No Free Lunch

This past Sunday Izzalini hosted an all-day program in honor of a saint I'd never heard of -- undoubtedly a local luminary, although not from our locality. It turned out to be a Vatican touring show, complete with learned speakers and a dazzling red-and-white plastic tent for late-afternoon refreshments.
I can't say I noticed many extra cars parked in front of the church or an overflow crowd in the piazza after Mass. In fact, the folding plastic chairs outnumbered the audience members 4-1. And I noticed that the folks who attended the post-Mass lecture did not return for the post-lunchtime session. Others drifted in, mainly from our own parish, and the last to arrive were my Izzalini neighbors. That's because the food was last on the program.
What a feast they found in the red-and-white tent: stingy, dried-out roast pork sandwiches and plastic cups of wine, soda or bottled water. Well, most likely people found out about the event by word of mouth and nobody bothered to read the fine print in the announcement -- the line that read:
At 17.00 a snack will be served.
However, free food is free food, even if there was a donation box on the table. The cool part about the Euro is that coins go up to the equivalent of $3.00 and nobody can tell what you're dropping in.