"I guess I should have set a price before I set foot in the boat, but I felt pretty ritzy later that day as we stepped into our gondola. "How much to sing "O Sole Mio?" I asked. I had been taken with the song and Venice since seeing it in movies. If there was one piece of music associated with Venice and its canals, it was this. I knew that Pavarotti had recorded it. So had Caruso. And Mario Lanza. And Elvis Presley, recently released from the Army, had a version written for him called "It's Now Or Never." Without missing a beat the gondolieri told me, "Sixty dollars, U.S." He put his oar in the water and we splashed off. He was a pretty good singer, actually, and I imagined that we were in an old MGM Technicolor musical. My wife Roz was smiling and I was thinking, Yeah, this is a magical moment. I thought about imagining this moment from the time I was growing up in Brooklyn, and that I probably never would have wanted anything better. When we had gotten married all those years before, taking a gondola on a Venice canal, listening to "O Sole Mio" and "It's now or never", it wasn't something I even dared consider. It would have been a fantasy. Now, I was living that fantasy as we held hands and he wound up with a full-throated last note. When the sail ended, I peeled off three twenty-dollar bills, and thanked him. We walked away, humming."