Story Frame 21 – Dust to Dust

From Panino to Pietrasanta

To help make ends meet during those first years of singledom, I sometimes drove an hour each way to a beautiful little Italian ‘white tablecloth’ restaurant out in Virginia owned by friends, Lou and Lydia Patierno. We’d met when our kids were in preschool together.

I think they guessed I was struggling on my own and made excuses to help out by hiring me as a hostess on the weekends when they were busiest. Back in the 1990s, the $65-$75/night I earned each Saturday night paid for that week’s groceries. One year, I even worked on New Year’s Eve. Lydia seemed to feel badly about asking me, but I didn’t have a date and needed the cash more than I needed to spend it out partying. And it turned out to be a fun and festive evening at the restaurant in the warm company of good friends and wonderful food.

I will never forget their many kindnesses to me. Each evening, I arrived early enough to damp cloth the menus, wiping off the dust from their popular homemade breadsticks while Lou prepared a special meal for me before the customers started coming in. It was always the best meal I’d eat all week.

One Sunday, when the restaurant was closed, Lou and Lydia held a private party for their French partner, René, who was returning to France to take care of his aging father, and they included me in the celebration. Lou’s brother, Robert, a fine arts artist and founder of the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, was also there. His art hung on the walls at the restaurant. I’d been admiring it for a long time and finally decided to buy one of his less expensive paintings – a nude in hushed turquoise tones with a dark skull hovering in the background. I had to sell a piece of my furniture to pay for it, but it moved me each time I looked at it on my living room wall, reminding me as it did of my sister living with the specter of death hovering just over her shoulder.

And now working on American Byzantine was giving me the opportunity to watch an enormous piece of art go from sketch to sculpture. George Carr and his assistants had been working in a large warehouse in Pennsylvania he’d rented to accommodate the large bas relief and I was anxious to see it. Martin and I, along with Stephen on sound and Richard on camera, drove up for a day to get some footage of the process.

As luck would have it, our shoot happened to fall on National Take Your Daughters to Work Day.

“Want to come with us?” I’d asked Zoë the night before, expecting her to jump at the opportunity to skip school for a roadtrip.

“No, thanks,” she said dismissively, not bothering to look up from the book she was reading.

“But it’s National Take Your Daughters to Work Day!” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“Mama, with you every day is Take Your Daughter to Work Day!”

I had to laugh. It was true. When you’re a single parent, there are so many times when you have to figure out a way to do multiple things simultaneously, which sometimes means working with the kids in tow. And so, we left without her.

Zoë changed her tune about the next shoot, however, but that was one I couldn’t afford to take her on.

We were following the full-scale plaster model – to Italy. Specifically, to a marble-carving studio in Pietrasanta where it would be translated into stone by a team of traditional Italian marble carvers.

Dust to dust. This film was developing its own vortex and sweeping me up into it. One night, I was wiping the dust of breadsticks from menus and not long after, I would be more than four thousand miles away looking at marble dust in Italy and learning how the Italians turn it into Tums.

Coming up next … Head Over Heels in Italy