Italian ice and everything nice

For the next two weeks, Little Italy plays host to the annual Feast of San Gennaro street fair. The San Gennaro festival was once a religious commemoration, but is now closer to a cultural celebration marked by commercialism, entertainment and excess. Not unlike Christmas, come to think of it.

Since the festival occurs around the middle of September every year -- along the length of Mulberry Street just a block away from our apartment -- it's impossible for Sarah and me to avoid, or avoid thinking about. You see, our wedding anniversary falls smack in the middle of the festival. And so we get wistful when we see the tre colori flags being strung up by those ugly wheeled cranes, when dirty blue sawhorses are erected as traffic barriers, when loudmouthed construction workers assemble wooden stalls for rigged carnival games.

Okay, so it's hardly a romantic event. It's a noisy, crowded, sticky tourist trap, but it's enjoyable in small doses. Tonight, we walked through the street fair with our good friend Melissa, in search of the artery-clogging, tooth-melting deep-fried Twinkie, among other culinary delights. I don't know what the international reach of the Twinkie is, but if you (like many readers of this blog) live outside the United States and have never had a Twinkie, let me put it as delicately as I can: Eating a Twinkie is like swimming in the East River -- you should only do it once a year at most, because once is enough to make you sort of sick. And if possible, try to avoid doing it altogether, because the risk of death needlessly increases every time you do it.

Of course, like swimming in testy waters, eating a Twinkie can be sort of fun. Especially when it's coated in batter, deep-fried, and dusted dangerously with powdered sugar. We found one vendor who indeed sold such a monstrosity, for $3 each. On Melissa's insistence, I talked the seller into selling us two for $5. He not only agreed, but also gave us three free zeppoles, which are basically deep-fried nuggets of dough almost the size of tennis balls. They were also dusted with powdered sugar. We ate everything.

This happened after we'd eaten a whole dinner's worth of barbecued pork, sausage-and-peppers sandwiches, and curly french fries, but before the cherry and coconut Italian ices.

Two observations while walking through Little Italy among hundreds and hundreds of Italian Americans: First, Italian women are quite breathtaking.

I don't remember my second observation.

Read more about the Feast of San Gennaro here. Read more than you need to know about Twinkies here. [Wikipedia]