Stay Away from South Florida…

You need to stay away from south Florida.  Sure…this time of the year our weather is the envy of the nation, and while everything else everywhere else is brown, we’re as green as green can be.  The food is good, the ocean is clean and just around the corner, and we’re diverse and vibrant.  Now I’m not urging you to stay away for my own good.  The people who do that live in Seattle.  Seattle is a beautiful city, also with great food and a lot to do.  But it seems that everyone wants to be the last person to move there.  As soon as someone becomes a Seattle resident, they start telling their friends back home how awful it is.  They don’t believe a word that they say to others.  They tell these lies to keep others from moving to Seattle and clogging up the place.  I understand that, because that’s exactly the problem in south Florida.  When south Florida began to become popular just after World War Two, lots of people started to move here, and they all told their friends how nice it was, so their friends moved here too, and they told THEIR friends, and so…well…you get the idea.  I’m telling you to stay away for YOUR own good, not just mine.  Because of…GRIDLOCK.  Everywhere.  Nearly all of the time.

One reason for this gridlock requires you to understand a bit about our geography.  Populated south Florida is a perilously thin, crowded, uninterrupted strip from the south end of Miami, up through Hollywood (yup…we’ve got a Hollywood too), Fort Lauderdale, and ending north of Palm Beach.  Just a few miles inland, the land is swamp…the famed “River of Grass” that includes the Everglades, the Big Cypress, and other uninhabitable territory.  So there are millions of us pressed tightly against the coast, and it works about as well as it sounds like it ought to.

Our expressways (HAH !!!) are at a standstill at anytime that anyone would want to go anyplace.  If your idea of a good time is to go for a spin at 3:30 am on a rainy Sunday morning…no problem.  But if you want to go have a meal, or go shopping, or sight see when there are actually sights to be seen, you’re in for some disappointment.  Now I get it at “rush hour,” but I’m talking about most other reasonable times of the day.  Your car can depreciate half of its value just trying to get across town.  We have a lot of water here, and only a few causeways and bridges to cross all of that water.  If there should be an accident (as there was last evening on the causeway that I must cross to get to my home) or if one of the many out-of-date, badly designed drawbridges should fail (as they often do) then you can be sitting in your car for hours, going absolutely nowhere.

And of course, this situation is compounded by the fact that all of the main roads are under construction all of the time.  I know this to be true by the thousands of traffic barricades I see everywhere, being carefully watched by men leaning on shovels or sitting idly behind the controls of non-moving heavy equipment.

So how about a detour?  Well…good luck with that.  In most parts of the country, when the main roads are backed up, you can drive around the blockages by cutting through residential neighborhoods.  Not in south Florida.  In south Florida, many residential neighborhoods have had any street that could be used as a shortcut blocked off at the request of the residents.  Of course these same residents complain bitterly when they cannot cut through someone else’s neighborhood.  I know this because I am one of those “someone elses.”

The fact of the matter is this…people spend a lot of money to come here for a visit, and this is a bad idea.  It’s a bad idea because you will spend most of your time sitting in traffic, which you could do at home for a lot less money.  And speaking of money, one of the problems with this whole situation is that renting a car in south Florida is cheap, unlike many other parts of the country.  I’m just back from a week in Maine, where I spent six hundred dollars to rent a small vehicle for just a week.  Sticker Shock is “shockier” when you don’t even own the sticker.  It’s a lot cheaper here, so the problem of the locals clogging the highways, which is bad enough, is compounded by scads of visitors in cheap rental cars trying in vain to get somewhere…anywhere…before they have to replace the batteries in their pacemakers.  It is the unusual trip to the grocery store that sees you arriving at home before that gallon of milk reaches its expiration date.

So take my advice.  Go out to your car, place a small potted palm on the passenger seat, turn on the heater, and spend several hours sitting in one place in your driveway.  It will be the same as a visit to south Florida, only a lot cheaper.  You may thank me later.  I’m here to help.  It’s how I roll, although here in south Florida, I roll neither far nor fast.

Solid Gold…

Although I really like Fettuccine Alfredo, I almost never order it in restaurants. I’m getting older, and my heart is not in the best condition. The last thing I need is more butter and cheese in my diet. But whenever I eat Italian food, in a restaurant or even at home, I think of Fettuccine Alfredo. Here’s why.

I spent a good amount of my childhood traveling with my parents. My father was an importer, and he had to travel a lot. He and my mother could not bear to be apart, so she went with him, and they took the kid, me, along with them as often as they could. Even though my father had no business in Italy, one year we stopped over in Rome for a full week. We toured the Vatican, the Colosseum, and just about every other historical sight we could find. We took day trips out into the countryside near the city. We tossed coins in the Trevi Fountain. And we ate…oh my, did we eat. Then as now, Italian food in Italy was terrific. Very few ingredients, carefully and lovingly prepared and beautifully presented. Nothing frozen or canned or otherwise tinkered with. And on our first night in Rome, my parents wanted to eat at a restaurant named Alfredo’s.

Movie Star Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart” was married to Douglas Fairbanks, “The King of Hollywood.” They loved to travel, and they loved to entertain. While in Rome during the twenties, they visited Alfredo’s and loved the restaurant’s eponymous signature dish. They returned for it night after night, and asked for the recipe so they could have the dish when they returned home to southern California. Just before leaving, they presented the restaurant’s founder and owner, Alfredo di Lelio, with a gift…an ornate solid eighteen-karat gold fork and spoon, along with a picture of the two of them dining at his restaurant. Since Pickford and Fairbanks were the most popular and scrutinized celebrities of their day, Alfredo’s restaurant became very well known in America, even among those who would never travel much beyond their hometowns. The gold fork and spoon became the symbol of the restaurant, displayed with the photograph of Pickford and Fairbanks in an elaborate showcase just inside the front door.

Many years later Alfredo sold the restaurant in order to retire, but after some time the new owners, who had renamed the place L’Originale Alfredo in order to compete with copycats, convinced him to come out of retirement to act as the greeter/maitre de. He was a large man, with a nose the size and shape of a ripe Roma tomato, but noble in appearance nonetheless, in his fine fitting, beautifully tailored dark suits and subdued ties. His formal appearance belied his demeanor. He was both friendly and outgoing, with a big smile, a booming voice, and a ready, hearty laugh…and he seemed to love kids. He was the Italian version of my father, a situation that was not lost on either of them. They really hit it off. Each night of our stay, the two of them would chat while we were eating, as my mother looked on…smiling. He introduced my father to Campari and soda, which became my father’s drink of choice (on the rare occasions that he drank) for the remainder of his short life. Alfredo brought us special products to taste, including tiny wild strawberries the size and shape of olive pits. They were delicious. We ate there every night for a week. It felt like home.

Our last night in Rome arrived. It would be more than a month until we returned home to Florida. Our next stop would be Bangkok, and then on to Tokyo for several weeks of business meetings. We were going to miss both Alfredo’s food, and Alfredo himself. He greeted us as usual, and seemed as sad as we were upon finding out that this would be our last meal with him. My father had his Campari and soda, and then the steaming bowls of Fettuccine Alfredo arrived. Alfredo approached the table, and placed next to my bowl a meticulously rolled white linen napkin. When I unrolled it, I was surprised to see, tucked carefully inside…the famous solid gold fork and spoon. Alfredo watched me carefully, and burst out laughing when I finally realized what he had done. And so I proudly ate my last meal at Alfredo’s with that legendary flatware, while everyone at the nearby tables watched jealously. I’ll never forget that meal, or the kindness of that lovely man.

When we had finished, the dishes were cleared, and we had our dessert. As we said our goodbyes, Alfredo handed me one of the restaurant’s wineglasses, which had enameled on it the name of the restaurant and a picture of the solid gold fork and spoon. I carefully wrapped it in paper, and for the rest of our travels, I guarded it like my life depended on it. Somehow this fragile piece of stemware made it all the way home in perfect condition. I still have it. That trip was more than fifty years ago.

I have many memories of wonderful travels with my parents, and numerous mementos to help trigger those memories, because after all is said and done, that’s the only thing that souvenirs are good for. When I catch sight of that glass, the first thing I think about is my parents and our trips together, and then I think of Alfredo. Although he’s long gone, virtually every Italian restaurant in America serves his namesake dish. Most of them screw it up by adding things that don’t belong (shrimp, chicken, garlic, onions), or by using substandard ingredients, or by overcooking the noodles, or finding some other way to complicate or otherwise ruin this simple delight of egg noodles, butter (added twice…that’s the secret) and Parmesan cheese taken from the very heart of the “wheel”, which must come only from the caves of Parma.

That wineglass sits proudly on a shelf in my study today, like a totem…part of the detritus of a well-lived but ultimately ordinary life. The image of the gold fork and spoon enameled on its surface is as bright and clear as it was on the day the glass was given to me. And even today, perhaps somewhere, if only in my mind, my father and Alfredo toast each other with Campari and soda, as my mother looks on…smiling.

The Jokes Write Themselves…

It seems that most major cities have descriptive nicknames. Seattle is “The Emerald City”, Chicago is “The Windy City”, New York is “The Big Apple”, and so on. I live in Miami Beach, but all of us in this area think of Miami, just across the bridge, as our hometown. Miami has tried over the years to find a nickname. The Chamber of Commerce folks for decades now seem to favor “The Magic City,” but that really hasn’t caught on. Every time the Hotel and Visitor’s Bureau folks make another push for this, the residents fight back with names like “The Tragic City” or worse…MUCH worse. I like to call it “The City Where Good Taste Goes to Die” but for some odd reason that hasn’t caught on either. Since it’s a perfectly adequate description of the area, I can only surmise that it hasn’t caught on because it’s too long. So I have another, shorter name to pitch for this place…one that is unmatched in its straight-to-the-point accuracy. How about “The Land of Irony” ?

Irony seems as common in south Florida as wild giant pythons choking to death on alligators, or as common as goats being sacrificed in religious rituals, or as common as politicians’ children counterfeiting U.S. currency, or as common as the thud made by huge comatose iguanas as they fall from trees during cold spells, or as common as…well…you get the idea. This is one weird place, and I don’t know whether living here for so long has been an adventure or an embarrassment. But perhaps nothing characterizes this area more than a recent incident containing enough irony to supply our nation’s strategic irony reserves for years to come. Of course the best irony is never obvious at first. It takes a bit of mental analysis and some time during which the events marinate. Only then does the real and tasty irony emerge.

Miami International Airport routinely ranks as one of the worst in the nation. The rankings are too generous. Speaking of irony…when you fly out of Miami International you often have to walk farther from the parking lot to your flight than you would have had to walk from your home to the destination to which you are flying. The terminal looks like the waiting room in a nineteenth century Indian railway station, only the passengers are less well dressed. The only things missing are the farm animals in the open wooden crates. Rather than the crates, here in Miami livestock generally is carried on planes hidden in counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags. This can include, but is in no way limited to, chickens, hogs, and small cattle. Miami International Airport is also ground zero for the smuggling of rare, endangered and just plain strange wildlife. Lizards, tortoises, birds, and all manner of creatures are routinely discovered in the undergarments of travelers, and usually not just one creature at a time, but dozens, even hundreds. If you see movement in the pants of the passenger seated next to you, it’s not a compliment…it’s probably just a few rare and colorful songbirds worth thousands in the pet trade (the chirping sound emanating from beneath the zipper is the giveaway). Ah…life in “America’s Tropics.” But I digress…

At Miami International Airport, like other airports around the nation, they take security VERY seriously. So seriously in fact that the airport was one of the first to receive the newest model of Full Body Image Scanners. These devices are quite controversial because they do just what the name suggests…they present the security screeners with a full body image to show if the passenger is carrying anything that might be a threat to safety on-board the plane. These became necessary when, last Christmas Day, a young man aboard an incoming flight attempted to ignite an explosive secreted in a highly personal location. So now, it’s no longer just the luggage or the pocket contents…the Transportation Security Administration needs to make sure that you don’t have C-4 packed into your underpants, or packed into what you have packed into your underpants. So…enter the Full Body Image Scanner. Literally. But this being America, everyone is absolutely convinced that everyone else is anxious to see them naked. And once again, on the subject of irony…the people most convinced that others would want to see them naked are, trust me here, the people that you would LEAST want to see naked. Last time I was at this airport, I did an unscientific research project on this subject. I sat in a chair and looked around to see if I saw anyone that I would want to see naked. I saw very few, and, having seen myself naked on numerous unfortunate occasions, I can assure you that I am unconcerned about my own personal modesty being violated for the “entertainment” of others. But apparently some people are still obsessed with this, so the Full Body Image Scanners have been configured so that they obscure the face of the person being scanned. All in all, this is a REALLY complicated and expensive ($130,000-$170,000 per unit) piece of machinery. And they are apparently not all that easy to operate.

When the scanners were delivered to Miami International Airport, the TSA began training its personnel to use them. They did not use passengers or volunteers in the training, but they used other TSA agents to substitute for the passengers. One of the agents they selected to substitute for passengers was 44-year-old Rolando Negrin. Well, dear readers, if you weren’t concerned about these scanners or about the professionalism of the TSA screeners before, you will be now. Apparently, according to those operating the scanner, who would be in a position to know, Mr. Negrin is, how shall I put this…somewhat lacking in the marital relations equipment department…and the Full Body Image Scanner revealed this unfortunate condition to Mr. Negrin’s fellow TSA “professionals.” And so the taunts, and the nicknames, and the other miscellaneous incidences of ridicule began, and reportedly grew more and more intense. And remember…these are the folks that we are trusting with our lives.

So Mr. Negrin, he of the recently-revealed endowment or the lack thereof, selected the person who he believed to be his primary tormentor, fellow TSA screener Hugo Osorno, 34. He waited for Osorno in the employee parking lot, and when Osorno arrived Negrin proceeded to beat the crap out of him…and…here comes the irony…Negin’s weapon of choice?…an expandable police baton…one that triples in length when you use it. In Miami, The Land of Irony, the jokes truly write themselves.