Most parents have a ridiculous threat they keep in their pocket to throw out when they want to keep their kids in line.   My mom had one which shut me up pretty quickly, because the thought of being away from my quirky family (insanity and all) made my knees knock together in terror.  Also, how the heck could I ever live without mom’s lasagna?

Her threat?   HELGA MUNSON!

This is the beaut I pictured playing the role of Helga.  Mom’s actual threat was that schoolmistress Helga Munson would come to our house to collect me, and take my sorry little talking-back ass to Camp Marymount reform school!

(ITALIAN LESSON:  Threaten (speak threats) = minacciare a voce)

Of course, Helga and Camp Marymount are fictional, but this trick of mom’s worked like a charm (I think she even had my dad involved in her Marymount scam a couple times).

Word to the wise:  if you have kids, be sure think up a few reusable threats today. This way, you’ll be ready to toss one out to your brats at a moment’s notice!

 HELGA SAYS: “Get back to the home of madness now at www.MadnessMomandMe.com !”

“It’s not a gang, it’s a club”  Gilda Radnor used to say in her SNL skits about New York street gangs.  Oops, I mean clubs.  I’ve heard that phrase  over the years  from my brother Paco (well, he calls his club a Nation).    

Paco claims he doesn’t get into much trouble, but I often see R.I.P. splashed across his myspace page when a King brother or sister falls, usually from a bullet or stabbing courtesy of a rival club, but to keep this on the lighter side, I’ll share this story about Paco, my mom and Andrew Jackson.

A few years ago, Paco stopped by mom’s house, threw five crumpled up twenties on the kitchen counter and asked, “Yo ma, can you to iron up some ’funny money’ for me, and sh!t?” 

(ITALIAN LESSON:  Counterfeit = contraffatto)

So, there mom is ironing out the additional wrinkles in Andrew Jackson’s face, while browning the garlic for one of her perfect vats of tomato sauce.  Yup, just a typical day with the Romano’s – always something different, and mom always had a hard time saying no to her baby Paco.

Mission accomplished. Did mom keep any Jacksons? No. Paco offered up a couple as a thank you, but mom replied with “are you out of your friggin’ mind?”

Crazy indeed, head back home for more insanity www.MadnessMomandMe.com

MADONNA MIA! I could just go on and on, so let me gather up some snippets to share and I’ll be back with more decades of true-life lunacy.

If you have a weak bladder, pop on your trusty Depends and hang on for the ride!

Crazy or not, head back to the HOME PAGE here: www.MadnessMomandme.com

(Italian Lesson: cigar smoker = fumatore di sigari)

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In the summer of ‘58 Mom turned eighteen, and Nan was wondering when her pretty daughter would marry and start a family.  Nan was concerned that her eldest might end up a old, shriveled-up unhappy spinster (back then, you were deemed a spinster if you weren’t hitched by the ripe old age of twenty — and that was even pushing it.  Ridiculous, huh?)

 In May of 1959, my Aunt Lo introduced her unattached Italian friend, Dominic, to my mom. Mom was a head turner, with her perfect hourglass figure, which was just right for wearing those fashionable Jackie Kennedy-esque dresses and those little vogue hats with her red tresses twirling out from under.  Needless to say, he was smitten.  

Second generation Dominic stood about 5’10’ had thick wavy black locks, styled into a little pompadour in the front (very stylish at the time).   Dom, “Sonny” as some of his friends and his sister Rosie called him, had a fresh  anisette aroma about him and always a warm twinkle in his dark brown eyes .

Life in his household revolved around cooking and eating, cooking and eating, and cooking and eating.  Mamma Romano cooked day and night – I don’t know if she ever left the kitchen.  She was always there, donning her spaghetti sauce stained, smelly worn-out apron.  If she wasn’t preparing breakfast, lunch or dinner, she was making anisette cookies, picking fresh figs from their tree or squeezing ripe tomatoes into sauce.  Dad’s parents were straight off the boat from the motherland:  Lucia from Sicily, and Joseph from Naples. 

Dom had a decent job, a stylish car and a bit of that Italian mystique.  Almost thirty with a car and a job, he was quite the eligible bachelor — a total catch.  A young Margaret accepted his request for a date,  and when he arrived at her house looking so chic in his chinos and leather and wool sweater, he blurted out upon meeting my grandparents “I’m going to marry your daughter”.  Wow, a man with confidence!

(Italian Lesson: what’s your name? = come ti chiami?)

Dominic and Margaret were married December of that same year.  My Dad’s mother wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of this half-Italian bride.  She had planned to ship over a Sicilian village girl to marry her youngest little Sonny, not some Americanized redhead.  Much more to tell about this later on.

The best is that Mom tells me she said yes to dad’s proposal of marriage – get this – mainly because he had a good Italian last name, and she just HAD to have an Italian name ending with a vowel.  Good pick, ma — because I really enjoyed my Italian last name all of these years, too!

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"It's just dad and his ding-a-ling, mom!"

On good days (luckily for me, there were plenty of those) Mom and I spent a lot of time shopping “downtown”. Downtown as in Dover, a cool old town known for its variety of diners, pizzerias, record shops and retail stores like J.C. Penney, Woolworth’s, JJ Newberry and Sears (actual stand-alone department stores, as these were the days long before malls took over the shopping scene).   A frequent spot Mom and I would visit was the historical Dover Public Library, a place I always found so intimidating (this old brick building seemed so large to me –  it housed dark wooden staircases, creaky banisters and always had a slightly musty mixture of sour and stale smells.  Plus, those never smiling oh-so-serious women who worked there, who always wanted us kids to be quiet – geesh!) 

Our library had 45 minutes set aside each week for the moms to browse books on the “mystery” floor, and the children would have story and coloring time downstairs in the “kiddie” area.  I remember I couldn’t wait to be grown up, so I could go upstairs and browse all of those alluring adult novels.  So there I was with the other kiddies sketching away — a pretty simple concept, until it came time for me to show my inner Degas I just unleased. 

(Italian Lesson:  Library = biblioteca)

You see, a day or two earlier, I happened to see my Dad in his birthday suit, when I just happened to be strolling by their bedroom while dad was getting dressed for work that morning — oops! I asked my mom what that “thing” was that Dad had kind-of hanging there, and she promptly told me “oh, that’s his ‘ding-a-ling’”.  Aha- that Chuck Berry song! Now I know what Chuck was singing about!

Well, you can imagine what our storytime librarian did when a proud little me handed in my drawing of a naked man with his dangling ding-a-ling.  My mother was immediately found and pulled aside by the staff to see what was going on in our family.  All was explained, and mom told me it may be best to keep my new ding-a-ling findings to myself.

OK, Ding-a-ling talk is now over, hope you enjoyed. Now please go back to the home of Madness:  www.madnessmomandme.com.

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I’ll get straight to the point of the dark side of being a young mom…my young mom.  Looking back (fondly), I now believe mom had undiagnosed issues like today’s classic panic attacks sprinkled with generalized anxiety disorder.  Maybe Mom felt a bit trapped in the reality of her world — maybe she was just a bit nuts.  She may have just craved more attention, and perhaps she relished the drama just for drama’s sake (I definitely think mom loved drama, but it was most likely a combination of all of these gems). 

A bad day for mom would usually mean the oven goes on.  You could always smell when our gas range was on, so I’d wander down to the kitchen and see what mom was cooking up for dad and me.  On my way,  I’d wonder  “will mom be baking my favorite treat today? Maybe chocolate fudgy brownies – or a creamy chocolate Betty Crocker cake? Lemon cupcakes with colorful sprinkles on top? Would I be able to lick the batter off the spoon?”.  Licking the batter – mmmmm, one of the best yet simplest pleasures life has to offer a kid.  Well, unfortunately, this was not about cakes, cupcakes or my delicious chocolately cake batter….damn!

(Italian Lesson: gas stove = cucina a gas)

No, this was all about our gas oven, a prime prop for my mother’s drama.  Mom would turn on the oven, open the door – gas aflame – that “funny” gassy scent filling up our tiny kitchen.  At times she threatened to stick her head in the oven and end it all, leaving me a motherless kid.  Sometimes she said we were ALL doomed, and our trusty little gas oven would take us all out. 

I was just a kid, so I believed her (not knowing that just lighting an oven with a working pilot light wouldn’t kill a freaking moth).  However, for some strange reason I never panicked when the range of death went on.  Yeah, I thought it was peculiar, but perhaps it was the frequency of this nut-job behavior that it became an in home show – a performance put on by a mom for her daughter.  Masterpiece Theatre in my own kitchen.  Bellissimo, Bellissimo!

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My mother’s mom (my Nan, whom I called “Nanny” my entire childhood) Olga just turned ninety one.  Nan is such a sweetheart of a woman – always was.  Women in our family live a pretty long life – not that each and every marble is still in tact, but most of them are still rolling around there in nan’s head.  My great-grandmother (nan’s mom) lived to be one hundred and two — of course she thought it was the fifties and she was a much younger woman but hey, whatever works for you, especially after a millennium of living. 

Nan does have some quirky habits:  making her coffee the night before and leaving it in her thermos for fifteen hours,  defrosting frozen meat in her sweater drawers and forgetting about it until my cousin smells the rot of decaying animal flesh stinking up her cluttered house, and she has a thing about cooking her banquet TV dinners a day or two ahead.  She covers them with Saran wrap and put them in the fridge until ready to microwave again.  Earth to dear Nan:  frozen meals take just three minutes to nuke – but I digress.  My Nan and I share a special birthday bond (I was the “grandgift” from my mom to her mom) as we share the same day of coming into this world.   Recently I heard that nan put a few of those little butter packets in her purse and forgot about them – what a hot mess.

 Lately, Nan keeps forgetting we share the same June birthday (something we must have talked about for over 40 years) but she’ll never forget to mention her bladder suspension surgery (I’m talking a surgery she had from decades back) at least three times in every conversation we have, and how she’ll sneeze and pee her pants (Jesus Christ, getting older certainly has its share of some really sucky sh!t!)    

So, you might be wondering why I have Joe Pesci’s photo here if I’m writing about my grandmother.  No, that is NOT my nan.  A fun family tidbit is that my nan babysat for Joe Pesci (well-known Italian actor in Goodfellas, Casino, My Cousin Vinnie, etc.) and his sister when we they were little.  She tells me that his mom Mary was a cousin of hers, which would make him, Joe Pesci, my third cousin!  Pretty cool, huh? I never wrote down all the names years ago or wrote a note to him (Nan wanted me to, but I felt cheesy about it) and unfortunately, she does not quite recall all of the details these days.  Hey Joe:  if you remember Olga Gabora Robosky changing your diapers, please drop me a line, cuz!

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Ahhh yes, as a kid I remember mom’s Empirin breaking apart in her “special” water glass, the glass which was always perched next to the kitchen sink.  Mom’s glass (she called it her pill glass) usually had a chalky Empirin or two fizzing away…actually more like just sitting in the water disintegrating. These magical and mysterious pills of hers were a must-have diet staple – mom’s little a.m., midday and p.m. treat.  She ended up moving on to other goodies — Darvon was her favorite drug of choice, and of course taking a few of my dad’s pain, heart or sleeping pills from time to time.  Mother’s little helper they say, right? At least mom drew the line when someone offered her horse tranquilizers or some kind of veterinary meds.  Way to go, mom!

Now fetch my meds and be sure to run along to the “Madness ” home page:  www.madnessmomandme.com 

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