How To Tell if You Are Fellini Trapped Inside a Fellini Film -The Toast

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fellini_h1. You are sitting in an idling Alpha Romeo on the outskirts of Rome waiting for a train to pass. You are chain-smoking Dunhill cigarettes.

2. A collection of your childhood friends are on the train, pressing their hands against the windows and making funny faces as they pass. Though you realize this might be a figment of your imagination it still makes you nervous.

3. In general, you are nervous. You see the world in black and white, which can make it hard to be cheerful.

4. At the end of most days, you sedate your nerves with a costly aged liqueur and wait in a hotel room for the arrival of your mistress, who your glamorous wife pretends not to know about.

5. Your mistress regrets her affair with you only because she’ll never get to be friends with your glamorous wife and also because it might be the reason you still haven’t helped her husband get that promotion. You shut her up by sticking a lit cigarette in her mouth.

6. Your mistress smokes, giggles and plays with your chest hair in bed while you chat on the phone with your glamorous wife, who pretends not to know you’re in a hotel room with your mistress. You refuse to feel any guilt. You’re gathering material for your next film.

7. You are at a spa in the Alps drinking artisan mineral water poured by a beautiful barefooted maiden whose giant breasts jiggle when you make her laugh. You turn into a buffoon.

8. You’ve dressed for the spa in a tailored silk Dolce and Gabbana suit and skinny tie. Your shoes are so shiny their only competition are your 18-karat gold cufflinks, a gift from your mistress, but your glamorous wife pretends to think you bought them for yourself.

9. As you drink your artisanal mineral water you sit at a tiny table chain-smoking. You slide your opaque Persols down your nose and watch a parade of beautiful women in fashionable hats and high-heeled shoes walk by, swaying their hips.

10. You check your Cartier watch for no reason, or no reason you can think of. Maybe it’s time to smoke another cigarette and adjust your Persols.

url-211. People come up and want to talk to you about your work, which gets on your nerves. You’ve made perfectly clear that your work is your life and that you don’t like talking about it. You ask for a Campari on the rocks and change the subject. If there’s no one around to bring you Campari, you abruptly cut the person off and walk away.

12. Fifteen minutes later, the train still hasn’t passed. It stretches into the distance as far as you can see. You light another cigarette and slide your Persols down your nose to get a sunlit glimpse of your mistress’s beautiful cleavage.

13. Suddenly it all seems meaningless. You turn the car around and head back to Rome. Your mistress gets so upset, she jumps out of the car in the middle of a busy intersection. She amuses you, but not so much that you’re willing to follow her.

14. You return to your modern minimalist apartment to find your glamorous wife on a chaise lounge reading the paper. Without looking up, she casually asks where you’ve been, pretending not to know.

15. That night you dream you’re in a car waiting for a train to pass. Everyone you’ve ever met is on the train, smoking and laughing and waving to you. You wonder if this dream might somehow be worked into your current screenplay.

Carmela D'Amico grew up with the modest goal of trying her hand at everything once. As of today, she's completed about 32% of her mission. Meanwhile, she documents her interest in everything under the sun by writing kids books, young adult fiction, essays, poems and anything else that strikes her fancy.

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