March Fanelli (Or How Chris Meloni got into my head)
Continuing with the anecdotes of how Chris Meloni and Lee Tergesen became my life long lasting obsession.
This time let me tell you how Chris impacted the mind of a 6 year old (so young, I never got a chance!!!!). You all know about that show in the 90’s called “The Fanelli boys” right? Well if you remember correctly one of the “boys” was precisely our beloved Chris.
The show was aired in México in 1991 under the unfortunate name of “Una familia a la italiana”; every Sunday at 5 pm my family sat to watch it. Why? Well, like some of you might know, I’m half Italian, and my family is out and proud of our roots, so it’s like mandatory to watch any TV show with something Italian on it. That’s why the Fanelli’s became part of the Violante family life.
I can’t remember something in specific about the show, just that it was loud, there was a priest and an Italian flag appeared in the opening. But the one thing I can recall is that the show was like any Sunday morning after mass with my whole family: loud and stereotypical.
Anyway, my cousins and I used to have this game when we pretended to be the Fanelli girls. Imagine a bunch of 5, 6 and 7 year old Mexican- Italian girls with a TV show obsession (mmm, come to think about it, things haven’t change that much for me), pretending to be the girlfriends of those fictional characters.
Well, the kicker is that back in the day I liked the character of Andy Hirsch (Ronnie Fanelli - Ha!) and thought that Frankie was obnoxious and a show off. But every time we tossed the coin to decide characters I got stuck being the girlfriend of Frankie Fanelli. How was I supposed to know any better? I was only 6!
So every Sunday I was March Fanelli and my cousin Gaby was pretending to be popping out Ronnie Fanelli’s babies and teasing me about it till she made me cry. I hated that, ‘till one day I started to notice that Frankie was indeed more of a man, gorgeous and well built (I was 6, not stupid). So I started enjoying being Mrs. Frankie Fanlelli.
We continued playing that game for a good year and a half (they were thousands of reruns of the show), and I always was Frankie’s girl and that’s how I started to love Chris.
Every now and then my cousin still teases me about never letting me be Ronnie’s girl, but I just laugh, because she thinks that I believe that being “stuck” with Chris Meloni was a bad thing.
I mean, I got to be Chris Meloni’s girl in our games, and that’s awesome!