She’d eat any kind of pasta she could get her hands on—elbow, bow-tie, fettuccine, angel hair. You name it, she’d eat it, and was addicted to it. And the sauce scene, well that was a whole separate addiction. From Bolognese to pesto, Marianna had never tasted a sauce she didn’t love. But her favorite was marinara. That’s why she had changed her last name to, wait for it, Marinara. It was also the ideal complement to her exotic dancing persona, Basilica Marinara. 

Among the many ironies about Marianna was that she possessed a job that required her body to be at least marginally attractive, and yet, she was obsessed with a food that completely negated this possibility. Hence, her coke addiction. It wasn’t a stripper cliche she wanted to embody, but she genuinely needed it in order to offset her daily pasta intake. 

One minute you would find Marianna in her butter pat-sized East Village kitchen whipping up carbohydrate-laden dreams you could never even imagine unless you tasted them, and the next you’d see her in the bathroom blowing rails like her life depended on it. Yes, Marianna had two terrible yin and yang addictions, each one supporting the other. Sometimes, she would be so enmeshed in her routine that she would accidentally snort up an errant piece of spaghetti laying on the kitchen table. 

It got to a point where she couldn’t do anything without incorporating pasta. Whether it was part of her onstage routine or her sex life, this food group needed to be a part of it. Her pasties were shaped like meatballs, her bras featured plates of spaghetti on each cup, her underwear had days of the week pasta images on the crotch. She was fast becoming known as “the stripper with a fetishist audience.” Marianna also tried to join a religious sect known as the Pastafarians, but even they couldn’t match her uncontrollable zeal.

Soon, her passion was beginning to affect her relationships. Every time one of the other strippers suggested going out to dinner, she would instantly shout, “Russo’s Mozzarella and Pasta!,” her favorite place in the East Village. They would all shoot her a look like she was Junior fucking Soprano to their stripper mafia–an old relic of a non-anorexia era that needed to be done away with. You see, when these girls said dinner, they meant dancing, they meant drinking, they meant anything except actually eating.

Marianna was ultimately ostracized for her food choices, left to feel insecure and inhuman for her pasta lust. This eventually led her to quit the strip club, hole up in her apartment and eat without supplementing her cuisine with coke. She became so zaftig that she couldn’t get another job, least of all as a sex worker. But it didn’t matter, the pasta still beckoned.  

The fact was, she would take it any way she could get it. Even if it meant being fat, even if it meant getting it from the Olive Garden. Nothing else mattered. When once she was just an ordinary slore, now she was a pasta slore–hopeless and addicted, waiting to die from diabetes or a heart attack or the sheer and utter loneliness of no one ever being able to understand her need. So be it, she thought. She would be buried in a mound of her favorite cuisine, wrapped in it like a mummy. And this act would be the most affordable funeral rite ever given.

© Genna Rivieccio 2014