I started Italian lessons on Monday. Class is from 3:30 pm to 6:45 pm with a 10-minute break at 5 pm for an espresso. There are fourteen students in the class, including Nik and me. There is a tall, handsome 50-year-old German man who laughs the way a German man in a cartoon might laugh. High-pitched staccato; “hä hä hä hä” occasionally ending in a snort. Another German woman. Two early-thirties, well-put-together, professional women from Holland. A late 30s Dutch girl who brought no other shoes to Rome except a pair of hiking sandals (something I would have pegged the Germans to do). A late 20s, slender, and smiley Portuguese woman who just exited the startup she helped found 10 years earlier. A fellow Oaklander who came to Italy for a few months to study wine. A late 40s Peruvian man… and an American from Florida: Sharon.

Everyone is beautiful and spritely. They are all in the class because they want to be, not because they have to be, meaning they all have learning Italian as their priority and hanging out in Rome as their close second. As a whole, we are a good group, except Sharon, whom I hate.

Sharon is extremely disruptive in class. With no sense of her audience and no sense of self, her turn comes to answer the rotating question, and she launches into a story, the volume of her voice set to American-Trumper.

Throughout the class, as we study different subjects, we are asked the same question by the teacher and given a chance to answer, one by one. When the time comes for Sharon to answer “Cosa fai per fare esercizio?” (What do you do for exercise?), a question asked and answered by 6 other students moments before, her response goes like this: “You’re asking what I like to do for exercise? Well, I’m from Florida, and the sole, the sun, is always shining in Florida; we have the best weather in Florida. So we swim a lot. How do you say ‘swimming’ in Italiano? Yeah, we swim, we’re always swimming. And we also have some of the best golf courses. People all over the world come to Florida to Golf. That’s where the world Golf championship…” Our teacher gently interrupts her, saying she gets it. “Nuoto, you swim. Please try to speak in Italian, Sharon”. Our teacher then turns her body and asks the same question to the student unlucky enough to sit next to Sharon that day.

The one and only time she went for apertivo with us after class, she held the group hostage. She started the night asking everyone to take turns guessing how old she was. She was crazed, pointing her attention gun at each one of us in turn, daring us to guess a number other than her obvious age. The pretty lawyer from Holland politely set the bar low at 48. We all followed suit, which pleased Sharon well enough. Only once she had a guess from every single one of us did she holster her pistol and smugly tell us she was turning 60 this year. The bomb she dropped was a dud, and though it was only metaphorical, I wished it had been real and blown us all up.

Later, during the Sharon-show, upon hearing that I was from California, she launched into all the ways California was a hell-scape and that she herself lives in Florida, where there are no problems and they don’t put litter boxes in classrooms for kids who identify as cats.

When asked what she was doing here in Rome, she explained that she works in PR and is here to evangelize her Catholic faith. She said that no one else could do what she does, and so far, she has really impressed a lot of people high up in the church with her skills. I had no idea what she was talking about and with massive effort I made conversation with someone else, psychically blocking her from engaging with me further.

Of course, if you haven’t met Sharon, you probably think I’m being a bully. The best in you is saying this is a woman just being her kooky self, living her life without shame. I am telling you that Sharon could benefit from some shame.

The main reason I give Sharon no grace is that she voted for Donald Trump. She did not come out and say this, but you can see it simmering under the surface. Her meager self-control was spent on NOT wearing a MAGA hat on the streets of Rome. It’s tempting to put in the line “I moved to Europe to get away from people like her” somewhere in this post but it wouldn’t be true. I’m also tempted to reflect on why she bothers me so much, but that would also be insincere. This woman, and the army like her, are a threat to my friends and family, to my wife and her rights, to my ability to move back to a semi-functioning democracy.

Because she very obviously continues to support Trump, I see her as a fascist, my enemy, and someone who wants others to suffer under the thumb of her righteousness. And it’s because of this, not her constant class disruptions, kooky personality, or vampiric energy, that I will see her in hell 🙂