Nana Biography

Oh, your French must be good.

Well, I can speak French, but with a very poor accent because we all had such – you know, girls are terrible. It’s just a terrible thing when you have the opportunity with real French people, our teachers were all French.

Your teachers were French.

Yes, we had native speaking French teachers. To me, instead of mimic them, we made fun, sort of. We spoke the language, but poorly. But I didn’t ever learn to speak Italian really as well, but I learned to cope.

Did you like learning languages?

Oh, I loved it. I just loved it. I mean, Italian, I thought that was really fine because I loved living in Italy and one of the fun things was, we got into a bridge group, you know, I told you, I like games and stuff, and so we got in, and instead of just being law professors, for a change, I got in with a group that played bridge. 

There was one judge there that we knew,– Italians are just nuts about bridge, and when they found out that John and I played bridge, we got invited out almost every night to play bridge. And a typical Wednesday evening, about five in the afternoon the phone would ring and somebody would ask me, all in Italian, to have an early supper and come over for bridge. That meant that you would have supper around nine, you would go there around 10:30, the last person invited would come around 11, and there would be two or three tables, sometimes four. The host would manage, the wife never did. No host, no husband ever played with his wife, there were more men than women present.you were told then to sit they played for money, not a lot but enough, so it was fun, all in Italian, and I sat, I remember the very first evening I sat down. I was a little nervous.

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