Goombah 101.(The Talk of the Town)(The Sopranos: A Wake)

Over Memorial Day weekend, fittingly, Fordham University hosted a conference called "The Sopranos: A Wake." Among the papers were "'Blabbermouth Cunts': 'The Sopranos' and the Feminist Dilemma," "A 'Finook' in the Crew: Vito Spatafore, 'The Sopranos,' and the Queering of the Mob Genre," and "Slouching Toward Jersey: 'The Sopranos' and Yeats." David Lavery, a television scholar, called the show "an excellent example of a Bakhtinian dialogical text." Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, of Manchester Metropolitan University, in England, discussed Carmela's collusion with the patriarchy and their consequent struggle "to deconstruct our attraction to her"--a project that had occupied them for seven years. While these people were sober academics, they were also "Sopranos" freaks. When a presenter quoted an unremarkable line from one episode of this eight-year series--Tony saying, of a gorilla, that it "could maul you into ten pieces"--he was corrected by an audience member: "It's 'could innocently maul you into ten pieces.' "

The most compelling presentations were not by the theorists but by other kinds of expert. Dianna Rivers, a professor of nursing from Texas, discussed the financial difficulties that Tony's men, not employed by the kind of organization that offers Blue Cross, faced as a result of their frequent hospitalizations. Philip Scala, a retired F.B.I. agent, said that the ritual by which Christopher was "made" was entirely accurate, down to the burning of the saint's picture, but that, as part of the lowering of standards so often deplored by Tony, the DeCa-valcante family, said to be the model for Tony's crew, had abandoned the ceremony: "They would just have a pizza party and say, 'You're made.' " (This caused other families to disrespect them.) Two brave men involved in Mafia cleanups in Sicily--Fabio Licata, a judge, and Antonio Ingroia, a prosecutor--reported that "The Sopranos" never caught on with Italians. "They didn't understand how a Mafia boss could have psychological problems," Ingroia said.

The best session was an interview with Dominic Chianese, or Uncle Junior, who is much handsomer without those enormous glasses which the costumers made him wear, obviously to reveal his gift for acting with his eyes. Chianese discussed the scene in which Uncle Junior smashes a pie in his girlfriend's ...