Rainbow in Rome

Rome Rome Rome. Rome is busy and full of guidos and average people. Average people by American standards. Like, fat people, and people who wear sandals and cargo shorts. The big difference in Italy is that those sandals are made by Prada and those cargo shorts cost a month's worth of pay at the pizzeria. Enough bigotry, I'll try and stay theme-based.

The cool part about going to Rome was that my stay coincidentally coincided with Europride. As the latter part of the name should suggest to anyone living in this millennium, this is a gay pride festival. The biggest in Europe, in fact. Jack and I had no idea it was happening on our last night there until our landlord asked us about our plans for the night. Being the spontaneous youngsters we are, we said "Uh, not sure." He told us about the festival: "It's for normal people too!" When he told us Lady Gaga was going to be performing in the Circus Maximus (where they used to hold chariot races) we could not possibly say no.

We went out for true Italian food that night and happened to cross paths with the flamboyantly epic parade that cut through the city. We caught it at the halfway point and the series of love-filled semi trucks to half an hour to finally pass us. There were trucks for lesbians, for transexuals, and for those who wanted the world to finally accept their S&M lifestyles. I've heard Italy was into plastic surgery, and true to their reputation I saw dozens of men with perfectly natural-looking breast implants. Jack pointed out one of the self-identified males and explained how fucking hot she was. "Dude, that's a dude." That's the spirit!

SHAKE DEM TITTIES!

After the parade passed us Jack and I went exploring to find an Italian restaurant that had better food than Olive Garden. We failed, and were charged 30 Euro for our stupidity at choosing the first place that had someone standing on the street, desperately corralling any tourists foolish enough to respond to their greetings.   The restaurant's card machine was supposedly broken, so I was forced to leave on a long search for an ATM  that according to the hostess was "down that's street." The entire time I fantasized about leaving Jack on his own to either foot the bill or escape with his wallet intact. The stupid moral part of me forced me to return. And I paid for the meal of peppered spaghetti and regurgitated sturgeon like I was supposed to.

The crowd at the Circus Maximus was enormous, as expected. I forced Jack to rush there because I knew the crowd would be even bigger than a Gaga concert that actually charged 60 dollars for admission. We managed to squirm our way through the dense crowd of belligerent Italians until we were maybe 200 ft. from the stage. I would have complained, but from the back row even the jumbotron would have looked like nothing more than a blinking piece of confetti.

GAGawD Worshipers

 Of course it wouldn't be a political event if there weren't speeches. We had to wait through a gauntlet of rants I couldn't understand a word of before Lady Gaga finally took the stage and put in her two cents. While it was in English, Gaga's speech was the most long-winded of them all. Many people heckled her throughout the speech. She knew what we wanted, and it wasn't to hear her rant about gays being awesome and her being 25% Italian.

But they surely wanted to here that her dress was custom made by Donatella Versace herself. Conventional designer clothes like pants and bags are hard to appreciate, but when it comes to dresses, top-tier designers create works of art. The dress looked like the subject of an MC Escher painting and captivated me for the entire show. That's not saying a whole lot considering she only sang three songs after her speech.

Gaga's a great singer, so great in fact that she can draw a crowd big enough to fill the Circus Maximus. It was clear that 90 percent of the audience came not to hear poorly-dressed lesbians shrieking about gay-rights because the field was nearly empty within 10 minutes of Gaga's show ending. I would have joined the exodus, but the following act was a troop of Spartan-bodied men dancing to Lady Gaga singles. The choreography was good enough, but the my attention was held at the surreal fitness-level of the dancers, which I had not though possible outside the airbrushed pages of GQ.

After the concert we partied.

Red Solidarity

This Sunday was the first of May first. While that not be explicitly interesting to the reader, he might be interested to know that Denmark and Europe at large celebrate socialism in all its glory on this date. The day is called The First of May funnily enough. It's like Earth day except with the Labor Party playing the role of Earth, and instead of people giving speeches attempting to get people to turn off the lights and taker shorter showers, people give speeches telling people to complain to their government about a lack of affordable housing and other stuff like that (I don't know Danish; I just know "arbejder" means"house").

Despite the obvious political overtones, the vast majority of those in attendance were young Danes just looking for an excuse to get drunk. There were many tents filled with people who were handing out a wide variety of propaganda. One of my favorite was a Danish organization that supported Kim Jong Il's regime in North Korea. I wanted to find out what their rationale was; perhaps it would revolve around a Western super-power conspiracy theory, since Europeans seem skeptical about many points in history I take for granted (I'm referring to the rumors of 9/11 being an inside job or that the moon landing was a video shot in Kennedy's living room). Because they couldn't speak English and there were not English translations of the literature they were handing out, I was left to develop my own theories about Kim Jong Il's true merit. Maybe he wasn't such a bad guy after all. Maybe North Korea is actually heaven, and the reason why they need aid is to... I'll be honest, I couldn't come up with anything. But I did support them by purchasing a pack of cigarettes that managed to escape the border patrol and end up in Denmark.

Jack's Chinese, so it was only appropriate that he
posed with the NK contraband

In addition to people pushing pamphlets and pissing in bushes, there were many tents that had performers. The whole park (Fælledparken) had a music festival vibe, although in between every performance there were long-winded speeches given by people I assumed were running for some sort of office. The main stage was dominated for the majority of the day by a raspy-voiced woman in a vest who yelled horsely into the microphone to produce a screeching guttural sound that resembled feedback.


Jack, the Asian posted above, knew a girl from school who was performing in one of the tents. She played sitar in Emma Acs' back-up band. I was surprised by the professionalism of the group, and actually didn't want to leave after the first song. It helped too that the girl sitarist was a beautiful Persian adaptation of Kate Hudson's character in Almost Famous. I took a pretty shitty video of their cover of Joy Division's Transmission, but the majority of the concert was original material.

 

They sound as good as they look. Seriously, the sitarist makes the band.

It was a sunny day when I arrived at the park, but after a couple hours the sky turned gray and the wind began biting the exposed skin of my legs. I always pick the worst days to wear shorts. Jack and I took the train back and I risked not buying a pass. It started raining on the way back and a Metro controller stepped on the train a couple miles away from our stop. I saved myself an $150 fine by escaping the train, but had to bike through wind and water to arrive shivering at my apartment.