Articles by: Annie lanzillotto a.k.a. Rachele coraggio

  • Op-Eds

    Sitting Under Cinderella at Mayoral Debate


    Her glass slipper jumping off her foot.  The peasants marveling at the fancy people coming down the curved staircase, one had a hood on like Savonarola.  That's how I dress.  Like Savonoarola gawking at Cenerentola.   Here they were.  Mike Bloomberg.  Bill Thompson, and in the audience John Liu, Freddy Ferrer, Ed Koch.  I shook Koch's hand and said, "God Bless You."  After so many protests  with Act-Up outside his village apartment, why did God Bless You come out of my mouth holding his hand?  Is that what peasants say?  I know what happened.  In the film "Shortbus" he is depicted as an old fag, who gets a kiss from a young man who says, "You look familiar" to which he replies, "I used to be Mayor once." 

    A kiss from a prince in an old fairy tale.


    I sat under Cinderella staring at Secret Service men eyeballing the audience.   Reverend Billy jumped up and shouted loud, "Mike!  What are you doing here!"  He was tossed out a side door in seconds.  Bloomberg didn't flinch.  "This is New York."


    What did I learn?  Mike Bloomberg said he never got a manicure.  The audience wants John Liu for mayor, and loves to shout his last name like he's a third baseman.


    Oh yeah.  Thompson said Obama has done enough for gay rights.  Bloomberg said an emphatic "No." 


    I agree that to overturn term limits without voter's say is abominable.  Are they our Padrones?  The City Council members and il Sindaco?  I know that housing is not even an option any more for many of us artists with health issues.  I know the sliver of the pie has been reduced to crumbs.  I know that I love crumbs.  I know I can't vote in this election cause I lost my housing.  I know sitting beneath Cinderella stayed with me the whole debate.  Next to Bloomberg was Jack in the Beanstalk.  I know Cinderella didn't run back up the stairs cause she lost her shoe.  She cut her losses.  We all cut our losses.  We step into royalty for the night shake hands with our liege, but my hood is pulled tight so I don't get Colpo Di Freddo staring at the rich, and I eat my crumbs and make a helluva dish out of them too, and I run out of Manhattan on a late bus back to Yonkers where my mother has stuffed peppers waiting warm for me filled with a risotto with raisins and I'm getting hungry just thinking about last nights dinner

    And for one night in my life, I wasn't standing in the cold with the protesters on 5th Avenue.  For one night I was inside the room in a seat next to a financier in a pin striped suit whose grandfather owned a bodega and bought their building in Harlem.  For one night I shook the old mayor's hand to see what the hand felt like, and it was softer than I imagined all those cold nights shouting outside his house, shouting at buildings, shouting for my dying fags, for one night I said God Bless You.  The pumpkin was becoming my carriage.  I had to get on the bus.  I couldn't afford another meal in the city, and the stuffed peppers in Yonkers where waiting, and my mother, for news of my day at the Prince's Ball
  • Art & Culture

    Streetcries Radio Broadcast


    Jean Feraca's radio show, "Here On Earth: Radio Without Borders," Wisconsin Public Radio. May 21st interview of Annie Lanzillotto about her performance work which examines the squashing of Streetcries by NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's 1936 injunction: "Rule 23: No Shouting or Hawking by Vendors nor Abusive and Lewd Language." Lanzillotto collects streetcries from around the world, old and new recordings. Special guest, singer/songwriter DuPree, takes a South Carolina flower cry, and vocally transforms it, giving an ethnomusicology perspective on race and peddling.

     
  • Life & People

    Triangle Shirtwaist Factory: and The Work of Remembering

    I was given four names.  Rosie Bassino, of 57 West Houston Street, died at 31.  Rosie Grosso of 174 Thompson Street, died at 16.  Millie Prato of 93 Macdougal, died at 21.  Irene Grameatassio of 6 Bedford St, died at 24.  I took my street chalk and got to work.  My mom packed me a fried eggpant sandwich, saying, "it doesn't have gravy," as she made her offering as I readied to walk out the door. 

    Macdougal Street.  Nobody bothered me as they stepped past what I was doing outside Millie's old house.  There was blood spattered on the concrete and I chalked over and around the blood embellished sidewalk:  Millie Prato 1897-1911, and the word "pace."  The bloodstains reminded me of my mother's upstairs neighbor, Erica Dituri, who died on Saint Patrick's day, just a few days ago.  I was the one who found her dead on her living room floor.  Now her carpet holds the blood from her head that hit the coffee table after the heart attack, and a few feet down the carpet is ashes; Erica died smoking.  Her heavy body put out the lit cigarette.  "You people have no idea how lucky you are," said the cop, "this whole building could have went up in flames." 

    I saw that chalking these women's names, a day after Good Friday, was a journey for me to remember them, and to remember my own dead, and to consider my own fragility in this economy and this city, the city as Italo Calvino wrote that "would eat your children," in his writings about Saint George slaying the dragon, and how the city becomes the dragon.  and in a way my children are slain as is my housing, and breathing.  The firey breath of the city in which we walk our walk, "del cammin di nostra vita..."  -- "yes I said yes I said yes"

    Thompson Street.  Little Rosie's house is still there, the fire escapes intact and beautifully wrought.  I wished she had had them at the factory.  I shouted "Rosie!!" three times up at the building, and chalked her name outside the door.  I handed chalk to two passers-by who stopped to inquire.  One, a Mexican student, and the other a Bronx Jew who had bought her apartment "at the right time," she said, bemoaning the neighborhood and what NYU was doing to it, "disgusting architecture," she said in her tight black feathery fur, chalking, "NYU HONOR THESE GIRLS !!" noting the absence of an official commemoration for the fire, and mumbling about the rumour that NYU is encroaching on Washington Square Park next, reducing the public space.   The Mexican student drew a star and cried, speaking to me in a combination of Spanish and Italian; we communicated something to the effect of -- somewhere someone in your family, in my family, --is fragile.

    I talked of the Bronx with the Bronx born lady, of the fact I lost my Brooklyn apartment of 15 years a year ago, and was wondering if New York is for New Yorkers anymore.  I put a flyer under one of four fist sized rocks I carried in my pocket and moved on.  The flyer talked about the conditions under which the women perished, March 25th, 1911, with fire escapes falling, and elevator shaft free falls, and jumping to death, and being locked in the building, on fire.

    I searched and searched amongst NYU buildings for the next address and never found it.  What I did find was a fancy espresso shop at what would have been 57 West Houston, of the next Rosie, Rosie Bassino.  Wow, the people looked well-heeled.  I chalked her name and yelled ROSIE !!!  up at the monolith building, placed my rock and moved on.

    Irene Grameatassio's house had a beautiful brown three story countenance, still in the sun on Bedford Street.  I opened the gate, placed the rock, chalked on the slate flatstone outside the door, and shouted "Grameatassio!!!"  three times up at the building as if I were "calling for her," as we used to say in the Bronx, "I'll call for you."  I thought the passers-by didn't hear shouting like this too often, and in a black leather bomber jacket and peddlder cap I felt like I was from a different century, from these factory worker womens' times, and I was sweating with the act of remembering, and getting down on my knees, and carrying rocks and marking the pavement. 

    Tomorrow is Easter, La Pasqua.  I feel ready to eat, to feel being alive, and joined in the fragile lives particularly of women.  Precious blood, images of angels catching precious blood from Christ's wounds in the golden cups surround me in churches, churches open for a week, and filled with more homeless folks stepping out of the wind on Good Friday.  Ah, that's another blog.
  • Op-Eds

    Hillary's Tears & Caucasian Lacrimation


    “Hillary’s Tears” draws 267,000 hits on Google, and the front page of the January 10th New York Times next to an article on the war in Congo; leading me to revisit lessons learned on race and tears, and question what lacrimoniousnous composed her white woman’s eye and what any of it means.  We wasted enough time obsessed on her husband’s body fluids, we as a nation don’t have time for hers.  Here’s my particular journey.


    When I got my first Rockefeller grant, my father laughed and said two things to me from the boiler room of the mental home where he lived, one-- “What kind of artist are you a con-artist?” and two -- “when are you getting money from the Kennedys?”  His sarcasm struck the chord within me that is a tug-of-war between work and bullshit.   My father was an iceman a boiler repairman and a marine.  He knew how to save your life, make sure you had heat in the winter, shoulder three hundred pounds of coal and ice up and down staircases, take a bullet.  Although my father stopped talking to me for a few years after I began to write memoir, he secretly wrote memoir in the isolated last years of his life and I less secretly retained his working class antennae for the bullshit I am prone to. 


    The grant was to fund a performance project in The Arthur Avenue Retail Market in the Bronx.  I made live opera based on the oral history of pushcart peddling, amidst a combination of images that triggered me: soppressata, provolone, La Madonna and Mussolini, Yankee action photos, pin-ups, cuts of meat and goat heads, the Nina Pinta and Santa Maria and Pacino and Brando’s headshots, and being surrounded with chandeliers of papparule which gave me an overarching feeling of safety in the surety that one day I would get burned, in one way or another.


    More Rockefeller dollars came my way in terms of The Next Generation Leadership Fellowship, which drew fellows from diverse sectors of society and funded our conversations and projects regarding solutions to problems of democracy.  Good projects came out of the subgroups: a website for day laborers services, a Mandela Garden project where you can write and bury notes about your life…  and perhaps most importantly gorgeous arguments that never got reconciled.  Five years in, I found myself participating in a nine person group process called Cooperative Inquiry, which was the third methodology after Tavistock, and How to Have Difficult Conversations that the fellowship tried to put some ropes and cushions around radically different individual beliefs and values.  I was the only Italian out of the hundred twenty-five members.  My communication style and assertion that my campesino grandfathers weren’t slave owners got me stereotyped by two Chicano activists as being of the same mindset of Antonin Scalia and a genocidal Columbus.


    The make-up of the Cooperative Inquiry group were: three white, two black, two Asian, two Native American.  When we faced each other in a circle, our discussions inevitably focused on race privilege.  We traveled to the cities of the group members:  Anchorage, L.A., New York. Chicago, and through all our travels the defining moment in the life of the group was the one moment, or “rupture” as we came to call it, when two of the white women cried in a go-around called “Hierarchies of Influence,” a reportage to the group how you felt within the power dynamics the group expressed.  Did you feel your voice was influential in the group’s decisions and process?  Were you heard?  Seen?  This is when the other two white women besides myself began crying, expressing that they didn’t feel as highly influential in this mixed group as they were used to within their own sectors where they were leaders of organizations.   That’s my take on it, reductively speaking.  (For a full report you can search the website of the NYU Wagner School of Leadership, Research Center on Leadership in Action: “Got Privilege” group) 

    Now, when the white women cried, I observed the people of color sit back reticently in their chairs and as they later reported feel somewhere between cautious optimism and here we go again disappointment about the incident of white people taking the space to cry and how that would change the course for the life of the group.  We processed that moment for months.  The people of color reported that as a rule they never cried in mixed race groups, and in the rare instance they did, the group didn’t process it after that.  My role as an Italian was between being white, yet with a “pass” into the group of color.  It was me who voiced, “I’m tired and uncomfortable being in these groups where the white people end up crying.”  So, I was seen as a race traitor to the whites, and a white person who recognized the macro dynamic. 


    After Hillary’s tear or two got national attention, I thought she too was mourning her own position in the “hierarchy of influence” after the Iowa caucus.   What were people of color saying in the media if anything about this moment?   Again I feel uncomfortable with this white woman’s tear, and all the attention her one tear got.  There’s plenty of injustice to cry about.  But that’s not the content of her tears.  I don’t think she’s crying for any of us.  I feel embarrassed being a white woman.  Impotent.  Tears indicate we can do no more than cry.  Wailing is as old as prostitution, as necessary and as cleansing.  I don’t want any part of it.  I’m sure there’s a sfragganizze, some old peasant wisdom, for this, if only I knew it.