#yes this is also part of the hairdresser Steve origin story

[peter-pantomime]

No thoughts except of Max, arms too achey to braid her hair anymore, chopping it off and channeling steve when she does

#yes specifically ‘84 Steve cuz that’s when they saved each other from demodogs and bullies and imprinted on the other like ducklings #yes this is also part of the hairdresser Steve origin story #Steve harrington #max mayfield #stranger things #steve and max #steves kids

[abstractnaturaldisaster]

Steddie Flower Shop / Tattoo Parlor AU

I am so floored by the response! It is absolutely so fun that y’all want to read my silly stories! This is a relatively short update but I am working on the rest! Hoping to post the full story by Valentine’s and I might also post an AO3 link at some point if anyone would like that I Part One I Part Two I Also on AO3!

***

Chrissy and Eddie had been taking bets about what type of business was opening up across the way. Eddie’s guesses had run the gamut from hipster coffee shop to hipster hairdresser to hipster high-end taxidermy while Chrissy had more or less stuck with her original guess of a speakeasy style bar. Eddie was starting to close up shop for the day when some guy in an honest-to-god sweater vest and jeans ran over.

“It’s too late to place any orders today. Sorry if you need to apologize to your wife and 2.5 kids and forgot until the last minute.” Eddie had to admit the guy was pretty infuriatingly handsome. If you were in to normie core, that is.

“What? I’m not- okay, uhm. I’m actually here because I just rented the place across the way and I wanted to ask about setting up a recurring weekly arrangement?” Steve asked.

“What?” Eddie yelled over Judas Priest.

“It’s a wonder you can ever hear anything over all this noise.” Steve gestured towards the speaker.

Chrissy had overheard the exchange from the backroom and cut Eddie off before he could start ranting about real music, “Yes, we are interested in setting up a recurring weekly bouquet arrangement for our new neighbors, Eddie.” 

Chrissy turned back around to lower the speaker's volume and pulled Eddie and Steve into the shop and onto stools by the workbench Eddie uses for arranging. Eddie glared at her but they’d just lost one of their regular accounts to some online service that was apparently way cheaper than what De Lucas’ could offer.

“Sure. What were you thinking, dude?” Eddie asked Steve.

“Just something nice for our front desk. Not too big and maybe nothing that people are commonly allergic to? But I’ve seen the arrangements you load up for delivery and I trust your eye. I’m not a live flower expert.”

“Of course, big boy.” Eddie noticed Steve flush a little bit at the pet name. Eddie reached behind Steve to grab one of the flyers Chrissy had made for company floral services. He purposely invaded Steve’s space a little more than necessary just to see if he could get the guy to flush a little deeper.

“Uhm, thanks, man. I’ll get out of your hair since it’s late. Sorry.”

“I’ve got time for you now if you want to talk through anything,” Eddie couldn’t resist biting his lip a little bit. Steve was apparently very easy to ruffle and Eddie sure did love antagonizing his hipster neighbor. “Tell me a little bit about your place?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s a tattoo studio? Just me and my friend’s helping run the, like, business part of it.” Steve responded

“You tattoo?”

“Yeah. Really fucking well actually,” Steve pushed back. It seemed like Eddie had hit a nerve.

“Shouldn’t you have like at least one tattoo?” Eddie’s brain to mouth filter had apparently stopped working. He shouldn’t be actively shitting on a potential customer.

“Who says I don’t?” Steve answered with a wink. It was Eddie’s turn to feel a little faint as his imagination took a little too much creative liberty thinking about where Steve’s tattoo might be.

Thankfully, Chrissy took the awkward silence as an opportunity to step in and work with Steve to confirm what level of floral arrangement he was looking for, how often he wanted a new arrangement, and if he wanted pick up or delivery.

“I can stop by and pick them up. Wouldn’t want you to go through the trouble of adding me to your schedule since I’m just across the way. Any chance I could pick one up tomorrow around lunch time? My first client is coming at two.” Steve asked.

“Noon’s great, Steve!” Chrissy reached out to shake Steve’s hand while Eddie was still working on slowing his heart rate back to a reasonable rhythm.

“Amazing, thanks so much guys!” Steve called as he headed out of De Lucas’ and back across the street.

“Woah, Eddie. Truly a masterclass in both flirting and getting new clients. I should have taken notes,” Chrissy said once Steve had made it halfway into the road.

“Hey, fuck you.” 

“He speaks!” Chrissy patted Eddie’s head and added, “You’ll have to get better at interacting with him since you’ll be seeing each other once a week now.”

Eddie dramatically sighed and laid his upper body across the workbench, getting little pieces of flower refuse stuck in his hair.

“I’m so screwed.”

You wish, babe,” Chrissy cackled as she grabbed her bag and headed out for the day.

***

Part 4 now available here!

Taglist: @maya-custodios-dionach @eboyawstenn @swimmingbirdrunningrock @sadcanadianwinter @thehumblefigtree @throwbackthrowaway @micheledawn1975

I think I caught everyone! I seriously am so genuinely amazed by the reception! 

#my fic #steve x eddie #stranger things #steve harrington #eddie munson #steddie fic #steddie #tattoo parlor / flower shop AU

[mrgodfrey]

Morrie’s Wigs: Behind The Curtain

‘And remember: Morrie’s wigs are tested against hurricane winds.’

Sight unseen, such a line doesn't sound like classic movie dialogue. But none of this is normal. This 18-second fake ad, 37 minutes into Goodfellas: what an absurdly quotable piece of footage, a joy for everything it is and everything it isn’t. What an introduction to Morrie, the loveable schmuck, who just seems so happy – if only we could all be as happy as Morrie – so utterly behind this endeavour, so brazenly into the hard sell. The clincher of course is the cheapness: it’s all so wonderfully unsophisticated.

I wrote about this before, briefly, in my investigation into all things Morrie and actor Chuck Low. But more has come to light. So down we go. Another rabbit hole. 

Goodfellas’ Morris Kessler was based on Marty Krugman, a 1970s bookmaker and owner of a hairdressers and wig salon, For Men Only, just up the street from Henry Hill’s Queens nightclub The Suite. As you can read here, the salon doubled as a collection point for betting slips and cash, and was also, in curtained off back rooms, a little den for a bit of gangster business. Henry and made man Paul Vario (Goodfellas’ Paul Cicero) bought hairpieces from Marty, whose wigs were known for their durability. Even underwater.

Much of the business’ reputation was due to Marty’s TV commercials, in which he himself hawked the hairpieces. They would broadcast late at night on Queens Public Television and featured Marty, according to Goodfellas’ source material, Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, ‘swimming vigorously across a pool wearing his wig while an announcer proclaimed that Krugman’s wigs always stayed put.’

While researching Morrie a couple of years ago I found, via some audio footnotes on GQ’s Goodfellas oral history, that Scorsese had an idea to include a recreation of Morrie/Marty’s ad in the film. One night, according to Joe Reidy, the first assistant director on Goodfellas, Scorsese saw a crude TV commercial for a windows company called Aalco, and wanted it to look exactly like that. He had his people track down the company’s boss, a man named Stephen Pacca who, they discovered, was also the guy on screen, selling his own product. They called him in for a meeting in view of having him consult on the Morrie ad, then asked him make it himself, just as he did his windows ad. Scorsese left him to it.

I’d looked for Pacca and found that he’d died in 1994. But recently I got a message from his son, Stephen Pacca Jr, who’d seen my blog, loved the bit on his dad, and wanted to give me the whole story. I spoke to him, and to Joe Reidy.

“My dad had gotten into the business in the 1970s, we sold vinyl replacement windows,” says Pacca Jr of his father’s company, Aalco. In the 1980s, Pacca Sr separated from his wife and the business was hit with dire financial problems, and one night after work he and his cousin, the company’s general manager, went for a drink. “After a few drinks sat at the bar, my dad was looped,” says Pacca Jr. “He didn’t drink, so he didn’t have any tolerance for alcohol. He looked at my cousin and he said, ‘Johnny, I’ve got the solution to not go bankrupt – we’re gonna go on television.’ My cousin was looking at him like this was absurd. But my dad said, ‘We’re gonna make a commercial, we’re gonna go on television.’ And that’s exactly what they did.”

His father was probably inspired, says Pacca Jr, by the TV ads for electronics chain Crazy Eddie’s, which ran over 7,500 commercials throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. The company was named after its Brooklyn owner Eddie Antar; many assumed he was the one screaming his lungs out in the ads, although the on-screen huckster was actually radio DJ Jerry Carroll. “His commercials were a lot more popular than ours,” says Pacca Jr. “The guy was screaming: ‘Our prices are insane!!’ His commercials were wild.” Yes:

Pacca had not previously made anything for television. He approached WNYW – New York’s Channel 5 – and got them to fund the commercial (for around $7,000, says Pacca Jr) in exchange for Pacca buying over $30,000 of airtime a week. But he wrote and made it himself. “He got the help of an advertising agency, but it was just a small guy and all he really did was print my dad’s storyboards,” says Pacca Jr.

“All people remember about our commercial was the money coming out of the window. They don’t remember my dad’s name, they don’t remember the company name. Somebody opens an old window and my dad says, ‘Homeowners, don’t worry about money,’ and then 5000 single dollar bills go through the window. We built a chute behind the window and we had five people just dumping the money in this chute, with big fans, so the money would all blow out the window.”

It worked. “The whole success of that business was the commercial,” says Pacca Jr. “Our business skyrocketed. We had six girls in the office just answering phones. In one year, we went from $1.7m in sales and a staff of five, to $15m in sales and a staff of 250.” And this is why. In all its breathless glory:

“They were so badly made,” says Joe Reidy, Scorsese’s first assistant director on Goodfellas, of Stephen Pacca’s commercials – after the success of the first one, he did a few more. That original one though, says Reidy, was “the one that got Marty’s attention.” Scorsese kept seeing it on TV and was fascinated by it. “The idea of making the wig commercial was just because of Steve Pacca’s ad,” says Reidy. “While we were in pre-production on Goodfellas, the content of the commercial didn’t exist. Then Marty had this idea that Morrie would have this commercial running and it would play in his shop as part of the scene. So that was incorporated in the script, he and [co-writer] Nick Pileggi must have spoken about it.”

You can see in the Goodfellas shooting script, dated January 1989, that it simply has Morrie swimming across a pool, just as Marty Krugman’s ad is described in Wiseguy, with the addition of some minimal Morrie voiceover.

“Marty wanted to make it like that,” says Reidy. “He wanted us to track down who directed the commercial that Steve Pacca was in – we didn’t know he had made it. I can’t remember who actually found him, it could have been me. But we basically called the company to find out who made the commercial, and the call got kicked upstairs quite quickly because it was not a very big company, it went to him. And he said, ‘We made it.’”

Then Scorsese got on the phone. Pacca Jr remembers it well. “I’m sitting in the office one day with the girls answering the phones, and the head girl, Diane, she says to me, ‘Stephen, I got a man on the phone who says he’s Martin Scorsese, and he wants to talk to your father.’ Oh my god, it was really him! And he told my dad he wanted to make a commercial exactly like our window commercial. He was very emphatic about that, he said ‘I want the exact same commercial, but I just want it to be about wigs.’”

Pacca was asked to go and meet Scorsese, “who got very very excited about it,” says Reidy. “It was not even a matter of, ‘Do you wanna meet him and see if it would work out,’ it was, ‘We’re gonna use this guy no matter what.’ And once Marty met him, it was over, it was decided Steve would do it.” After an initial meeting at Scorsese’s office was a follow-up, in which an excitable Pacca went full dog and pony.

“He made a presentation for Marty,” says Reidy. “The man came in with storyboards. They were primitive, but he had designed a commercial, how it would go, he had written a script. He had basically everything in line for shooting it. He drew the wig coming off. He drew off screen, off the edges of the storyboard, where the fan would be placed [to simulate the hurricane winds]. He drew the fishing tackle pulling the wig off, so that people would know how it would be done.”

Swimming pool aside, the ideas were Pacca’s. “Mr Scorsese didn’t tell him to have the guy jump in the swimming pool,” says Pacca Jr. “He didn’t tell him anything. My dad told him what he’d do, that he’d have the actor talking and then we’d print his name at the bottom and then he’ll jump in the pool and the wig’s gonna stay on. And Marty just said, ‘Okay, whatever you say.’ He gave him carte blanche to do what he wanted.”

“What we all agreed on,” says Reidy, “was that Steve would not only direct it, but he would put everything together. The only things we would provide would be the camera and our Director Of Photography, Michael Ballhaus, to shoot it, but he’d take direction from Steve Pacca. Michael had two assistants, and a sound mixer and boom operator, but again only under Steve’s direction. All of the special effects, all the prop work, all the make-up and wardrobe would be done by Steve Pacca’s group, which were really people who worked in his office or installed the windows. Someone operating a fan? His guy, with a fan that they brought. A normal house fan.”

Warner Bros, says Reidy, decided that it would be a kind of unofficial part of the production, giving Pacca freedom to do whatever he wanted. That caused some confusion, says Pacca Jr – his father didn’t realise that Scorsese’s team would give him whatever support he needed, so he just went ahead and took it all on, using his company staff. He rented the Lodi Boys Club in New Jersey, which had an indoor pool, for the interior shoot. It was all too much.

“My dad didn’t realise how time-consuming making this wig commercial was gonna be,” says Pacca Jr. The shoot was only a day or two, but with pre- and post-production, the project took a month. “I said, ‘Dad why don’t you ask the guy to help you?’ He said, ‘No no no, he asked me to make this commercial and I’m gonna deliver him the finished product.’ He wanted to be very proud of his work, you know?”

At some point, chiefly because he wasn’t able to do his day to day job while doing this, Pacca snapped. “He called Mr Scorsese up,” says Pacca Jr, “and he told him he quit! I wasn’t in the room when he had the conversation, he told me afterwards. Mr Scorsese said, ‘What?! You quit? Steve, you can’t quit! There’s too much involved here, we’ve got too much going on!’”

The Morrie ad was the first thing being shot for Goodfellas, which itself was now about a week and a half away from filming. “Mr Scorsese said, ‘Is it about money?’” says Pacca Jr. “And my father said, ‘No no no, I just don’t have time for this, it’s costing me too much money. It is about money, but it’s not the money you’re giving me!’ He was giving my dad $2,500. But my dad, I bet you he spent $10,000 of his own money making this commercial.”

On what? “Well I don’t think he asked for money to rent the boys club. I don’t know who he used for actors, but I know he paid people. This guy’s gonna jump in the pool and his wig’s gonna stay on, it looks like it’s not a big thing, but it is! And Martin Scorsese went crazy: ‘I’ll give you more money!’ And my dad says, ‘You don’t have enough money to give me, because this is costing me my business! It’s not about dollars, it’s costing me time.’ So Marty says, ‘Look, whether it’s about money or not, I’m gonna give you £5,000 instead of $2,500 – please finish this commercial for me.’ So my father finally agreed to finish it.”

And a rejuvenated Pacca did the shoot. He got satin baseball jackets made for his crew, imprinted with the film’s working title, Wiseguy. Scorsese stayed away, determined not to dilute the purity of the project. The Goodfellas hair and wardrobe department provided Morrie’s wig and outfit, and checked that Pacca’s supporting ‘actors’ were dressed accurately for the period. Other than that, Pacca was allowed to just “make the commercial the way he would have made it if he were the wig man,” says Reidy. “The guys who came to do this, they didn’t know anything about filmmaking. The other women in the background [of the commercial]: these were all people Steve Pacca knew. We didn’t interfere, we didn’t suggest any way to make it better.”

Michael Ballhaus, the Goodfellas cinematographer who had previously worked with Scorsese on After Hours, The Color Of Money and The Last Temptation Of Christ, didn’t bring lights. “Michael had seen plenty of bad commercials to know that he wasn’t going to light it,” says Reidy. “He wasn’t going to do anything except turn the lights on inside the pool. And it was just sort of drab as a result. Michael knew that and was very excited about it, he said, ‘It’s gonna be great!’ It was very surreal because he was taking direction from a man who didn’t know anything about directing. Excuse me, no: Steve Pacca knew what he needed to do, what he wanted to do. And Michael was in the spirit, he was very enthused about it.”

Martin Scorsese and Michael Ballhaus on Goodfellas. Photo taken from Alamy, can you tell

And Pacca got Chuck Low to those locations, and told him what to do, and how to do it. Pacca Jr was at the shoot for a bit but, 28 years on, doesn’t remember much. “I just remember him jumping in the pool,” he says. “That was a highlight.”

Pacca edited the ad and submitted it just as we see it in the film. “Marty was so, so pleased with it,” says Reidy. “So happy. He was laughing, he was thrilled, it really broke him up. He really loved it.” And that was that. Scorsese shot Goodfellas, and invited Pacca to the premiere.

Pacca set up another business, for second mortgages, and made an ad for that too. This time he had a horse. “He brought it up the elevator at the Channel 5 studio,” says Pacca Jr. “The horse had saddlebags, and in the saddlebags was money, which all came out somehow.”

Pacca Jr told me a lot about his dad’s highs and lows, about how he’d make millions then go broke, then make millions again, then go broke again. At one point he built a recording studio in his office, “with speakers that cost $15,000 a piece. I guess he always had wanted to be in showbusiness in some way. He would sing, he would record music, he made a couple of records with pictures of him on the front. But it never took off.” Having grown up poor, says Pacca Jr, his father deemed it important to always have a new car so bought a new Cadillac convertible every year, whether he could afford to or not. He would, says Pacca Jr, drive through Harlem and have people wave and call out his name, such was his fame from the TV commercials. He was known to pull over and give homeless people $200: “He just was very generous to strangers.”

I asked Pacca Jr how his father died. Around 1989, he says, Pacca had kidney failure, and was put on dialysis for two years. Pacca Jr pleaded with him to take one of his kidneys, but he refused right up to the last minute. Finally, after a third emergency visit to hospital in the space of a month, he insisted. “I looked at him that day in the hospital and said, ‘Look, if you don’t take my kidney, you’re gonna die. It’s as simple as that. You almost died tonight.” Pacca agreed, and the operation was scheduled for Christmas Eve morning: “It was a nice Christmas present for me to give to him.”

In 1994 though, Pacca had a heart attack. “He climbed up to the fifth floor of a building, surveying the building to do 500 windows for a guy, and he sat down in the guy’s kitchen, turned blue and dropped dead. But he got three or four good years when he wasn’t suffering. I was happy to be able to be a part of that.”

We’ve all got a lot of happiness from Stephen Pacca. So think of him when you watch that Morrie’s Wigs ad. Just a simple window salesman who made a piece of movie history. And please. Don’t throw money out of the window.

And that’s that.

My Chuck Low extravaganza lives here, and my unhealthy unraveling of the Goodfellas dog painting is here. 

#goodfellas #morrie #morrie's wigs #chuck low #martin scorsese #scorsese #stephen pacca #commercials #wigs #windows

[whiskeytangofoxtrot555]

92 Truths...that no one probably cares to know...

THE LAST… 1) Drink: Diet Coke
2) Phone call: my husband
3) Text message: my niece
4) Song you listened to: Happier
5) Time you cried: listening to the Hamilton Original Cast Recording, when Eliza sings the last song--the part about her starting the first private orphanage in NYC makes me tear up EVERY time... HAVE YOU EVER…
6) Dated someone twice: yes. My first love: in high school (twice), and then in college. 
7) Been cheated on: Not that I know of...
8) Kissed someone and regretted it: Yes. An older guy who was interested in me but I only wanted as a friend. I blame the tequila...
9) Lost someone special: my grandmother died last year. 
10) Been depressed: oh, yes. I am diagnosed with Chronic Major Depression. And depression's trusty sidekick, anxiety. 
11) Gotten drank and thrown up: Too many times. New Years Eve 1999-2000 was particularly ugly. My then-fiancé was in the band that played for the town-wide celebration, and when he got home in the wee hours of the morning he found me curled around the toilet. He asked if he could get me anything. I just asked for my pillow... LIST THREE FAVORITE COLORS…
12) green
13) purple
14) orange (I love the ginger!) IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU…
15) Made new friends: Yes! Thru TUMBLR
16) Fallen out of love: NO
17) Laughed until you cried: Yes. Happens every time I watch The Hangover and Mr Chow comes flying out of the trunk, naked, with a crowbar!
18) Found out someone was talking about you: I'm Italian: somebody's ALWAYS talking about me...
19) Met someone who changed you: yes. 
20) Found out who your true friends are: that's a hard one. I'm still working on this. 
21) Kissed someone on your Facebook list: Yup. Hubby is Facebook friend. And previously mentioned Italian relatives... OTHER…
22) How many of your Facebook friends do you know in real life?: All of them. 
23) Do you have any pets?: 2 cats, Sprinkles and Steve. We are also in the process of getting my daughter a kitten from the local SPCA. 
24) Do you want to change your name?: Not really; unless it's to change my last name to Sheeran! 😜 j/k
25) What did you do for your last birthday?: Went to Ocean City, MD, with my husband (no kids! Yay!). 
26) What time do you wake up?: As late as possible, but usually early because of the kids. 27) What were you doing at midnight last night?: Texting. 
28) Name something you cannot wait for: Going to see Ed on the Today Show next week!
29) When was the last time you saw your mother?: Last weekend. 
30) What is one thing you wish you could change about your life?: I wish crippling depression hadn't robbed me of my memory (both short and long-term), and my passion and ability to work in my chosen field. 
31) What are you listening to right now?: My mother-in-law telling a story. I'm at a family get-together and there's a group of folks out on the porch. 
32) Have you ever talked to a person named Tom?: To my knowledge, I have chatted up at least three Toms (including my fave, Uncle Tom, who was closeted for SO MANY years that my heart broke for him, but now he lives in South Beach, FL, and is absolutely FABULOUS!!! And he's by far the smartest Facebook friend that I have...)
33) Something that is getting on your nerves: That my husband just took a picture of "all the sisters-in-laws" and totally forgot to include me in it...
34) Most visited website?: Google news
35) Elementary: Great memories, great grades, great friends, great teachers. 
36) High School: Awkward (but who wasn't?). Where I decided to go to college and finally knuckle down and bring up my grades. 
37) University: Which one? Gettysburg College (in PA) for college; University of Maryland for my M.A.; and Penn State for their PhD program (well, most of it...). 
38) Hair color: JUST started to color my hair. It's normally brown, but I've knocked out the gray with a dye that my hairdresser calls "Red Velvet." It has a reddish-purplish tint in the sun. The best part is that any gray hair just turned a light pink!
39) Long or short hair?: My hair is long (past my shoulders) and curly. 
40) Do you have a crush on someone?: Other than Ed? I would have to say Bradley Cooper (though I hear he's a major dick). 
41) What do you like about yourself?: Not much. 
42) Piercings?: At one point I had two in each ear, but now they have all closed up. 
43) Blood type?: I have no idea.
44) Nickname?: Chris. 
45) Relationship status?: Married.
46) Zodiac sign?: Leo. 
47) Pronouns: She/her.
48) Favorite TV show: A couple of years ago I would have answered NCIS in a heartbeat. I LOVED that show. But for me the magic of the show was Tony and Ziva. After they both left the show just lost its magic dust... These days the only show I watch is "America's Got Talent," mostly because my kids and husband "make" me. 😉
49) Tattoos: 2. A semicolon (to represent mental health awareness) with colorful wings added to it to make it into a butterfly. And my paw print tattoo that represents Ed(!), and my beloved cat, Sprinkles. 
50) Right or left hand?: Right. FIRST…
51) Surgery: Tonsils and adenoids out at 11 years-old. 
52) Piercing: 14 years-old. 
53) Sports: I kicked ass in Little League, but my sporting career tanked after that. 
54) Vacation: I liked a trip to Wisconsin we took a few years ago. We stopped in Chicago and I loved the city
55) Pair of trainers: I have NO idea. 
57) Eating: I had a bagel with salmon-flavored cream cheese on it as my first meal of the day.
58) Drinking: Diet Coke. Always. 
59) I’m about to: Go to sleep. 
60) Listening to: My son carrying on a running conversation with himself about a video game. The kid's got Aspergers and ADHD, and let's just say his meds have worn off. I swear, I'm going to have to scrape him off of the ceiling when I finally make him go to bed. 
61) Waiting for: A shower before bed. 
62) Want: To tell my son to shut up for the love of God and all his saints!!! 63) Get married: I've only been married once. 
64) Career: I can't do what I was trained to be anymore. I miss it terribly. YOUR TYPE…
65) Hugs or kisses?: Hugs. 
66) Lips or eyes?: Both. 
67) Shorter or taller?: I'm short, so it doesn't really matter to me. Taller, I guess. 
68) Older or younger?: my husband is slightly older than I am. 
69) Nice arms or nice stomach?: Arms and shoulders. 
70) Sensitive or loud?: Sensitive. (Loud reminds me too much of my big, fat, LOUD Italian family. I would NEVER marry an Italian guy!)
71) Hook up or relationship?: Definitely relationship. 
72) Troublemaker or hesitant?: I don't really understand the question... HAVE YOU EVER…
74) Kissed a stranger?: Technically, no. But when you're Italian you are constantly kissing people who are supposedly somehow related to you!
75) Drank hard liquor?: Yes.
76) Lost glasses, contact/lenses?: No. 
77) Turned someone down?: Can't recall. 
78) Sex on first date?: Never. 
79) Broken someone’s heart?: Yes.
80) Had your heart broken?: yes.
81) Been arrested?: Nope!
82) Cried when someone died?: Yes. Does it make me a bad person for crying harder about our puppy dying than my 88 year-old grandmother???
83) Fallen for a friend?: Yes. DO YOU BELIEVE IN…
84) Yourself?: when I have to come through for my kids. 
85) Miracles?: Yes. 
86) Love at first sight?: Yes.
87) Santa Claus?: I believe in the magic of Santa Claus. 88) Kiss on the first date?: Not with my husband. Well, he did kiss me on the hand, which was sweet. 
89) Angels?: I believe that regular people are angels to others everyday. I'm not sure about the wings and halos, but an inner spirit of goodness is alive in most of us. EVEN MORE…
90) Current best friend’s name: Jonathan. 
91) Eye color: Hazel. 
92) Favorite movie: The Hangover, The English Patient, and The Fault in Our Stars. Oh, and the kick-ass new Wonder Woman movie. I just LOVE Gal Gadot in that role!