Contributed by Mark Leslie
"Travel and Food Experiences in Italy~ their influences on my American life, plus photos and recipes, too!" by Mark Leslie, author "Beyond the Pasta: Recipes, Language & Life with an Italian Family"
It’s all a ride~
My father was in the Navy when I was very young and for a couple of years he was stationed in San Diego, CA. While my father was away in the Pacific for months at a time, my mother was at home with my sister and me. I am sure that was a daunting task to have been 23 and home alone raising two children under three.
When my aunt would come out to visit us, keeping my mother company, we would go to Disneyland. I can vividly recall riding the teacups, or sitting in Dumbo as he rose up and down as we twirled in a circle, or pulling down the brim of my Donald Duck hat and making it squeak as we plummeted down the rushing water of the Pirates of the Caribbean. But the ride that seemed to ground us back in reality and return us to our sugarcoated, picture perfect lives was “It’s a Small World.”
Why that ride and this blog entry, which is about Venice, are connected in my head at the moment is beyond me. I think it might be the vibrantly bright colors that I associate with those singing peoples of the world and the colors bursting from the shop windows in Venice. It could also be that, like the ride where everything seems so small and compressed together, the streets of Venice feel more like sidewalks bordered in shops than actual thoroughfares where traffic blurs the window displays. In Venice, if you are not in a boat, then you are on foot walking everywhere. There are no bicycles, motorcycles, or mopeds. You either float along, like the Disney ride, past the brightly colored buildings and people, or you are walking through tight and narrow streets crowded full of people who “float” you by the displays of masks, trinkets, and restaurants.
Displaying how fresh and beautiful your food is happens to be what the Venetians do. Window after window, restaurant after restaurant, bar countertop after bar countertop had food displayed on it. Sometimes raw, sometimes cooked, it is always there for your viewing.
It is midnight, as I sit here finally eating my first meal since lunch earlier today—after a very long day at the theatre where I listened to beautiful singing, in a foreign tongue, by 80 people dressed in a wide array of clothes. Now if I was just sitting in a boat and wearing my Donald Duck hat…
I am looking down at my blandly cooked chicken over romaine lettuce that I quickly threw together and thinking of all the beautiful food I saw and ate in Venice. How I would kill for some calamari, prawns, sea bass, or cooked octopus right about now. I need some vibrant color--that is what I really need.
It might be a small world, but tonight my dinner plate and the plates I experienced in Venice are worlds apart.
Ciao e a presto~
Mark**Enjoy the photos of some of the food sights of Venice.
Contributed by Mark Leslie
Mark Leslie works in professional theatre as a stage manager and is a member of Actors’ Equity Association. Currently he is busy working with Gemelli Press on his first book "Beyond the Pasta: Recipes, Language & Life with an Italian Family." http://beyondthepasta.com
Every year, Mark vacations in Italy and lives to eat his way through every plate of pasta and cone of gelato placed before him. In 2005, he had the good fortune to live for a month in Viterbo, Italy with the Stefani family. There he took cooking lessons from Nonna, the grandmother of the family, and Italian language lessons from Alessandra, the mother. That experience is the basis of his first book "Beyond the Pasta: Recipes, Language, & Life with an Italian Family." SEE DETAILS ABOUT THE BOOK: http://mark-leslie.net/we-have-a-publisher
THEATRICAL CREDITS:
Mark is in Winona, MN working on GRSF's production of COMEDY OF ERRORS. Recently, he wrapped up LE NOZZE DI FIGARO and AIDA for Opera Birmingham in Alabama. Last September, he stage managed CABARET at the Arts Center of Coastal Carolina in Hilton Head, SC. He also worked at the Arts Center in 2005 on its production of Evita. This past summer, he worked in Minnesota on Great River Shakespeare Festival’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Over the past 22 years, Mark’s regional theatre credits include: Denver Center Theatre Company (White Christmas, Noises Off, and a reading of a new adaption of The Unsinkable Molly Brown directed by Kathleen Marshall and authored by Dick Scanlon), Alabama Shakespeare Festival (resident stage manager on over 65 productions), Actors’ Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival (D. Boone by Marsha Norman), Arizona Theatre Company (Amadeus, Loot, and Ain’t Misbehavin’ directed by Arthur Faria), and Maine State Music Theatre (Phantom, South Pacific, Jesus Christ Superstar, La Cages Aux Folles, and the world premiere of Chamberlain).
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