Category Archives: bio

Another Rite of Passage Completed

Italian Middle School Exams

The Italian education system is big on exams. Ross did pass her middle school exam, with a grade of Buono (on a scale of Ottimo, Distinto, Buono, Sufficiente, Insufficiente – outstanding, distinguished, good, sufficient, insufficient). This was better than I’d expected, since most of her grades this year have been merely sufficiente. But she worked the system brilliantly.

Her results on the written tests were a mix. The test of written Italian was simply to write an essay, which Ross does well (even better when she takes a little time to concentrate on her spelling and punctuation). Math she only did half of, and probably that half badly; English was a joke for her, and French seems to have gone well. On average, a passing grade, I guess (we were not given the individual test grades).

Then she had about ten days to study for the oral. I was in a panic; I’d been told that the panel of teachers could ask almost anything that had been covered throughout the year. But her math tutor advised her to go and watch some of her friends’ orals. This she did, and also talked with some other kids. One told her he had prepared mini-essays on the specific topics he wanted to talk about, and the teachers seemed pleased to be given these before he started. Then he gave his prepared presentations, and managed to steer the exam to the topics where he felt best prepared.

While watching her friends, Ross observed that her beloved music teacher was slumped in his chair, feeling left out. After all the major subjects had been covered, he would forlornly ask a question or two, and be met with blank looks. “Did you even bring your music notebook?” he would ask in desperation. No one had.

So Ross sat down and wrote an essay about jazz, specifically on swing music during WWII (inspired by Jazz : A Film By Ken Burns – the accompanying booklet came in very handy). She chose her topics in other subjects to match: WWII for history, the atomic bomb for science. She also took in advice from her (very supportive) art teacher: “Talk about your artwork, and for god’s sake, don’t burst into tears! I expect better from you.” Not that Ross was likely to do so, but several of her classmates had sobbed through their orals.

When Ross’ exam began, she handed out her essays, then the teachers asked her what she wanted to talk about first. “I’d like to talk about jazz,” she said. The French teacher elbowed the music teacher: “Hey! It’s your subject!” He sat up and got very enthusiastic, and they had a long conversation about jazz. Then Ross spoke about the other subjects, except the atomic bomb – many kids had already talked about this, and the math/science teacher was bored of hearing it. So she picked a topic that Ross hadn’t studied and didn’t remember much about. Oh, well.

Ross had put her art pieces into a presentation binder, and spoke about each one, explaining what famous painting it was inspired by (or copied from), with some biography of the original artist. She came home quite confident that she had passed; we all heaved a sigh of relief.

Part of the exam ritual is to go and see the grades as soon as they are posted outside the school, for all to see. Ross and I were pleasantly surprised by the buono, which put her at or above the average for the class. Her Italian teacher came by on her way to a meeting, and we thanked her for the year’s work. I said I was pleased with the exam result. “There was some negotiation over that,” she replied, with a significant lift of the eyebrow. Ah, yes, the math teacher, who didn’t like Ross’ attitude or lack of math ability (“How is it possible when your father’s a math professor…?” Poor Ross has been hearing that all her life.)

I just smiled; I had a pretty good idea who had negotiated vigorously on Ross’ behalf. Half an hour later, I was standing in line to pick up Ross’ exit papers, and the music teacher ran by, late for the staff meeting. He saw me, and gave me a huge grin.


As I also mentioned earlier, cheating is widespread in Italian schools. I was writing that piece while Ross was doing her English written exam, which for her was simple and soon over.

She came home and said casually: “I’ve found a way to earn some money: I wrote Martino’s English test for him.” We were, of course, aghast. He hadn’t actually paid her, had simply asked her to do it – and, much to my disgust, she did.

After half an hour of hearing from two very angry parents a host of reasons as to why this wasn’t a good thing, she probably won’t be doing it again… or at least next time she won’t tell us!

In response to that original article, an Italian friend wrote me that, during an exam in electronics technical school, his whole class cheated together, with the assistance of their teacher. This was because one of the exam questions was on something so obscure and bizarre that you would never do it in real life, and it required the cooperation of the whole group searching through the library to find the answer. I guess the question succeeded brilliantly as a test of teamwork.

next: high school

Everyday Movies

I’m astonished at how regular a part of my life movies have become these days. When I was a kid in Bangkok, few English-language movies were shown, still fewer that were suitable for kids. I dimly remember Camelot (very long – I fell asleep before the depressing ending), being scared at Diamonds are Forever, and The Wizard of Oz – which I didn’t see very well because I had forgotten my glasses, not yet being used to carrying them with me.

At the end of every film in Thailand, they played the national anthem while showing patriotic pictures of the king and the flag. Everyone had to stand to attention until it was over, so there would be a stampede during the final credits to get out of the theatre before the anthem began. The authorities eventually caught on, and enforced respect by playing the anthem right before the film started.

In Pittsburgh we had TV, which was a novelty to me. We had only gotten a TV in Bangkok in 1969 to see the moon landing, which everyone stayed up all night to watch. Thai TV didn’t show much at all in those days, let alone in English, so after the moon show was over, the TV went out to the servants’ quarters. I would sometimes go there to watch Bewitched; you could get the English soundtrack by tuning to a special station on the radio.

Back in the States, I liked some shows, especially Saturday morning cartoons, but I never got used to the American attitude towards television. In many households it was (and still is) constantly on, which I found distracting; I couldn’t just ignore it or half-watch it, blaring away in a corner, as everyone else seemed to do. I would go to a friend’s house to visit and play, and be disappointed because she’d want to watch TV; this was not my idea of a social activity.

When I was in 7th grade, the public television station PBS began showingMonty Python’s Flying Circus late on Tuesday nights, followed by the International Animation Festival; it was a great treat for me to be allowed to stay up til 11 to watch both.

American TV also gave me a chance to catch up on classic movies I had missed. “The Wizard of Oz” was shown once a year, around Thanksgiving, and it was a very big deal, advertised for weeks beforehand. One year Dunkin Donuts came out with their “Dunkin Munchkins” (the holes instead of the donuts), and used this annual TV event to launch them. Then there were the classic Christmas movies like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman sung by Burl Ives. (I never liked those; I preferred real animation.)

In 1976, we moved to Bangladesh, and were again cut off from English-language media. (We entertained ourselves by making music – no bad thing, but a topic for another article.) One of the American government services showed a film once a week; they were mostly films I didn’t particularly want to see, but I’d go out of sheer boredom, with the result that I wouldn’t sleep for weeks after seeing things like Carrie.

Up at Woodstock, we didn’t even have that. The school would show a film once a semester or so. It never occurred to me to go see a Hindi movie in town, partly because my Hindi wasn’t that good. Once or twice we saw English films at Picture Palace. I was mystified by the popularity of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, a pair of apparently English actors who made a series of farcical westerns, very popular in India; how was it that I’d never heard of them in the States? I learned many years later that they’re both Italian, and the films were shot entirely in Italy; both were still making silly movies when I moved to Italy in 1991.

During my Woodstock years, my dad moved back to Thailand, where mass entertainment had come a long way. There was more TV, though I only watched The Muppet Show, again listening to the English soundtrack on the radio. Movie theatres were now equipped with glassed-in sections where you could sit if you wanted to hear the English soundtrack, and all the big Hollywood movies reached Bangkok not long after their US release. There were also “movie restaurants,” where you could eat a meal while watching a movie.

During home leave in the States in the summer of 1979, I gorged on movies, forcing my dad to accompany me to The Muppet Movie (he fell asleep) andDracula, but refusing to see Alien (“In space, no one can hear you scream” – but in the theatre they would have!). And I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Showfor the first – but far from last – time.

My university years were film heaven. I took a film course at UC Santa Cruz, analyzing such classics as The Rules Of The Game, Rome: Open City, andPather Panchali. Santa Cruz being the funky alternative town that it is, there were several art house theatres. My boyfriend and I got carded going to see the X-rated gay film Taxi zum Klo. Even when she’d established that we were old enough, the ticket seller asked: “Are you sure you want to see this?” We did, and found it mostly funny, and very touching at the end.

When I transferred to the University of Texas, I was delighted to discover that the Student Union cinema showed about 15 different movies a week, plus there were other film societies around campus, and of course lots of theatres in town for the first-run stuff, and friends to go see them all with. (Poor John, I was still a wimp – I dumped popcorn all over him after swearing I wasn’t scared inSomething Wicked This Way Comes.)

When I visited my dad in Indonesia in 1984, I feared movie withdrawal. My attempt to see a movie in Semarang, during an earlier visit, had been a disaster – it was A Fistful of Dollars, not bad in itself, but smoking was allowed in Indonesian cinemas, and everyone smokes clove cigarettes. After 3 or 4 hours of Sergio Leone, you come out smelling like a baked ham.

In Jakarta, however, we had the video man. Videocassette players were well established by this time, but not video rental stores. So this guy would come around once a week with huge cases of videos; you could pick as many as you wanted, and pay a small fee to keep them for the week. All pirated, of course, which made for great variety. We even saw an Australian television mini-series about an ugly rich woman whose husband dumps her into an crocodile-infested swamp to be eaten. Unbeknownst to him, she survives. After extensive cosmetic surgery and a long recovery, she is unrecognizably gorgeous and bent on revenge… why on earth does this thing stick in my mind?

My daughter’s generation is growing up with no concept of media scarcity. We have a VCR and DVD player, and a large collection of films in both formats. Blockbuster Video arrived in Italy years ago, and our local one in Milan had a small section of English-language tapes. Now, with DVD, there are multiple soundtracks, so language is no longer a problem. My only gripe with Blockbuster is that they don’t have classic or unusual films (I remember fondly a video rental shop near a friend’s house in San Francisco that I could have spent a lifetime exploring). So I end up buying a lot of the older films that I want to see. (I’ve discovered that the HMV shop at Heathrow Terminal 1 almost always has something interesting on sale, cheap.)

Ross’ generation also doesn’t realize how privileged they are to be able to watch a film over and over again, something you used to be able to do only in film courses. If you have a small child and a VCR, you’re familiar with the phenomenon: a kid will watch the same movie constantly for weeks or months, in the same way she might demand a beloved story every night for weeks or months. Ross has long outgrown Disney movies; she now watches Stanley Kubrick films, over and over. My 14-year-old film auteur.

That Vampire Thing: Story of an Obsession

I had a thing about vampires long before Buffy the Vampire Slayer came along. It began in the summer of 1978, when I traveled to the US with my folks on home leave. The hit Broadway production of “Dracula” had been made into a movie, with Frank Langella reprising his title role. I was 15 years old, and for the first time in my life got a crush on a movie star. (Of course it’s entirely accidental that the man who later became my husband looked like him!) I saw the movie two or three times, and read the movie tie-in edition of Bram Stoker’s original book. By the time I returned to school, I was hooked on all things vampiric.

When I got to college, I began collecting vampire books. I’ve kept only the best ones over the years, including a complete set of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain series. Saint-Germain is a very sympathetic vampire, who has lived for about four thousand years. This gives Yarbro plenty of scope for the deep historical research she clearly loves; the books are richly detailed snapshots of certain times and places in history, in which the “bloodsucking fiend” is usually the most humane creature around, striving to save those he loves from the cruelty of other humans. I should also mention that Yarbro is a VERY good writer.

Laurell K. Hamilton’s series Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is also worth a look. I read the first few thanks to a friend from St. Louis, who had them because the writer is from St. Louis and sets her books there. The writing was rough at first, but Ms. Hamilton has improved at her craft over the course of 12 books or so (and a new, different series just started), and the premise is fun: vampires, werewolves, etc., really exist, and have been granted civil rights by the US government – so long as they behave themselves. When they don’t (which is often), bounty hunters like Anita Blake step in to take them out. (2006 – Recent books in the series have become a strange sort of horror-porn – fun, but not exactly high literature… )

I was a big Anne Rice fan, at least for the first three Louis/Lestat books, and was thrilled when “Interview with the Vampire” was made into a movie. Which had its flaws; couldn’t they have gotten anyone but Brad Pitt to play Louis? But Tom Cruise was excellent as Lestat, and one of my favorite film scenes of all time is the final one, with Lestat speeding across the Golden Gate Bridge in a convertible (at night, of course) with “Sympathy for the Devil” blaring out of the radio. I actually never saw the movie til I got it on video. Rossella was young then, and I figured it wasn’t suitable for her, so I watched it when she wasn’t around. But she saw it on the shelf and got curious, and when she was 9 or 10 I let her watch it. Then she got into vampires. I dunno, maybe it’s genetic?

Soon after that I heard about “Buffy.” I only knew vaguely that it was about some sort of female teenage superhero, but I spotted a magazine about the show in the UK, and bought it for Ross. We were both skeptical: we like vampires; would we like a show that seemed, by its title, to be all about killing them? Still, I was curious enough to take up my friend Adrian on his offer to send us the videotapes (then commercially available in the UK, but not the US). As I mentioned, we were hooked within the first five minutes. I’ll spoil things for you a bit by explaining how.

Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, has said that he came up with the vampire slayer concept because he was tired of the many horror movies where a ditzy blonde wanders into a dark alley, is followed by some sort of fiend, and winds up messily dead (okay, I’m paraphrasing). He thought it would be fun to turn the tables, and have the blonde beat up the monster.

I didn’t know that when I saw the first episode. It begins with a small blonde, dressed in a pleated skirt like a Catholic school girl, and a slightly older-looking guy, breaking a window to get into a school at night. Science classroom skeletons and scary music create atmosphere. The girl is nervous. “We’re just gonna get in trouble,” she says. Big macho guy reassures her: Everything’s cool, no one will see them. “I heard a noise,” she says tremulously, looking away, down the dark hall. Scarier music. (And I’m practically hiding under the sofa – I am easily freaked out by horror movies.) The guy leers evilly behind her. “No one here,” he says. The music swells. “Okay,” says the girl. She whips around to face him, and is suddenly transformed, with fangs and yellow eyes. She sinks her teeth into the guy’s neck.

I knew right then, before Buffy herself was anywhere in the picture, that this was a great show. Oh, and it’s still okay to like the vampires. There are some good ones in “Buffy,” and they don’t get slayed. Slain. Whatever.

Martin Baynes as Renfield and Mike Nicklin as Dracula, Jakarta 1984

^ Martin Baynes as Renfield and Mike Nicklin as Dracula, Jakarta 1984

Nov 18, 2003

When I wrote the above, I clean forgot to mention one of the biggest vampire events in my life. In 1984, a brief visit to my dad in Indonesia turned into an extended visit when I couldn’t get a visa to study in India as originally planned. Although Jakarta is a big, bustling city, there wasn’t all that much for foreigners to do there in those days, so the expatriate community had to work to keep itself entertained. One means was amateur theatre, in which my dad and his friend Donna were enthusiastic participants.

While I was stuck in Jakarta, my friend Sue came for an extended visit from the US, and we were both happy to get involved in the Jakarta Players production of “Dracula.” The group was using the script by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, originally produced in the 1930s. This play had been revived in the 1970s, starring Frank Langella on Broadway, in the production which was then adapted into a film in 1979.

Indonesia had never signed the International Copyright Convention, so the Jakarta Players… took some liberties with the script, adding entr’acte vignettes more or less taken from the Frank Langella movie, along with a generally more sexy and romantic atmosphere. We even retitled it “Dracula, a Love Story.”

As you can see in the photo above, we stole the set design from Edward Gorey’s sets for the Broadway show, done in his characteristic macabre cartoon style. We also used music from John Williams’ score for the film for mood-enhancing background, and choreographed a dance for the big seduction scene.

Dracula poster, Jakarta Players, 1984

Sue and I helped out during many weeks of rehearsal, taking the opportunity to flirt with two cast members we liked (one was the British local head of an airline, the other a Scottish engineer working for an oil company). Sue was eventually appointed stage manager, and I was put in charge of sound effects, which I pulled off pretty well except for that one time when the wolves howling got swapped with the screaming loonies … Our friend Julie played the maid, which so thoroughly infected her with the theater bug that she now works at the Kennedy Center in DC.

A team built the 40-foot-high flats for the set, which were supposed to be painted black, white, and grey, just like the Gorey drawings. When we raised the flats on the Jakarta International School stage, however, they were brown and grey. The woman put in charge of set painting had gone to a shop in Jakarta which happened to be out of black paint; the shopkeeper there told her there was none to be had anywhere, here, have some nice brown instead. And she believed him. We all looked at the brown, and it looked pretty stupid. So Sue and I volunteered to repaint the entire set in the week we had left before opening night.

This wasn’t too difficult for the first six feet going up. Then we started standing on furniture and ladders. Then we had to pile things on other things, building up increasingly tall and rickety “scaffolding” so we could paint higher and higher up the set. When we got near the top, there was nothing else we could safely pile up. So the light bars were lowered down to the stage, we sat on them, and were raised 40 feet up so we could paint the top of the set. This was a supreme effort for me, because I am terribly afraid of heights. But we finally got it all done, and it looked good.

The show came together well, and was warmly received by the expatriate and Indonesian audiences. Best of all, it kept us all very happily busy for months. Jakarta Players went on to do still more ambitious productions, including “Cabaret,” “Pajama Game,” and “Greater Tuna.”

Vampire Stuff at Amazon

Saint-German books: Amazon US | UK

Dracula: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by John Williams (excellent, romantic score)

Anita Blake books: US | UK

Anne Rice’s Louis/Lestat books: US | UK

Interview with the Vampire on DVD: US | UK

Rubber Ducky

A little while ago I was wandering around Amazon.com, looking for a mother’s day present for my mom. Bath stuff seemed like a good idea, so I went to the “Health & Beauty” store, which turns out to be Drugstore.com. How could I resist taking a peek at “Sexual Well-Being” (yes, it’s very prominent on the page)? Vibrators and sex toys? Wow. What is America, ahem, coming to?

Then I just about fell out of my chair laughing. I Rub My Duckie Waterproof Personal Massager – They may be older, but rubber ducky’s still the one.”

This is one of the cleverest pieces of marketing I’ve seen. Any American woman around my age is familiar with Sesame Street (original home of The Muppets). Before I ever lived in the US and saw the show, I had a Sesame Street record (bought at the PX in Bangkok), which included Bert’s song: “Rubber ducky, you’re the one, you make bathtime so much fun. Rubber ducky, I’m awfully fond of you…”

Frequent Flier: The Strange Perks of Business Class

Over the years I’ve lived in Italy, I’ve ended up travelling to the US far more than I ever expected, mostly for work. The first such trip occurred soon after Incat Systems moved to California, in late 1993. I was the technical writer, so I had to meet with the engineers from time to time, and later with other sorts of colleagues. I got into the habit of flying to California four times a year, sometimes staying for extended periods and visiting other parts of the US as well.

My first day at the US office, Whitney, the new American vice-president of the company, asked me if I’d flown business class. The idea had occurred to me, but I didn’t think the big boss would want to pay for it, and had been afraid to ask. “Next time, fly business,” said Whitney. “I’ll take care of Fabrizio.” I was nervous about this, but no one complained when I booked a business class ticket for my next trip.

When I saw Whitney, he immediately asked: “Did you fly business class?”

“Yes.”

He leaned in and whispered conspiratorially: “Good. Never look back!”

And I didn’t. I continued to fly business class on long-haul flights (Europe to San Francisco is at least ten hours), which meant that I was more likely to arrive in working order than if I had spent the trip with my long legs cramped into a cattle-car seat. I racked up the frequent-flier miles, initially on KLM, which we had habitually used for family trips. One of the perks of KLM business class is a gift: a little Delft china house full of gin. I have a shelf of them (still full of gin), but we never figured out how you’d get the big palace (half a litre’s worth) that we saw on display at Schipol airport.

Sometime during all those years of flying, I responded to a piece in theInternational Herald Tribune about business class service on various airlines. I was trying to be funny, something about how on Alitalia there’s no personal video, only a single big screen, so they had to edit James Bond for the family audience – which made the film quite incomprehensible. This letter was printed in the paper. I hadn’t mentioned why I travelled, merely that I worked for Adaptec. So they quoted me as “an executive for Adaptec, a California company.” I guess they figured that anyone who flew that much had to be an exec.

Just as I was beginning the (later aborted) move to California in 2000, British Airways put fully-reclining seats into business class. I have never been able to sleep on my back, and in a partially-reclining seat it’s very difficult to lie on your side. On BA, I was able to really sleep on a plane for the first time in my life – and I needed that sleep. So I became a BA frequent flier, and made so many trips that I shot to Platinum level within six months.

The California thing went sour, and I made my final flight home to Milan in late March, 2001. I was so physically and emotionally drained that, driving my rental car to San Francisco airport, I was seriously afraid that I would have an accident. But I made it, dragged my 200 pounds of luggage to the BA check-in, and collapsed in the lounge. I was grateful to crawl onto the plane, where I wouldn’t be responsible for any person or task for at least 12 hours.

The purser came to greet me: “Ms. Straughan, we see that you’re a very frequent flier with us, and we want to make sure that you’re happy. If there’s anything at all we can do…” I was impressed with this display of customer relationship management, and didn’t tell him that this flight was probably my last, through no fault of BA’s.

I haven’t flown much since quitting Roxio, and never business class. I’ve used up the mileage I’d accumulated on various airlines (not only on myself and my family), but haven’t acquired much new mileage. BA has steadily demoted me; now I’m at plain old Blue level, so I no longer get preferential check-in (I’ll miss that) or lounge access.


Received by email:

“Hi Deirdre,

Just stumbled upon your site whilst reading about travel to India (LP thorn tree) and ended up spending half an hour browsing the various sections! It was very interesting to read your travel experiences but also the Op/Ed pages. You must put in quite some time, my compliments. The reason for sending you a message is this:

“…we never figured out how you’d get the big palace (half a liter’s worth) that we saw on display at Schipol airport.”

A friend of my parents used to be a board member of KLM (now retired). He told me once that this special bottle/house, depicting the royal palace on Amsterdam’s Dam Square, used to be presented to KLM business class passengers flying on their birthday! Of course I don’t know if this is still the case but I thought you might like the answer to your mystery.

Keep up your web site, best regards,

[name deleted for privacy]”