One of our duties at the Institute is to monitor the media – how the Italian heritage is perceived and broadcast across the nation.
The Learning Channel (TLC) has a popular series called My 600-lb Life, about morbidly obese Americans who decide to avert early death by shedding pounds. In the few episodes I’ve seen over the years, none has dealt with ethnic tropes. So I was surprised to read the billing for the premier episode of Season 11: “As an Italian American, Geno (sic) was raised with lots of love, family and food; now, he’s still living with his mom and eating himself to death…”
Before I watched it, I prepared myself for scenes of a large, loud Italian family gathering with the 600-lb Geno scarfing down mega-plates of lasagna and a tray of cannoli while his portly mamma plies him with garlic knots and tiramisù. To my relief, the episode wasn’t really about Italian Americans or Italian culture – that was a cheap promotional gimmick. Geno usually eats alone in his bedroom – lots of scrambled eggs, breakfast sausage and French toast. His mother’s name is Rhonda and not a pot of sauce in sight, nor much of a Bacchanalian family. In short, I was had…as was the Italian image.
Another television series, this time on PBS, is called Finding Your Roots. I’ve written about this series before, now in its 9th season. Celebrities of all races are given costly genealogies sometimes back to Medieval times. Blacks often find their slave roots in the American South; and some Whites learn they had slave-drivers in the family. The host, Dr. Louis Gates who is half Black/half Irish, elicits reactions from his subjects as they find heroes or skeletons in their closets. Talented singer/songwriter Cyndi Lauper (Girls Just Want to Have Fun, True Colors, Time after Time) had her family tree presented last week.
Cyndi Lauper’s maternal side (Gallo) came from Sicily. The presentation went downhill from there. Lauper has it in for Sicilian men, Italian culture, and the Church. It seems her Queens, NY-born mother’s dream was to pursue a career in singing but her father refused to allow her to accept a scholarship to a Catholic high school in Manhattan – ‘only whores go to Manhattan’. The suppression of her mother’s spirit weighs heavily on Lauper. She became a rebel, expelled from high school, and later embraced the feminist movement and LGBTQ rights, while rejecting her Italian heritage as “stifling”.
When Dr. Gates introduced the story of her great-grandfather Giacomo in Sicily, she impulsively called him a “tyrant” because he represented that “stifling” Italian culture that denied women their dreams. As Gates held up a photo of Giacomo, a tall, stately, 4th generation coachman in Palermo catering to the tourist trade, Lauper dismissed him as a “servant” who lacked ambition for driving a horse-drawn carriage like his forebears. Quite a brutal assessment!
Having seen so many other celebrities discover that their ancestors were slave owners, criminals, deserters, and many in Ireland, Scotland and England dying in poverty, Lauper’s reactions and comments were shocking. Other guests would have been proud having ancestors who managed to prosper in any honest trade and not die in a poor house. Lauper even bragged to Gates that she went to Italy some years ago and lectured relatives in Sicily on how the Church, government, and family oppressed women throughout their history. Lauper does not take prisoners!
Gates threw her a curve when he revealed that it was a female Gallo who blazed the trail to America. In 1909, her great-aunt Gaetana led the family to these shores establishing herself and bringing her parents over in 1915. Another “servant”, no doubt.
The atmosphere turned suddenly positive when Lauper discovered her German-Swiss roots. Her 1600s ancestor rebelled against feudal conditions of his day. Here Lauper found her true DNA – a man recorded in Swiss history. But he wasn’t too rebellious. He wasn’t hanged like the other instigators, just paid a modest fine. And we don’t know how he treated his wife and daughters, or how hard life was for Germanic women. For Lauper, who Gates revealed is 53% Germanic and only 45% Italic, the majority wins – no questions asked.
Ironically, what Lauper missed in her DNA was the talent that opened the door to her own fame and fortune. It was her Italian American mother who no doubt passed on the genes and motivation to sing. But why appreciate the Italian side? -JLM
That interview was disturbing on so many levels. If you want to see “self-loathing” in action, look the show up on PBS.org and feel free to flagellate.
Lauper’s only comment about her grandmother was that “she would sit in a corner, she was almost bald and half-blind, and wring her hands, saying, ‘figlio mio, figlio, mio.’ I’d probably feel like that if I was bald and blind!” It stuck me as callous.
She also prefaced her line about “only whores go to Manhattan” with “my grandfather probably said.” In other words, she is “speaking” for him. So dishonest.
As pointed out, her vocal talents were no doubt passed on to her by her mother. Zero recognition of that on Lauper’s part, or that patriarchy has no ethnicity.
As we get older things we denied come back to haunt us, I wish this for Lauper, that she come to see the truth.
If not, I hope she keeps her ignorant, uniformed mouth shut!
It will end when enough Italian Americans use their numbers and economic power and say enough. It has gone on way too long. Look to the African American population and see how they have stopped this type on negative thing!
I wonder how Ariana Grande, Madonna, Stefani, Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, Minelli, Halsey (Frangipane), and many other Italian-American women were able to succeed in the music business despite coming from such patriarchal backward culture.
Is it maybe the case that music is a foundation of Italian Culture?
By the way, the first Conservatory in the US was founded by Italian-born Filippo Traetta (American Conservatorio of Boston, 1800). His dad was the famous composer Tommaso Traetta from Puglia.