Steeltown Sicilian

>> Cu’Fu tells the tale of growing up
Italian in Hamilton

by MATTHEW WOODLEY

“Sicilian family members don’t betray each other for something as insignificant as a crime,” says Calogero “Charly” Chiarelli over the phone from Kingston. The performance artist is telling me a story of late teendom in the Italian-rich north end of Hamilton. Before heading out to a rock ’n’ roll show with a group of non-Italian friends—a relatively new bunch for a kid who had spent most of his life in the same ’hood—Chiarelli suggested they puff a joint. And his old man caught a whiff.

“So I do this whole number where my father smells it, asks what it is, then starts screaming that this is ‘cigaretta de la Mafia,’ that I could go to jail for this. I said, ‘Well you smoke, why don’t you try it?’ He takes a toke and says, ‘For this you go to jail?’ So he picks the seeds from the pile on the kitchen table and tells me, ‘Don’t buy this from the Mafia anymore, I’ll plant these in the backyard.’ And there began what can be construed as a very liberal attitude from a very agrarian, seemingly culture-shocked old man.”

Chiarelli’s in town this weekend to perform Cu’Fu, his biographical one-man show at the Mirelli & Lino Saputo theatre in St-Leonard. “Cu’Fu?” translates into “Who did it?”

“It’s such a quintessential Sicilian expression,” says Chiarelli. “Sicilians want to know. If you bestow kindness to a Sicilian, you get back more than you’ve given. And if you don’t, well we have a reputation of vendetta. We wanna know who did it.”

Cu’Fu traces the lives of a Sicilian family who immigrated to a working-class Hamilton neighbourhood in 1949, then home to 10,000 people from the same town of Racalmuto. In just under two hours, he slips into several skins: his mother, father, siblings, an abrasive welfare lady and Charly, from a nine year old up to the time of his father’s death two years ago. He glues the stories together with a dozen “Anglo/Sicilian” blues tunes that he plays on the harmonica, which he taught himself at age 12 and developed over the years, having performed all over the globe and fronted a symphony to boot.

While hanging onto his day job at the Ontario Ministry of Health (he has a master’s degree in social work), Chiarelli has been telling the tale of Cu’Fu for six years from packed halls to small rooms to psychotherapists’ conventions (“After the show they thanked me for sharing,” he says). The show has collected rave reviews for its magnetic storytelling.

“This isn’t a niche piece that I’m doing, although the Italians have claimed it,” he says. “But I’ve also had Chinese people come up to me and say, ‘Hey you’re telling my story’. It’s universal immigration stuff.” :

Cu’Fu, Friday, Aug. 16, Mirelli & Lino Saputo theatre in the Leonardo da Vinci Centre
(8370 Lacordère, st-leonard), 8pm, $15

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