Last night I went to a big ol’ extended family dinner activity at an ultra kitschy Italian restaurant. We sat in the Pope Table, so named because there was a nearly life-sized bust of PJPII at the center of the table on a lazy Susan.

We kept the lazy Susan busy for the first few minutes, since no one wanted to be the lucky diner forced to meet the faux pope’s piercing stare. The bust was encased in a plexiglass cube, and my brother suggested it was simulating the Pope-mobile. As it turns out, the cube had a parallel function, because after two glasses of chianti (okay, I was drinking bourbon, but other people were drinking chianti, and this really was a chianti kind of place, and I’m trying to set a tone here, so let’s just set aside my preferences for a moment and pretend we were all drinking chianti. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the pope...)

I was not alone in the urge to put a bouquet of green beans in the pope’s benevolently clasped hands, or drape linguini over his robed shoulders. Fortunately, the cube protected us all.

Also, I lost a bet with my aunt that "Volare" would cycle every twenty minutes (it took an hour).