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Italian Flag Pizza

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Yes, the Wood household is passionate about the Olympics. We have thrown several parties for the Opening Ceremonies of various games, most recently for the [Athens 2004](http://prwdot.org/2004/08/14/a-holiday/) summer games. On Friday night, we threw a party for the Opening Ceremonies of the [Torino 2006](http://www.torino2006.org/ENG/OlympicGames/home/index.html) winter games. (Warning: that site has up-to-the-minute scores, so if you’re waiting to watch a taped broadcast, don’t look!)

At the Athens party, we had nine guests, which was “just about as much as our living room could hold”. This time, we had 11 guests… so I guess it can hold a bit more than we thought. 🙂 We had sent out invitations made to look like flags from various nations, and each invitee was designated to ‘represent’ the nation whose flag was on their invitation. There was no requirement to do anything special to “represent” the nations, but some people did bring representative foods… Mark brought some French breads and cheeses (including “cheddar – the French kind”) and Zach and Andrea brought Chinese food (crab rangoon). Becky made some pizza in the form of the Italian flag – green peppers on the left, cheese in the middle, and pepperoni on the right. 🙂

The opening ceremonies themselves were interesting, as usual. The theme for this Olympics, as seen in the title of this post, is “Passion Lives Here”. So the ceremony involved a lot of flame, including a bunch of people on inline skates with flame-throwing helmets, collectively referred to as “Sparks of Passion”. There were a number of musical and dramatic performances, including one near the end by Luciano Pavarotti. The Parade of Nations, of course, is always fun to watch: critiquing each delegation’s chosen uniform, counting the number of people holding camcorders, cameras, and cell phones, and reciting selected trivia for any given nation. Our only disappointment is that NBC had advertised the Opening Ceremonies as starting at 8 p.m., but actually showed clips of various Olympic trials and interviews with athletes for the first hour.

I didn’t take many compelling photos, but here’s a photo of [Becky with the Italian flag pizza](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/etcetera/grab_bag/P1070366.JPG.html), and a photo of the [flags of the “nations” that were invited to our party](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/etcetera/grab_bag/P1070367.JPG.html).

Enjoy the 2006 Torino Winter Games! I know we will!