Pepe & Poppy: tarantella vs zorba

By Joe Novella

It's 1983 in the multicultural city of Melbourne and the worlds of Italy and Greece are about to collide. Giuseppe Allevoni, from good Italian stock, and Kaliopi Papadopoulos, a good Greek girl, fall in love and set in motion a culture clash that, while at times comical, threatens to tear the young lovers apart.

Set against the backdrop 80's fashion in a world of discos, home-grown tomatoes and pissing-angel fountains, Pepe & Poppy is a charming and heartwarming story about love and acceptance and the universal similarities between us all.

"My Big Fat Greek Wedding meets The Wedding Singer"

"Loved it! I laughed and cried." Bridgewater USA

"had me laughing out loud" Rochester USA

"Pepe and Poppy is a true celebration of cultural diversity" Altair Magazine

"A valuable lesson can be learned from reading this book, that other than good fine and wine, a close and loving family - no matter the size - is really the staff of life. Viva Joe Novella!" Australian Provincial Newspapers

"A funny Australian yarn of an Italian wedding in true Greek style" John Morrow's Pick of the Week

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joe Novella
• Release date: Aug 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780987184405

Joe Novella

Hello there, thanks for checking out my page. Let's see, a biography... Well, I'm just your ordinary happy-go-lucky type of guy from downunder who loves the beach, his beautiful wife Fiona and playing soccer. I love travel and people, actually I just about love everything. Some day I plan to grow up but I'm in no rush and in the meantime I'm going to do my best to make people smile. Apart from that, I'm the author of 'Pepe and Poppy' and 'The Ultimate Self-Help Guide for Men' (which will be appearing on the upcoming motion picture 'American Reuinion'- part 4 of the American Pie franchise...all very exciting!)

Book preview

Pepe and Poppy

by Joe Novella

Copyright 2011 Joe Novella

Smashwords Edition

First published in Australia 2001 as ‘Pepe and Poppy’

Ebook edition published 2011

Cover painting by Justine Novella

Photograph of Joe by Linda Giuliano

The right of Joe Novella to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, oganisations, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organisations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Joe Novella

Joe has a bachelor’s degree in computer science, has trekked in Nepal, cycled in India, sailed in the Caribbean and worked in London, but according to him, none of these experiences come close to having a plate of his mother’s lasagna.

Pepe and Poppy is Joe’s first book.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Harry and Poppy Gianasmidis, Ano and Betty Iosifidis and Louie Gonis for helping me understand the beautiful world of the Greeks. Special thanks to my sister-in-law Justine Novella for her encouragement and suggested improvements. Last but not least, to my family, all of you, thanks for being who you are.

Introduction

My Greek mates tell me that Greek weddings are more complex than having a bill passed through parliament. A couple of days before the wedding there are all kinds of rituals that need to take place. Most of them are fertility rituals, like the blessing of the marital bed.

The night before the wedding, the groom’s extended family gathers at the house of the groom’s parents and celebrates. At the same time the extended family of the bride gathers at the bride’s parent’s place with the same intention. On the day of the wedding the two families join at the house of the bride’s parents and, accompanied by musicians, the wedding procession walks to the church.

The real complexity begins at the church. There is the preparation of the gthisco, which is a box that contains the wedding rings, bonbonieri, rice and the stefana, which are like angel’s halos made of lace. The ceremony contains more crossing and lapping than a Grand-Prix.

The cumparo, or best man, must cross the wedding rings three times, then he must cross the stefana over the heads of the bridal couple three times and then the bridal couple must circle the altar three times. With all this circle work, it’s got me stuffed as to how nobody gets confused.

Italian weddings in comparison are quite simple - it’s the wedding receptions that Italians are famous for, with productions that Cecil B. DeMille would be proud of.

Like the Greeks, the respective families gather together the night before the wedding to catch up with all the overseas and interstate relatives.

On the day of the wedding the only ritual is getting dressed, but that seems to take about four hours because most of the dressing has to be captured on film.

The church ceremony is relatively simple: the wedding vows, the exchange of rings, an Ave Maria here and a love sonnet read by one of the bridesmaids there, a photo session in a botanical garden and then onto the reception to eat, drink and generally make arses of themselves.

So what happens when an Italian marries a Greek? Nowadays it’s not uncommon but that wasn’t always the case. In the early eighties, my brother Giuseppe, a good Italian boy from Avondale Heights, fell in love with a Greek girl and our whole world rocked on its axis.

Chapter 1 – The Family

It’s taken me a few years to get the whole story straight of exactly what happened back when my brother met Poppy but before I recount it let me let you in on one very important fact and that is Italians think themselves the best lovers, fighters and most cultured people on the face of the earth. But what really makes them Italian is their love of family, closely followed by the home, the garden, their passion for celebration and their desire to outdo all of their relatives.

My family was typical of Italian families in Australia in the eighties. My mother, Teresa, was the financial and social director of the family. Mum was pretty tough, she raised four kids pretty much on her own while Dad worked to provide an income.

Mum loved to cook and she had this uncanny ability to know when there were spiders in the house. They’d sing to her, or so she said, and then she’d clobber them with a broom. She talked to our cat Maude too, but that stopped when Maude ate one of her budgies.

Mum’s job was to look after the house and nurture the family unit. She was the one who held the household together. My father, Agazio, who everyone called Jim (how you got Jim from Agazio I’ll never know), was just as tough as Mum. You had to be pretty tough to come to a new country as a twelve-year-old boy and build a life.

Building was what Dad loved to do and people came from far and wide to marvel at his creations. Some of them were useful, like the twelve-foot high pizza oven that he built in our backyard. Others, while maybe not useful, were genuine masterpieces, like the Statue-of-David scarecrow, complete with pyjama pants that covered his penis and a rotating head that had water spraying from the eyes and mouth, scaring the crows and watering the beans at the same time.

As well as my Mum and Dad there were my two sisters: Grace, who was twenty-eight at the time and married to Domenic the cabinet maker, and Nancy who was twenty-one and working for a bank.

Grace grew up in the era of KISS and The Bay City Rollers. When we were kids she liked nothing better than painting Ace Frehley or Paul Stanley masks on my brother and I so we could scare the shit out of our classmates during show and tell. Nancy, on the other hand, was all business and was always coming up with ideas to make money like using the computer to help Dad’s fruit and vegetable business sell more fruit and veggies. As if. We all thought she was nuts.

Giuseppe, or Pepe as my brother was known to us, was twenty-five and worked for a computer company. As for me, I was twenty-two with no idea as to what I wanted to do with my life.

That was my immediate family, but with Italians – and for that matter, Greeks – family meant much more than just brothers and sisters. Italians and Greeks have uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents as far as the eye can see. Back then family also meant paisanni - anyone who grew up in the same town as your parents - and those who baptised your kids, sponsored your confirmation and generally anyone who’d helped the family prosper.

Family is everything to Italians and I was to discover the same is true for the Greeks, and keeping the family together is number one.

My family did everything together and that included the cousins, uncles and aunts and I guess this was the reason our family prospered. As we grew up, all us kids were expected to help out at my uncle Sam’s clothing factory, or cement paving with Uncle Joe or in Dad’s fruit and veggie stall at the Footscray market.

But work was not the only thing we did together. We went on day-trips together. My cousins and I went clubbing together. We gathered together in someone’s garage to make homemade tomato sauce as if it were a religious occasion. Every week someone was getting married, engaged, baptized or having his or her first communion so more often than not we all celebrated together. And boy how we celebrated! Lots of homemade wine and lots and lots of food.

Back in those days, when my uncles got pissed they liked to sing and dance to the tarantella. When they finished singing and dancing they’d put on the old Calabrese folk songs and sing along to songs that were mainly about donkeys, marriage and the pecurarru malandrino which translates as the naughty sheepherder. My personal favourite translates as,

I had a donkey

And it was a thing of beauty

It would eeh aaww

From morning till the night time

The eeh aawwing that it made

Was like the sound of an Opera tenor

Beautiful donkey of my heart

How can I love you now that you’re dead and gone?

To me this was an absurd song about an eeh aawwing donkey and I would laugh my head off but to my parents’ generation it meant a lot more and without fail it would make my uncle Diego burst into tears.

When we were little most of the families’ celebrations took place in my parents’ house since they were the first out of all the aunts and uncles to build their dream home. Our house was a typical Italian house: double-storey, double-brick and cement everywhere. Forty square metres of brick, cement and marble. A big backyard with plenty of space for the all important shed and veggie garden, statues in the front, a rockery filled with white pebbles and a lemon tree.

Inside there had to be leather lounges, tiled bathrooms and crystallera or crystal, along with the regulation paintings of the Last Supper and of a dead rabbit surrounded by assorted fruit and vegetables and a smoking rifle.

Somewhere in the house there had to be a walk-in wardrobe and if you didn’t have an intercom, a bar that lit up and a billiard table then you just hadn’t made it.

Most of my uncles and aunts had similar houses. Most of them lived in the same street as us. My favourite auntie was Auntie Rosa. Why? Because she had the good biscuits, not the Teddybears or Arrowroots but the good chocolate stuff like Choc Royals.

There were even some of Dad’s cousins that lived in our street. Next door to us lived Dad’s cousins Rossario and Rossaria. Rossario’s four favourite words were fuckiny, governmento and bullashitta mate. Rossario was convinced the government was after him. Rossario’s wife Rossaria was a walking doctor. She always started a conversation by asking you what’s wrong? and even if you said you were Ok she had ten different types of tablets you could take to make you feel better.

One time when Pepe was young he fell off his bike and got a huge lump on his head. Mum called Dr Rossaria. She was over quick as a flash and forced me to piss on a rag, which I later saw hanging from Pepe’s head. The swelling went down but I’ve never had the heart to tell him what the magic potion was.

On the other side lived my uncle Joe who loved to sit on a chair in his garden playing his piano accordion, singing old Calabrese folk songs in nothing but his cement-laying boots and big-white-bog-catcher underwear. My aunt Maria told me he was trying to scare the beans into growing. I couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not.

My uncle Joe had the biggest zucchini, the sweetest peas and the juiciest tomatoes in the neighborhood so no one dared to question his methods, although many of my aunts attributed Uncle Joe’s success to the work of the Devil and secretly crossed themselves when walking into Uncle Joe’s backyard.

For a long time Uncle Joe’s yard was the undisputed jewel of the family until Uncle Diego produced a wine vintage that took centre stage at all our celebrations. A good wine trumps good vegetables, but Dad trumped them all. Dad knew he couldn’t beat Uncle Joe’s vegetables or Uncle Diego’s wine, but he could win on the garden statue front.

Rather than have the usual pissing-angel fountain that all Italians seem to have, Dad built a pissing-angel fountain guard of honor: five angels mounted on Roman-style pillars on either side of the path leading to our front door.

When visitors arrived and pressed the intercom button on our front gate, Dad would flick a switch from inside the house that electronically released the gate latch. The gate opening would trigger the angels, which would start pissing water from either side of the garden path, forming arcs of water that the visitors were supposed to walk under. Unfortunately, whether it was the angle of the angels’ penises or a drop in water pressure due to suspect plumbing work done by our relatives, most visitors copped an earful of water. Nevertheless, people came from everywhere to see Dad’s pissing-angel fountains.

Back then, in our little corner of the world, life had a familiar and comforting pattern to it. You were born, baptised, had communion, confirmation, played soccer, went to discos, met a good Italian girl from a good Italian family who’d look after you, got engaged, married and had kids.

On October twelfth nineteen eighty-two, after a family dinner, Pepe announced he had fallen in love. None of us could have anticipated what was to happen next.

Chapter 2 – The Family Dinner

For Italians, eating was much more than simply satisfying a physical need. It was