI = a tribute to my life that was so funny, I cried into my starter course. The sweetness of the stories as we moved around the table was as if my heart was dipped in honey. We finally arrived at Alexander, my son, who said something like this: .
“What I most admire about my mom is what is also most foreign to me. I have been trained to think logically and take my time to consider the pros and cons of any decision.” (He has an MBA.) “It’s kind of my nature”. (He was the kid who organized his Halloween candy in a drawer by brand, then ate them over the course of a month.) But I also really admire her way of doing things. And I hope to learn something about this from her over time. Her style is what I might describe as… “Ready. Fire. Aim.” “
Laughter all around. Okay. Fair enough.
Two months earlier, I put a down payment on a villa in Italy without really planning to do that. 30 years ago, I suddenly and painfully left their father to be with Lee. We made an offer on an apartment in Charleston on a vacation there in 2014. Hadn’t considered it before that! Lee and I bought a cottage on Folly Beach in 2017 without ever talking about it. I saw it when I was working with the architect who owned it; he said it was for sale. Okay, let’s see if we can make this happen. We did. No clue how we did it to this day. It’s always by the seat of our pants and our complete comfort with taking risks.
Ready. Fire. Aim.
So, recently, I have been thinking I might be addicted to chaos.
On Tuesday, April 30 we were flying to Minneapolis to see my 93-year old (young) mother. On that flight, Lee was in seat 12A and I was in 10B so I couldn’t communicate with him easily. While on the flight, I logged into wifi to work and discovered that a package had been delivered by the USPS from Florida. Well, of course I knew it was from the Italian Consulate of Miami and it was news of our Visa status, which we had waited for since applying on January 5.
The back story is this: we were in Italy in February, like on a honeymoon in our new villa which had just closed on the 20th of February. Somewhere around the 22nd we got an email from the Miami Consulate. “We would like to see you in person on February 28 in Miami.” WTF? We are in Italy, on our villa-moon and our return ticket is for April 3.
Lee writes back and explains all this. “Could we do a zoom meeting instead? We are available on the 28th.”
“No, we’ll see you when you return. Just let us know when you have landed in the United States.
“We are happy to do that. Could you kindly tell us the purpose of the meeting so we can be fully prepared?” he writes back.
“No. Just call us when you are back.”
Okey dokey. On their time. But it’s not going to ruin the next 6 weeks in Italy.
We arrived home on April 3, and let the consulate know we were back on American soil. “Come to the consulate on Monday, April 8 at 10:00 a.m.”
Ouch, Just returned from 7 weeks in Italy, jet lagged in the funny way that you think you have energy because you are up at 4:00 a.m. but actually just completely disoriented, we just had to make the trip. $1000 later, up at 3:30 a.m. to catch the 5:30 a.m. flight that would get us to the consulate by 10:00. Do you know how much time we killed at Miami airport that morning? Do you know how many hours of work I missed that day for this little charade?
Charade: an absurd pretense intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance.
I am now going to be as respectful as possible because our future is held in the balance.
We were directed into the office of a middle-aged Italian man in his dark suit. He did not introduce himself. He did not shake our hands. He did not say anything like “Piacere” or “Nice to meet you.” (By the way, this is nothing like our experience of people who actually live in Italy. Warm, friendly, welcoming all around.)He pointed us to our chairs while he sat behind his desk. I was in front of him and Lee was to his left. For the next 90 minutes we sat there, expecting at any given moment to be given the chance to dialogue, to explain our interest in living in Italy, to defend our applications. But, instead, he talked for 85 of the 90 minutes. He had 20 minutes of material which he repeated four times. His point if not said directly. “You are old. You should just apply for the retirement visa in Italy and enjoy your life.”
We explained. “I have work in the US and I will complete the projects as I’ve committed. I love my work and although I am much more selective about what I will take, I still have work to do.”
And Lee feels the same. We want to use our beautiful home / villa to share with others, to do retreats, wellness weeks, in the spirit of Otium – a latin word meaning leisure with dignity, and developed at the Villa Medici outside of Florence with gatherings of artists, musicians, writers, philosophers, together to celebrate life in the 15th Century.
He suggested, quite directly, that we just withdraw our current application for Lavoro Autonomo (freelance work, which I’ve done since 1980 by the way) and settle in to that cushy retirement in Italy, which isn’t that cushy on Social Security. Sorry. Not happening. So, in complete shock, we said we would go have lunch and call our attorney in Florence , then get back to him and let him know about our decision to proceed or withdraw. Lunch happened, sort of. Phone call with the Florence attorney spewing Italian profanity and we were encouraged to NOT SIGN ANYTHING. GO HOME. WE’LL MAKE A PLAN.
So for a couple of months we’ve kind of been in limbo. We wrote the Italian consulate by email that we were NOT withdrawing our applications. Then our attorney (who had only had positive experience with the Miami consulate in the past) wrote a 3-page letter in Italian citing Italian law and questioning the judgement and attitude of the consul. Nothing. We heard nothing. They never said, “Got your email! Thanks!” Never said, “We will respond within the standard time frame of 4 months.”
Nothing. Like I’d been set out to sea on a boat with no motor, no oars, no sundial, no compass, no coffee and no wine! It was a special kind of hell. We were just waiting. Waiting. Waiting. All the while, our villa is empty. We need furniture but can’t send it until we have a Visa. We can’t buy a ticket to return until we know how long we can stay. Purgatory.
I texted my neighbor down the street to go pick up the package, open it and take photos of whatever was inside. Here I am on the plane stuck between two people just watching movies and chomping on pretzels and I am about to get news that will forever change our lives. I put my headphones on to listen to something like psychedelic journey music to try to set a mood of Zen while I waited for the verdict. It’s borderline elevator music.
Ping. The text came in. I opened it and saw several photos of pages of written word. No Passport included. A sure sign. If the Visa was approved, they would have sent the passport with the Visa. It was written in both Italian and English, so I quickly scanned the first and last page. This letter was addressed to Lee. “Your Visa application for Lavoro Autonomo (freelace work visa) is denied.” Then they went through “impediment” after “impediment” for why it was denied. And if I have to repeat it here I will go open two more bottles of wine and never make it up the steps to bed tonight. So I will not relive the reasoning. Like, there is no proof you own a home in Italy. Except that we do.
Moving on, it was quite painful to sit with this news when I couldn’t share it with Lee without making my way to Aisle 12 and telling him by shouting across the people on the aisle and the middle seat all the way to the window where he sat. I just couldn’t make a scene on an aircraft in mid-flight. I have that much control. I had to just sit there, in the middle while the woman next to me watched some inane movie about a high school where all the 16-year-old high school girls had the same huge round boobs. It was just uncanny. All the same exact boobs. I was annoyed to have that in my peripheral vision. You know, you can’t stand to watch it and you can’t not watch it.
So, I just got to work thinking about what to do next. But of course the big next was….would I get my Visa??? I tracked the package addressed to me and it got separated from Lee’s letter and took a tour to North Carolina so I would get it in a day or two. Patience is not a natural virtue for me. But, the psychedelic journey music chilled me out enough that I just decided to go with the flow.
I got off the plane and had to give Lee the news. There was no perfect way to do that, so I just blurted it out. “They denied your Visa,” as he ducked into the Men’s Room and I split off for the Women’s Room.
Two days later, my package arrived. Also…..”Denied.”
Stay Tuned for Part II: The Appeal, Selling the House, Buying an Apartment and Generally Chaotic Behaviors to Compensate for the Obvious
Thank you . So nice of you to ready my posts! I will get back to more quite soon!
Interesting journeys, Alecia … Ah, the Italian bureaucracy, eh? Funny that your daughter works(ed) for JGV … I tended bar at Vong for him in the early 90s and at his namesake resto at 1 CPW, NYC a few years later. Is she still loving hospitality? It takes a certain kind of person!