This post has been inspired by Hotaka's last post...:-)

Ok, my interview landed me in lot less glitzy and important publication than the one of Hotbabe...lol......but still....i have that article in my photo album and this is the story of what happened...;-)


In Italy i have been interviewed several times on a radio and a tv news station and my face showed up in few articles too...but this is the story of my splash of VIP moment on a foreign country paper that happened when I came here in US for the first time to visit my then fiance's family...

At that time they were living in O., a really small town located in the middle of nowhere here in Texas .......Population: 450.
The kind of place where even the sneeze of a cow is big news for the local circulating paper...

The lady in charge of the above paper was a good friend of my then MIL, Nana, who was immensely and understandably excited for our visit.

First of all, her beloved son was coming back home after more than one year of being stationed in Italy.....AND he was bringing along his fiance'....this foreigner....an Italian woman....older than him...an exotic, different creature who nobody ever met before...and, as Nana was thinking with disdain, most likely would have not even spoken English at all...

Can you feel the anticipation?....lol...

All her friends and relatives had been buzzing about us (specially about me) by weeks already and everybody, i mean everybody, had been calling her days in advance to ask if we had arrived yet, or what.

Talk about having to live up to the expectation, right?....

The day after my arrival at the airport of Dallas a friend of my ex picked us up at the fancy hotel we had been staying and drove us to the town. He was going to visit his own family as well.

It was a long 4 hours drive in the middle of this new land...
I had never been in Texas before...never seem that amazingly vast flat-stretched out land in front of me, never experienced the immensity of that sky, never seen those interminable highways leading to apparently nothing that were going from point A to point B without a single living creature moving on them....

I was fascinated.

You know, i had all these visions floating in my eyes...all the movies i had seen...Baghdad Cafe', Paris,Texas, the Giant...... i had all those stunning photos of Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Winston, Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham coming back to my mind......heck, even John Wayne's smirk or the Sergio Leone's movies with Clint Eastwood and Terence Hill..........lol....

Most of all I was thinking that my dad would have been out of his skin for the excitement......he loved the frontier.....the wild wild west....
Well.......i was having my slice of it...

When we finally arrived to my MIL town i just thought....."It's that all??"

I mean, he had told me it was a tiny town...but ....there was only a train railways, a small Postal Office, a small grocery store with a pharmacy and an attached gas station,.a 4 light traffic stop in the middle of the two roads going West and East and around a bunch of small houses with trees and any kind of junk in their yards...old tractors, old cars, old something...
Dogs were barking at our car when we were passing by and dust...lots of dust swirling around...

Just like a wild west town was supposed to be, after all, right?

But there was that beautiful sky full of huge white clouds too.....a sky with which i immediately fell in love.

After the first embarrassing and nervous moments of meeting his family (you can read about  this encounter in my post here) we settled in and the next day my MIL got a call from the paper lady who wanted to meet us.

Actually, she wanted to meet....ME.

Apparently, i was going to be the star of the article...

I was pretty taken back by all this interest built around me but at the same time i was giggling at the thought of when i would have recalled the story to my friends and family, back in Italy. They would have loved it!

My MIL arranged the appointment for the next day. I could feel that Nana was bursting with pride...she was going to have his son and his Italian fiance' (who apparently had won her heart at first sight) on the local paper, with picture and story and all..she was going to frame the article for sure ...

(She actually did frame it.....when i moved here in Texas, after we got married, and we got into the habit of visiting them at least once at month, learning to respect and love each other very much, she told me all about that visit and she showed me the framed article too...sweet Nana......she passed away 5 years ago....i miss her)...

At that time i was still working as a reporter in Italy so i was extremely curious to see up close how a small all-American rural town paper was working.

I was imaging all sort of stuff ....you know......a kind of Norman Rockwell kind of fantasy...with the freckled blond young delivery boy on his bike, the smell of the ink in the back of the office, the rugged up old reporter with a pen in his hat.....

I was a little nervous too...i wanted to give a good impression of myself, mostly because of my fiance'....i wanted his family to be proud of him through me ..

At the phone she had also asked for a picture of us. We decided to take one in front of his parents house with the mesquite trees in the distance...
Sonny, my FIL took the shot but we couldn't stop laughing so we had to take it over and over again...
I remember Sonny laughing and threatening of not bringing me on his his huge truck if i didn't stop giggling......see, we were planning to do that ride the next day...we would have gone to visit the other part of his family in Lubbock...


For the picture I chose of wearing the most country-est outfit i could think of: a white cotton laced peasant kid of skirt at knee length, my half calves black boots (even though Italian ones) and a 3/4 long sleeves grey-sh sweater with a high leather belt. I was feeling country enough...even though the sweater was by Armani....lol..
I used to have a perm at that time with my hair long to the shoulder and a dark brown color.

My ex was wearing his country outfit in all his glory and proud as hell of it: tight Levis jeans and a big belt with a shining silver buckle with a bull engraved. He had won it after a bull riding competition in high school...he was pretty good at that sort of thing....
He was wearing a striped colored shirt (Beyond...the same the kind of country shirt you had talked in your post some time ago...the ones with no buttons but push-in buttons), his black Stetson hat and, naturally, armadillo skin boots.

I think we were cute.

When we arrived at the paper place i got the first surprise..... the paper was run inside the only local craft shop in town that was doubling as hair and beauty products shop as well.
I had a smile, but said nothing.
 
We walked in front of any sort of country craft material before reaching the back room that was serving as paper office and break room.

She was waiting there....a matronly kind smiling lady...with a high bun tight on her head....huge breast and arms...small bright blue yes..
She hugged my ex so strongly i thought he was breaking him in two....he was on the skinny side and she was pretty abundant......;-p.
She shook my hand and we all smiled at each other.

She seemed nervous. 
As I found out later, she said to Nana that she wasn't expecting me to look so young.
"I mean, Nana, she looked even younger than your boy"

I also found that my impression was right: she was indeed very nervous to meet me.
Nana had told her i was a reporter in Italy working for this national big newspaper ...so she must have felt some kind of intimidated by me....

But there i was...nervous about the whole situation, just like she was ....
Funny how the same event is imprinted in such different ways by the protagonists...

As reporter, my way of conducting interviews was using a notepad or a tape recorder......i would ask questions, the interviewed ones would give me their answers.
So i was ready to try my best with my English to be at the top of the situation....didn't want say something totally inappropriate..
Also, I was very aware of how easily words can be misunderstood during an interview...

But...alas....i had another surprise: there would have been no need for me to talk at all.
After the greetings and a small chat, I was handed a questionnaire and she told me to simply filling in the questions.
"Go on and write them down, sweetie. He and I will catch up with the news"
And they left, leaving me alone in the small room.

That's it?, i thought.
Basically I had to write all by myself an article about myself?

I was kind of disappointed though.....WTH...i was feeling like at the doctor before a visit.

Where were the paparazzi, people?
Where were the elbow fighting, ambition driven, loud mouthed reporters going to each other throat to have my exclusive?

Oh, well.. here i was filling questions like: do you like America? What do you like it the most? Which ones are the biggest differences you had found between Us and your country? How would you describe your country?

Not bad question, after all...
And then questions like.....how did you meet T., when do you plan to marry, how long are you going to stay, where do you live in Italy, do you have brother or sister, what kind of job are you doing?
Stuff like that...

I had a vague suspicion at one point that all of that interview thingie was only a gig of the FBI or the border patrol people...you know...to found out if i was really going back to Italy or i just planned to marry the naive yankee to simply snap my US citizenship ...

I wanted to be precise in my answers and write them down well and round so i took my time.
They didn't seem to mind ...he was filling her with his Navy duties and his Italian life, she was telling him who got married and had a baby and who not, what his old school friends were up to......

I finally finished and handed her the paper and we left after more hugs and smiles.

The next day Sonny brought us on his truck along more wild regions and i had a first hand experience of a truck driver life in Texas...though life, people, very though.....
My back was seriously burning when i got out of that cabin after all those long hours.......and to think he was sitting up there all days long, seven days a week, rain or shine..

When two days later we went back Nana showed us the paper with the article.

And there i was...between the announcement of the local church meeting Saturday evening and the prices of the farmer market produces ...

We were looking good in the pic though...
I joked and told him:
"Now all your ex girlfriends in town will remember how handsome you are but will also see what a hell of a hot fiance' you got yourself in Italy.....lol.....you will be the talk of the town for months"....

Well, guess what? One of his exs actually called Nana house the next day...yep, she wanted to say hi to him...since he was in town, you know...

Yeah...eat your dust, woman!....lol..

So ok, pic was cute but.....all my well thought and costructed sentences with which i had tried so hard of being clever and wit and funny at the same time....nothing was in the article...nothing...

She used only 4 of my answers....WTH.....why didn't she tell me that all the other ones were going to be of no use?

All that effort for nothing....;-(

Even though... i couldn't blame her too much...being a reporter, i knew that we sometimes use 20% of the info we receive when we have to squeeze them in a small place in a busy page lay-out.
.
But still.....damned.... i just thought i was more important than the local competion for the biggest pumpkin in Halloween ....

So this is how i had my face on an American paper....small paper but hey, better than nothing, right?....lol...

 
So Hotbabe....going back to your post...as a reporter i have to defend our right to creatively use the information people willingly release to us but, naturally, not to the point of deforming their truth.

And as somebody who has been interviewed, i completely understand your frustration of seeing your words twisted or patched up or changed or, in my case, deleted ....