The 'It Made Me Laugh' Edition

So, this may rub some of you the wrong way, but I can’t resist. Some times things happen that make me laugh, mainly because I can picture it happening to me. I remember, years ago in L.A., we were hanging out at the hotel pool courtyard. Along came a guy. Seemingly very important based on his expensive suit, shoes, sunglasses, and his cell phone glued to his ear. He appeared to be having a power discussion as he arrogantly strutted past us. The pool saw him but he didn’t see the pool… he walked right into the deep end—fancy suit and all. Everyone rose to their feet to rescue him, if needed, but he dog-paddled to the ladder and got out. That was memorable.

The other day, sitting out front of Pedro’s, a group of maybe ten millennials sat around a couple of tables pushed together. They were a good looking group. The best looking one was a raven-haired beauty in a tank-top and loose linen shorts. A seagull flying overhead indiscriminately went pooh on her. Stunned silence was followed by hysterical laughter. Sounds mean, huh? But she was the comedian. When she showed them that it had gone into her shorts pocket, the group was gasping for air, they were laughing so hard.

There’re a lot of pedestrian streets in Armação de Pêra. Can you guess where I’m going with this? A car went creeping down the narrow, steep street the other day. I could tell they didn’t want to be there, but couldn’t figure out how to escape. Literally everyone watched them until they got down to the bottom where a one-way road goes by at a sharp angle. This is when it got worse. They turned down the wrong way, realized their mistake and tried to back up onto the pedestrian street. You know that at this point they were probably completely stressed out (I would’ve have been). Anyway, in their first attempt to back up they hit a garbage can. Then they drove forward to within a couple of feet of a table with people eating lunch—they promptly vacated their seats. Then it backed up over a curb as Joe and I scurried out of danger. They did eventually get going the right way. We laughed only because we’ve all been there to some degree or another.

Have you seen those round window shades for car windows? I have one and they take awhile to figure out how to make them collapse. Apparently there’s a beach pup-tent based on the same principle. The other day we watched a dad attempt to reduce this wind block structure to a little round thing meant to fit inside a bag the size of a grocery bag. It was hysterical to watch this battle. He would almost get it to the right size and it would spring open to its preferred shape. It was so entertaining to his buddies, they pulled out their cell phones and recorded the contest. It appeared that the tent was going to win, but after twenty minutes of sweating and covered in sand, he finally squeezed it into its bag.

Children are basically left to wander where they want. No one is going to hurt them. The other day at a café, a little toddler was wandering around with a couple of giant strawberries clutched in his hands. He saw something else he wanted to pick up. Faced with a dilemma he came over to our table and set a gooey strawberry on the seat next to me, then went back to fetch the seashell and carried to his parent’s table. I picked up the strawberry and wiped the seat off just in time for him to return for it. He stood staring at the clean seat in confusion. He looked up at me with absolute conviction that I was the thief. Mom came to my rescue.

Freedom Day was a couple of weeks ago on April 25^th. It’s a super important day here and Armação de Pêra was packed. This holiday celebrates the day the citizens calmly went out en-mass to place red carnations in the barrels of the militia’s guns. They’d decided they would rather be a republic than a have a socialist government. They succeeded. The next holiday was May-day, or Labor Day. This is a day off from work if you work at a grocery store. It least that’s the way it seemed to us. We needed groceries so we innocently headed out with our little rolling grocery cart. It blew me away that our big store was closed. So we tried the next one, and the next, until we’d tried all five grocery stores. We stopped at our favorite café to have a cup of coffee and rest our feet. The waitress claimed everyone had the day off except the restaurant industry.

Last but not least, I have to poke a little fun at the Brazilians. They are so different from their Portuguese cousins. This sturdy little group of Portuguese are seemingly in awe of the loud, flamboyant Brazilians. They play music on the beach, which is taboo here. They wear the craziest stuff too. Kinda hard to describe really. But the other day Joe and I watched with open mouths as an exotic woman poured an entire one liter bottle of Coke all over her body on the beach and rubbed it in! What? I bet the sand ants loved that feast!

Regarding my screenplay, I’m still scouting places we can film if Florence won’t cooperate. I was leaning toward Pistoia and then I heard about Prato. It’s a beautiful city right by Florence. As I researched its personality, I discovered it is struggling with gang activity right now because of the Chinese textile factories. Their people are controlled by the Chinese syndicates and the Italian mafia doesn’t like that, so occasional skirmishes occur. As pretty as it is and the wonderful history it has, I’m not really interested in placing a film there. This week, I’ve been looking at Lucca. Lucca is one of my favorite cities in Italy. We will make it a day trip to go explore it for the scenes to see if I can adapt it for that city. It doesn't hurt that this will be the week of Lucca's History Festival with all kinds of medieval reenactments.