Tony Soprano Is a Friend of Ours

I’ve been watching a lot of The Sopranos lately. Like, a lot of The Sopranos. It started when I downloaded the first two seasons to my Kindle for my trip to Africa. Nothing like 17 hours on a plane with La Cosa Nostra to get your agita up. Or random nudity in the Bada Bing! scenes to get your circulation going when you slam your device’s screen down so the passengers behind you don’t tell the flight attendant and then you make international headlines as “Texas Woman Kicked Off Flight For Watching Porn, Claims ‘It Was Just Boobs, Jerkwad!'”

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I was the only passenger on Ethiopia Air who flew halfway across the world listening to dialogue like, “There’s an old Italian saying: you f-ck up once, you lose two teeth.” Of course, I’m mostly basing that on the elderly African woman across the aisle who spent the entire trip sucking on a toothbrush and staring at me like I was a hologram. And on the 20,000 babies on our flight who were in some kind of sadistic competition to goat scream the longest and the loudest every time I closed my eyes. (Spoiler alert: There was no winner in that crap competition.)

I also think I was the only passenger who was getting an earful of mob business because everyone else was busy watching the in-flight entertainment on the plane’s numerous drop down monitors. And what brilliant show were they showing on our flight from Malawi to Ethiopia? On our flight that departed from probably the most rundown airport I’ve ever been to in my entire life? An airport that didn’t have working toilets or conveyor belts? An airport where you had to walk onto the tarmac and identify your luggage before they loaded it? “Secrets of the Super Rich.” Uh-huh. Tell us again, TV people, tell us how the Chinese billionaire’s $11 million home in Beverly Hills took ten years to build because he couldn’t decide on a tile pattern. We’ll be sure to take notes while we suck down our airplane “wine” and cross our fingers that the airport has electricity when we land.

I’m not really sure why I’m watching The Sopranos again because I saw the entire series when it originally aired on HBO in the 2000’s. Maybe it’s because I also had toddlers in the 2000’s, so that decade was my equivalent of a crackhead life. Meaning, I don’t know what the hell happened in the 2000’s. I might have bought and sold a few houses back then. Might have owned a boat. Or a show pony named Thadeus. Who knows. I’ll have to pull out the scrapbooks and/or Google myself to find out for sure. Check myself for tattoos.

But because I’ve been listening to Big Pussy, Paulie Walnuts and Tony Soprano talk for weeks and weeks now, I’ve found myself inserting some of their dialogue into my daily interactions. And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that “I wipe my ass with your feelings” goes over far better in New Jersey than it does in a Texas grocery store. Same with, “You’re only as good as your last envelope, you f-ing hump.” I thought it was the perfect thing to say to JoJo, our mail lady, but she really has no sense of humor. Especially on Restoration Hardware catalog day. Baby is a sweaty mess.

Luckily my husband does have a sense of humor, so I’ve been using my two favorite lines on him every time he comes home. Both are things that Tony said to the maleficent Richie Aprile, and both aren’t very PC, but hey, so what? So now Chris is either greeted with, “Oh, look who’s here. I was wonderin’ why the squirrels went quiet” or “So what brings you to an English speakin’ neighborhood?” when he walks in.  Then he laughs and laughs and quietly sneaks away to open an account on FarmersOnly.com while I yell, “Wha? I’m just bustin’ yo bawls!”

The good news is that I’m almost done with the show, so he won’t have to hear this stuff for much longer. The bad news is that I just downloaded Orange Is the New Black again and I have a great recipe for summer toilet wine. I know. Whaddya gonna do?