How can I still be embarrassed by something that happened when I was 15 years old? Recently the Italian word for laundry bleach, biancolino, literally “white linen”, appeared in the captions on a cooking show, where a pleasant old lady was reminiscing about growing up in Little Italy and how the biancolino (pronounced bee-yung-go-LEEN) man would come to your house with his gallon bottles.
I remembered being sent to Cucinotta’s grocery store by my German-English mother to get a bottle of “buy-anka-leena”, her pronunciation of the label pasted over her empty Coca-Cola Syrup makeshift bleach bottle, then eventually having to point to one, and Dolores laughing and laughing and showing her white teeth.