Cigarette Story

The following is a two minute audio clip from an interview I did with my grandpa (aka nonno, aka Biagio). I've included the transcript (copied verbatim) so that you can better understand him through his accent.


Nonno's Cigarette Story (AUDIO CLIP)



"You can’t buy pack cigarette, no way in the world. Was too expensive. And you no have money because you no make enough money to cover everything, and ugh (coughs) I was a teenager, goin’ to school an’ I make uh my own cigarette with uh paper school, you know you cut it in chewed off some potato you know the…how do they say…the leaves that dried in the sun, you chew em out good, you smash good and you roll. When it was a holiday, you know like New Year, Christmas we chip it in, you know few cents each boy, was bunch a teenager and we bought pack cigarette. But you can’t smoke, we put it away, smoke once in a while one cigarette we smoke about ten guys. Get one pop each, ya know? Make a turn. It was a funny, it was a funny. We never saw a stake cigarette like here, you can’t buy the way they cost. But we get along because we don’t know better, we don’t know better. We don’t know there was cartoon cigarette. When I came here I start working and buy cigarette, i got a cigarette in my car cigarette in the garage cigarette in the pocket wherever you go there was cigarette yeah, i was a big shot. yeah. uh but like i said before, we made it we made it."



*IMPORTANT NOTES FOR THE MULTIMEDIA EXHIBIT

Elements for the show. sights, sounds, smells: 

I was listening to these interviews again and I kept hearing this sound. It was a sound that I've heard I'm used to ignoring because I've heard it all my life: the clanging of porcelain espresso cups. Throughout the interview my grandfather is slurping espresso, stirring it with a little metal spoon, and rattling the little cup on it's little saucer. I've been thinking about maybe incorporating the sound of an espresso machine, or at the very least espresso cups into the multimedia exhibit. It may also be nice to have the smell of espresso wafting throughout the room.  Perhaps I will bring in some espresso and porcelain cups for class on monday. :)


POSSIBLE TITLES? :

The following are two phrases that are repeated by my grandfather over and over in our interview sessions. They have been echoing in my head ever since so I I thought I'd share them with you all:

"That's what it was."
"It's been like this." (followed by: "...it probably gonna go like this."

In this broken English my grandfather is trying to say, that life has gone this way in the past, this is the way it was back then. And in the second phrase, life has been like this for decades. But because of his limited abilities with language they come out in these two choppy phrases that I think, even in their oddity still capture some of the essential essence of the sentiment with a random elegance. At the very least these are two interesting axioms but forth by an old man.