-A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
My Italian teacher giggles so much now that we got a boy in our class. I just smile and watch her like she's the cutest thing I've ever seen and sometimes I start laughing too. I like her so much and I've been trying to figure out why. I think it's because she reminds me of my mom. She's short and teeny and wears light pink shirts every day. She's very kind and patient with all of us, a bunch of twenty-something girls who just want to go have a glass of wine instead of trying to say "I am happy and tall" in some variation of Italian that sounds so bad she just makes this face and smiles, like oh god this is hopeless. I have a quiz tomorrow and she has the kind of voice that you can hear while you study. I know they say knowing one romance language helps you learn another, but I just want lungo to be longo and molto to be multo. So..idk maybe writing it in this post will make me remember. Thanks blog.
My fresco professor is Mario. Like I meant Super Mario, but yea his name is actually Mario too. He's old and wheezy but not in a sick way, in an old Italian man way and you can't really understand him sometimes but he can say "you know what I mean?" in perfect English, and does, every so often between mumbles of Italian. This morning I asked him what an article from the newspaper was about because the picture was so scary, and he just looked at me and walked away. And then 15 minutes later he came back and told me a 20-year-old woman was raped, but he didn't know in English "how to tell a lady." They don't make him like him no more.
My painting professor reminds me so much of my one at UNC because they're both so American, their Levi's and midwest accents make you want to go home and watch Casablanca with your wife. I don't have a wife but once I ran into my UNC painting professor at a thrift shop buying old romance movies on VHS, so I figured that's what he was going home to do. Anyway, they both teach the painting and drawing courses in a row so I was used to those same 6 hour afternoons before class even started.
Batik lady is just that. She's 65 with a relaxing, open-air, tropical studio tucked away off campus. She did her masters of a life-size VW bug she Batik'd, quilted and constructed with metal supports. She showed us her photo album of when she completed it and when VW casually bought it from her, but I was more struck by this young, glowing beauty in a sixty's dress to die for smiling, so proud of what she had done than her actual masterpiece. Age is so amazing.
My Illustration professor is a crazy college girl at heart. When she laughs you can tell she means it and then she keeps talking with the smile leftover from the laugh still on her face, so she always seems like she's having a great time. She tells us stories of when she went to work in NYC after she graduated college and it's so funny to hear the reverse experience of an Italian living in America. It's like you flip a shirt inside out and put it on backwards so it's basically the same thing, but opposite. I don't know where that metaphor was going. Maybe I'll illustrate it tomorrow.... But that's all for now, I just wanted to remember my professors before they grade me AHH
