The American Damceron – Reflections from Day 27 to Day 29
By Anthony Acri | Retold for TaleTreasury.com
Day 27 – A Senate of Straw and Honor
There was a time, I recall, when the Roman Senate stood as a symbol of rustic nobility, its conscript fathers not yet corrupted by the polished decadence of later eras. Back then, the Senate was made up of farmers and statesmen—Italic framers who tilled their land, slopped their own pigs, and guarded their wives and daughters as fiercely as their wheat fields. These men wore crowns not of gold, but of grain and sweat. It is for them we still use the term framer of the republic.
They did not wear togas spun from foreign silk or sit atop marble thrones. They dressed plainly. They smelled of earth and woodsmoke. Their authority came not from opulence but from integrity. I often imagine their meetings held in humble farmhouses of timber, the only affectation being the dignity of service. This vision, once celebrated, has decayed—nowadays, the roles have reversed. The pigs are dressed in finery, and it is the honest men who are sent out to slop the troughs.
As Ovid once lamented, I too long for those earlier days when virtue was measured by action, not pretense.
Day 28 – The Cartoon Bunny and the Prince of Shadows
Who would have thought that a cartoon bunny could provoke such fury? A satirical sketch I sold—a throwback to Playboy, Mad, and National Lampoon in its golden days—sparked outrage among the apparatchiks of sanctimony. Their ire stemmed not from what it depicted, but from what it dared to recall.
In the cartoon, a sultry brunette rabbit—stylish, cheeky, undeniably sensual—is visited by the Prince of Shady Groves, a figure borrowed from the old Pentamerone tales of Italy. He recites a limerick with a wink, a nod to Jo Collins and other icons of late-night charm from the days when seduction was playful, not prosecuted:
There once was a girl from Sparta,
Who could play any tune in her Garta,
The boys hummed along,
As she played any song,
From the anthem to Ludwig’s Moonlight Sonata.
It was satire, it was art, and more than that—it was a resistance to the creeping dreariness that now pollutes imagination. Those who howl the loudest seem determined to flatten everything sensual into sanctified sterility. But imagination, like beauty, is unruly by nature. And sometimes, it wears a bunny suit.
Day 29 – Visions of Venus and the Eternal City
In the shadows of lockdown and ideological warfare, I sought solace in the past. A gift arrived: Ovid’s Fasti, the poet’s reflections on Roman festivals—unfinished, exiled, raw. I read it as one might sip from an elixir meant for the soul. The words echoed through the mind like a bell in a ruined basilica.
I saw her again—Wendy Fiore, not just a woman but a vision, a modern-day Venus cast in flesh and feathers. She stood on the green slope behind our crumbling apartment, the kind of place where once-wealthy dreams are reduced to rationed sunlight. Her hat brimmed with swan feathers, her dress a homage to a time when style meant something. She was realer than any screen princess, more potent than any Disney muse.
She wore a rose-red one-piece, more modest than today’s garish standards, and yet infinitely more powerful. Her curves, mocked by the spineless dwellers of the internet, stood defiantly against the tide of uniformity. She was the antithesis of everything drab. She was a goddess in exile—just like Ovid.
As she played with a blackbird—intelligent, mysterious—I saw echoes of the Italian tales Walt Disney never touched, stories too wild, too witchy, too unapologetically human. In that moment, time collapsed. She was Beatrice. She was Calvino’s princess. She was the high tide of Italic myth reborn in nylon and feathers.
Suddenly, I found myself transported—was it a dream, a memory, a divine vision? I stood in a Roman villa, its frescoes fading but noble. The pillars glowed with topaz and magenta. In a salon that might have been mine in some other life, my drawing of Venus—my muse, my Wendy—hung proudly.
And then came the visitor. Not a ghost, but a presence. A hillbilly Marius wrapped in a black coat, with eyes like Mediterranean steel. “Did you make that?” he asked, nodding at my drawing. I did. And in that instant, I recognized something ancient in him, too—a hero of dust, perhaps, but a hero still.
As we looked out over this imagined Rome, our conversation turned to prophecy. “If some dark hand is behind all this,” I said, “may it be struck down with the wrath of Virgil’s gods.” He smiled, a Fred Gwynne grin, part monk, part monster.
And behind us, Venus lounged again, cat at her side, hammer in hand. In her, there was the threat and promise of Fortuna. Beauty and fate mingled. She was not the Disney princess who waits to be saved. She was the goddess who holds the nails—and the will—to shape her destiny.
🏛️ Moral of the Story:
Art, memory, and myth are powerful weapons against conformity and despair. When truth is bent and beauty is ridiculed, it is the imagination—the storyteller, the poet, the satirist—that remains our last defense. In the ruins of Rome and the echoes of cartoons, we find that even in exile, the soul can still sing.
