Interdependence Day at E.T.A. — Mario's *ONANtiad* film, the annual O.N.A.N. rite

texture · 8 Nov YDAU

• When: 8 Nov YDAU (2009), Continental Interdependence Day; the film screens ~1930h after supper
• What: The Enfield Tennis Academy's annual I.-Day gala — hats, suspended dietary rules, Mrs. Clarke's desserts — climaxes in Mario Incandenza's puppet-film, a kids' adaptation of his late father's four-hour anticonfluential political parody The ONANtiad (events 1-9, 14 here are narrated through it). Where Mario plays political historian, Himself mostly didn't: per n176 the original ONANtiad was "more centrally concerned with doomed high-office claymation romance than with political comment" — a doomed, unconsummated Gentle affair with a Canadian minister's germophobic wife — so even the parody's parent is a love story, not a chronicle. Mario's version has proven more popular with E.T.A.'s adults than with the children it was made for; the Canadian students (John Wayne among them) sit unhatted and stone-faced, feeling "with special poignancy on 11/8 the implications of their being down here, south of the border." The screening is the thread's framing device — O.N.A.N. history preserved and mocked as institutional ritual. See the Mario timeline, the JOI timeline (The ONANtiad); the E.T.A. thread (event 13) (the gala as E.T.A. institution).