"Oy, how'd that go?" Stacey asks.

"The morning was kind of cool because all the girls were in these little slippers and they just hopped around to the sound of lutes. Like, light and lithe and kind of magical. But then, after lunch, those five hundred little girls all donned their tap shoes at the same time. They were banging away so hard that the walls began to shake. How does seventy-six pounds of nine-year-old make that much racket? I told Joanna, 'I bet this is what Afghanistan sounds like.'"

Fletch interjects, "You didn't tweet that, right?"

"Not on your life," I responded. This is another reason I'm trying to wean myself off of social media; there's too much room for misinterpretation. For example, I have oceans of respect for the armed forces and years ago when I made my checklist about my ideal man (are you sensing a checklist theme here?) "ex-military" was in my "would really like to have" column. When we met, I was thrilled to learn Fletch was former active-duty army. Because military service is so important to me, I donate generously to veterans' charities, have sent many care packages to those serving overseas, and always mark Memorial and Veterans' Day by hanging our flag at half-mast. And I vote for politicians who are like-minded in terms of armed services, so there's no question on how much I respect each and every branch.

Joanna appreciated my little quip, but that's because she understands my intentions. Even though I thought my remark was clever as it juxtaposed the agonizing ballet of battle versus little girls in embroidered dresses banging around on a stage by an ice rink, I didn't dare share this thought because I didn't want to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to explain how no, really, I swear I support the military.

How does an innocuous observation like, say, "There sure are a lot of Subarus up here in Seattle," so quickly devolve into an angry mob demanding to know why I hate lesbians? What? How did- where did-what?? This bizarre telephone-game interpretation social media engenders has become flat-out insanity. When did everyone begin to take everything so seriously on these sites? Personally, wouldn't the fact that my home page boasts a photo of my cat wearing a tiny sombrero be a small clue as to my irreverent nature?

Overreactions to what should be completely inoffensive make me so crazy. And at what point did "clicktavisim" take over for actually trying to do good? I mean, people can retweet about hunger awareness until their thumbnails fall off, but if they really wanted to do something that would help feed people right this d.a.m.n minute, they'd go to the grocery store and load up their cart with shelf staples like peanut b.u.t.ter and pasta, dropping everything off at their local food bank.

(Sidebar: If you try this-and I hope you do because you'll feel AWESOME afterward-be sure to grab a few items that kids like. According to the man at the Northern Illinois Food Bank, most of those who've lost their SNAP benefits are families with small children. As much as they appreciate the stewed tomatoes and canned pinto beans, I'm sure they'd love a bag of Goldfish crackers or a few Hershey bars so they can feel like the other kids in their cla.s.s, even for a minute.) (Additional sidebar: Was that soapbox-y? If so, I apologize, but I'm sick of others who equate posting about doing good with actually having done it. Also, if a supermarket sweep isn't in line with your budget, giving your time is equally important.) At this point, our server swings by to tell us about the specials. She's not a terribly skilled waitress because she keeps trying to give us every other table's drinks and on her last stop, she spilled the better part of Table Twelve's martini down Fletch's back. But considering that I myself was a terrible waitress, I'm sympathetic.

After she rattles off the list, I'm torn between the pork loin with caramelized onions and the swordfish, so I ask how the swordfish is prepared.

She responds, "I like fishes."

"Um, okay," I say. "I'll have the swordfish then."

She takes the rest of our order, which includes salads and appetizers, and then wanders off without collecting our menus. On her way to the kitchen, she plows into a busboy.

"Was that weird?" Bill asks. "It's not me-that was weird, right?"

"I wonder if she's delayed somehow," Stacey speculates.

"Yeah," I say. "I got that vibe, too. 'I like fishes.' Really? Then bless your heart, sweetie. Well done."

Fletch's eyes twinkle as he smiles at us over the rim of his craft brew. "Uh-huh. Delayed. That's what she is."

"Anyway," Stacey says. "What's next on your list?"

"Well, I start Italian lessons next week," I say.

"Ah, molto bene!" Bill cheers.

"I know, I'm really excited. All summer long I've been using an Italian workbook to get familiar again and I just bought Rosetta Stone. I had the budget to buy either that or a home laser hair removal kit. So, I figured I was going to embrace my Italian heritage and leave my mustache alone. Oh, stop rolling your eyes, Fletcher. I still wax."

Our waitress materializes at our table again with a big tray full of frozen drinks and drafts.

"I definitely didn't order anything blue," Stacey says, waving the frothy concoction away.

"Wait, was blue an option?" I ask. I'm charmed by any blue c.o.c.ktail. Fact.

"None of these drinks are ours," Bill says, gesturing toward all the full gla.s.ses on the table. "We're all fine with what we have, thank you."

The waitress c.o.c.ks her head like a German shepherd trying desperately to understand if he heard the words "doggie park" correctly. She looks at all of us for a solid thirty seconds and then, without saying a thing, tries to give the six drinks to the two-top behind us.

Bill says, "Wow. She's not good at this."

"That poor thing," Stacey says.

I chime in, "I know, right? I just read this book about traumatic brain injuries and-"

Fletch puts down his gla.s.s and shakes his head at all of us. "She's s.h.i.t-housed."

"What?" We all look at Fletch.

Our mouths agape, Fletch continues. "Oh, yeah. Hammered. Blotto. c.o.c.keyed. c.r.a.pulous. Sauced. Wrecked. Tanked. Pixelated. Three sheets to the wind. All sloppy and no joe. Do you not see it? The slurring? The giggling? The stumbling? And she smells like a gin mill."

"Oh," I say. "I a.s.sumed that was the martini all over your back."

"I have a martini all over my back. Was that not a big hint?" Fletch is far more amused than he is aggravated. "The three of you are the worst detectives ever."

"That's so funny," I say. "I was a drunken waitress in college-you'd think I'd be better at spotting it now."

"Yes, but that was at Purdue," Stacey replies. "The context is off. You don't actually expect to see this in a non-college-town restaurant with cloth napkins and a selection of artisa.n.a.l cheeses."

"What do we do?" I ask.

Bill puts down his napkin and stands up. "I'll handle this. Let me say something to the manager. Excuse me."

We return to our regularly scheduled conversation. "So, are you doing private lessons or cla.s.ses at Lake Forest College?"

"Neither. I definitely didn't want to be with a bunch of eighteen-year-olds and private lessons were expensive. I found a group and it works out to about ten bucks an hour for twelve lessons."

She fist-b.u.mps me. "Nice!"

Bill returns with an odd look on his face. "Well, I spoke with the manager." He sits back down and places his napkin in his lap.

"And?" Stacey asks.

Bill nods slowly, like he's trying to come to terms with something. "He's drunk, too."

When our entrees arrive before the salads or appetizers, Bill then has a word with the hostess. She appears to be about eight months pregnant and is absolutely mortified by our experience. She instructs a busboy to drive both the manager and the waitress home and has the bartender take over our table. Everything works out and the rest of the night is a happy blur of old friends, laughter, and conversation.

The swordfish, by the way, is delicious.

When we say our good-byes, we make definitive plans to do this again very soon. Not here, but definitely somewhere.

Saying yes has already proven to be a fine idea.

The rest of the summer pa.s.ses by in a flash because I'm so tied up with working on furniture and saying yes to garden walks and lunches and farmers' markets. My friend Becca tries to trick me into babysitting but I explain that she's my friend, not her kids, so I'm able to skate out of it.

Not only has saying yes been a lot fun. I believe that upping the social portion of my life is actually helping my goal of losing twenty pounds.

In the scheme of things, twenty pounds will make a difference for me only psychologically, as I doubt I'll even be able to see the results. Yet I can't not be satisfied as the numbers on the scale finally, finally trend downward, no matter how slightly.

I love when a plan comes together!

For the past couple of weeks, I've been telling Fletch that my cla.s.s feels too good to be true.

But I should have realized that when something seems too good to be true, it generally is.

I've spent each week in excited antic.i.p.ation of Monday night because I'm so eager to learn. I spend tons of time practicing on my own, whether it's using my computer discs or playing the Italian language version of MindSnacks on the iPad. (BTW, I just learned that "the shin" is "lo stinco" in Italian and that word makes me giggle every time.) Also, my circ.u.mstances are far different from when I studied Italian in college as I no longer have to make the choice between attending cla.s.s or working a lunch shift to pay my rent.

I'm learning for my own pleasure and it's so gratifying.

I adore my instructor, too, which adds to the whole experience. La mia professoressa Donatella doesn't just grill us on vocabulary and grammar. As a native Italian she's able to offer us an understanding of the country as a whole. She figures what good is speaking a language without a concept of the culture, too? She says we're not trying to stuff in as much vocab as possible to pa.s.s a standardized test. Rather, we're all here because we eventually want to go to Italy, so we're picking up the lingo and the skills that will help us best navigate. Donatella explains that context is so necessary when teaching adults, so that's a good piece of her focus.

For example, a few weeks ago we spent the final fifteen minutes of cla.s.s honoring Giuseppe Verdi's two hundredth birthday. We discussed the great composer and his impact not just on Italy, but the music world in general. I love Verdi's operas because he wasn't afraid to go dark, like when (SPOILER ALERT) everyone dies in the pyramid at the end of Aida.

Donatella gave us the Italian lyrics to the aria we were listening to, along with the English translation, and we followed along. I left cla.s.s that night really feeling as though I'd learned something significant. Then, because Joanna's a fan, too, we had something entirely new to discuss over lunch.

In fact, I enjoy my cla.s.s so much, I've taken to arriving a few minutes early to chat with the other partic.i.p.ants. Years ago, I saw the foreign film Italian for Beginners and although I wasn't looking to find love, I did hope to make some new local friends like in the movie, and thus far, this feels really possible.

I'm happy that the movie was, in a small way, prophetic, because everyone in cla.s.s seems so engaged and interesting. Like the woman who sits across from me-she mentioned how her baby was born at two and a half pounds when that same baby had just come home from college to celebrate her twenty-first birthday!

I also quite like the gal who sits on my side of the conference table. She has to miss cla.s.s in a few weeks because her son is getting married-on 11/12/13. Or how about the adorable young Moroccan couple who already speak so many languages that sometimes they forget their Italian and answer in Spanish or French? Their collective cuteness slays me.

I can't believe how fast time goes by in cla.s.s, either. I remember practically growing old and dying in some of my college courses, but here the hour pa.s.ses in a wink and I wish I had so much more time.

Of course, I should have known there'd be una mela marcia (a bad apple) in our midst.

There's an older couple who sits at the end of the table, clad in weird sweatshirts and elaborately framed gla.s.ses. The husband's attendance has been sporadic for the past few weeks, first due to work schedules and then to this being cold and flu season. (It's not an accident that I sit as far away from these two as possible, FYI.) We begin every cla.s.s by going around in a circle and greeting one another. As most of us are super-geeked to be there, our responses are basically Italian variations on "I AM FRIGGING SPECTACULAR, THANK YOU FOR ASKING!!!!" But I've noticed that the wife of this couple has been saying she's cosi cosi, which means so-so. Except she can't seem to just say cosi cosi; for four weeks running, she's insisted on asking what the word for so-so is before she can give her response.

Um, number one, write that s.h.i.t down so you don't have to ask every week; number two, we don't actually care how you are because that's not the purpose of the exercise-just say you're molto bene so we can get on with the cla.s.s; and number three, stop giving us the big sigh before you ask what so-so means, all right? It's abundantly clear you'd like to discuss your troubles at length and that is not okay. This is Italian cla.s.s, not therapy, so if you're compelled to talk about all your feels, please consult an appropriate professional. I paid for a full sixty minutes of this cla.s.s and every minute you waste being cagey about your emotional health is a minute I'm not learning.

In other words?

Chiudi il culo! (STFU.) Also, this lady wears a bowling hand brace to compensate for her carpal tunnel and that bugs me.

When Fletch asked how I was sure it was a bowling brace, I replied, "Because it says Brunswick on it."

After our instructor tacitly ignores Brunswick's weekly cry for attention, we begin to discuss numbers. Our homework was to study numbers one through twenty, so naturally, I learned up to number one hundred. (Again, it's with deep regret that I wasn't hip to the pleasures of being the teacher's pet back in the day.) So, Donatella says we're going to count to twenty and asks us to repeat after her. We get to number three before Brunswick throws us completely off course. Here's the thing-when you're learning a language, it's imperative to hear the word BEFORE you can p.r.o.nounce it, hence the listen-then-repeat command. But like every single other time, we get a couple of words in of listening and repeating before Brunswick loses the pace and begins to say the words with the instructor, ergo, no repeating. Dollars to doughnuts, this woman could throw an entire stadium off by clapping on the wrong beat.

Accidenti! (d.a.m.n it!) When we finally manage to count to twenty, Brunswick makes an important discovery.

"I thought venti meant coffee," she begins. "At Starbucks, venti means coffee."

"Actually, it's a size," says the nice 11/12/13 woman next to me. "It means twenty ounces."

(Fine, maybe I don't know everyone's names yet, but I figure I have only so much brain capacity, so I'm better off filling it with verb conjugations.) "But I thought everything was in French, because of the grande," Hand Brace argues. "Does grande mean sixteen ounces in French?"

"Non," reply the Moroccan students in unison.

Donatella tries to move us along to the numbers after twenty, but Brunswick is having none of it. "Then why would Starbucks do that? That makes no sense. They should do Italian OR French because it's confusing. In fact, that's why I don't even like their coffee. I'm a Dunkin' Donuts person. Why would anyone pay four dollars for a cuppa joe when Dunk's is so much better?"

It now occurs to me that Brunswick spends a lot of cla.s.s time asking why about questions that have no answer except, "Because that's how it's done." Why do the Italians use the indefinite article? Why are there masculine and feminine words? Why are flowers masculine when very clearly it's ladies who like them? How come the h is silent? How come our teacher p.r.o.nounces h like "hache"? Why are some verbs irregular?

What matters is not the why of these rules, but that they exist at all. We need to learn the specifics, not debate them. This is Rudimentary Italian, taking place in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a far-flung suburban insurance office, not a seminar on Advanced Linguistics at Oxford University.

Brunswick continues her diatribe. "What about tall, then? Is that Italian? How come tall is actually small at Starbucks?"

That's when it hits me that Brunswick is a time burglar.

Specifically, she's stealing my time with her inane questions and now she is my nemesis. It's one thing to have legitimate questions-I mean, this is a cla.s.sroom and we're here to be taught. We're all beginners and it's expected that we'll make mistakes. Being able to ask questions without feeling like a dips.h.i.t is one of the biggest benefits of having become middle-aged. I can think of dozens of instances in my college cla.s.ses where I didn't seek clarification because I was too embarra.s.sed to raise my hand. What might have been illuminated had I not been afraid to ask?

Yet what this woman fails to realize is that she's ignoring the social cues that her questions are not appropriate, as they do nothing to edify any of us. What's even worse is she's now thrown the entire cla.s.s off course and everyone's busy trying to explain beverage sizes to her in regard to a coffee shop she actively avoids.

Nothing about our conversation matters, so it's up to me to get us back on track.

I snap, "It's a marketing term, okay? Can we please move on?"

Donatella shoots me what I swear is a grateful look and we proceed to thirty, which is trenta.

"Hey, trenta is the newest Starbucks size and . . ."

Accidenti!

Donatella wrests control of the cla.s.s away from Brunswick and we continue with our lessons. Once we complete the numbers section, we begin to discuss geography. She explains how Italy is a very diverse country, and each region has distinct characteristics. Before she can describe any of said characteristics, Brunswick feels compelled to chime in. "Do the north and the south still hate one another?"

Donatella takes a moment to consider the least stupid question Brunswick has ever posed. "Well, the relationship is a little more complicated than that," she begins. "You see, the south does not have the economic opportunities found in the north, so-"

Brunswick says, "When I was a kid, we lived in Highland Park, a block away from the Highwood border, and Highwood used to be full of Italians."

The fact that she doesn't actually say Eye-talian is a pleasant surprise.

She continues. "Why was it full of Italians, I wonder? Anyway, we had northern Italians on one side and southern Italians on the other and they HATED one another. They fought about everything-the hedges, the trees, who was supposed to shovel. We never did understand why they hated each other so much. My dad said he never saw anything like it."

I glance around the room and notice half a dozen students mid-eye-roll.

Donatella takes a breath, smiles tightly, and continues. "So, Italy is made up of twenty regions."

I want to cheer her ability to ignore the intrusion, but I'm too interested in what she has to say. Turns out, she's just finished the itinerary for the annual trip she hosts in the spring-a cooking tour of the Amalfi Coast! The trip is all-inclusive, with luxury accommodations and tons of side trips.

(Sidebar: Apparently Brunswick is a huge fan of gnocchi, but she doesn't understand why we don't p.r.o.nounce the g the same way we do in the USA.) This tour might be just the thing for me. I'm in this cla.s.s because I plan to go to Italy, but maybe I'd be better off going with a group and a set itinerary? I fear that on my own, I would eat my own weight in gelato while sitting in my hotel room watching Italian soap operas. (If my history is any indication, my Eat, Pray, Love goal will morph into Eat, Eat, Lounge.) Maybe I need the social interaction of a group tour? Unless Brunswick is going, in which case, I will look at my globe to determine the farthest point away from her I could get.

Cla.s.smates begin to ask questions about the tour, as we're all quite interested. 11/12/13, who's traveled with our instructor before, wants to know if some of the same guides will be used because they were great last time. The mother of the preemie is curious if she could book her own flight. Instead of Lufthansa, she'd prefer to use her miles on American.

(Sidebar: Did you know you can get a ticket to Rome off-peak for twenty-five thousand miles?! How was I not informed?) I ask if I could upgrade, not because I'm so G.o.dd.a.m.ned special, but more because I'm fairly claustrophobic and dread wedging my large a.s.s in a tiny seat for eight hours. Also? Snacks!

"Upgrading costs money," Brunswick informs me.

Really? That's a news flash. I thought I could just work my way to the good seats on the merits of my charm alone, or perhaps trade some shiny beads. Does Lufthansa accept repainted dressers as payment? I seem to have them in spades.