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National
Cheese Month I really have no news to report, other than one surreal afternoon standing in a phone booth in Castellina in Chianti with the rain beating a tattoo on the roof and a weekly market still going on all around me oblivious to the weather and me trying to call various restaurants scattered throughout the Chianti to see which ones were open and reserve a spot and also trying to track down Stan to let him know when I was coming back by Rome and then all of a sudden, without umbrella or anything to protect him, a Carabinieri went striding past my phone booth in full dress uniform, walking with impeccable Carabinieri-school posture, carrying two plastic bags of his shopping, and bearing the absolute spitting image of Rowan Atkinson on his face. It was the highlight of my week. Where was I? Oh, yes. Other than "I'm still plodding along the travel writing thing" reports, I have no news other than that which appears in the newspaper. You may not have read about this, seeing as how it was strangely not on the front page, so I will quote the story here (not in its entirety), as much for the lead-in to the piece as to the point of it:
The thing is, I wouldn't mind all this "Official State..." stuff if we actually did something with it (we as in Americans). When an Italian village has its wine or its strawberry festival, you know darn good and well exactly what there's going to be plenty of freely available in town on that day, and that everyone will be out celebrating it in a suitable manner. We Americans, on the other hand, go and declare a National Cheese Month (when it is, I always forget), but then there's hardly any more cheese in it than there is in a regular month. All we get is a bunch of wholesome commercials by the Real(tm) Milk Corporation, pretending to be the United Dairy Farmers of America, telling us to go buy cheese. I would love to see Bill Clinton up on the podium instead, giving a heartfelt and emphatic speech — full of his pregnant pauses and that downward tonal slant at the end of each sentence that some speech coach at some point must have told him made him sound more believable — on the importance of Emmenthal, the versatility of Velveeta (which is, technically, not a cheese), and the olfactory qualities of aged gorgonzola. Then he could finish with a bit of fist pounding and perhaps taking a big ol' bite out of a hunk of Vermont cheddar (for patriotism, you see). Then we would all go out and enjoy picnic plates piled high with cheese, watch fireworks, and sign petitions banning the further production, sale, and consumption of Swiss cheese since it has all the taste and texture qualities of rancid galvanized rubber, its only redeemable quality being the fact that the holes mean you're spared more cheese volume-per-slice. Where, I repeat, where will the madness end? I must get to sleep now. ('No, Reid' you are thinking. 'You obviously needed to go to sleep about two paragraphs ago.') But thank you for allowing me to write about something that had nothing to do with the decor of the restaurant I just ate in or the spring power of the beds in this hotel (fair to middlin'). Copyright © 1997 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved. |
