100% Real Juice: The Sopranos

It’s amazing that a mob show could have so many hidden gems.

After all, it’s not the most logical first guess. Life lessons from The Sopranos? How on earth could one find insight from a show full of gangsters, violence, strippers, and liberal use of the word “fuck”? Liberal use of all profanity, actually, mixed with heaping tablespoons of political incorrectness, copious whackings, and slaughter of the Italian language.

Then again, Tony has been in therapy since the show’s incarnation. Really, is there anything more fun or ironic than a mobster in touch with his emotional side?

This juice doesn’t come from the boss though, it comes from the writers of the show via Tony’s uncle, Corrado Soprano, known to us as Junior. Old man Junior, with the honking glasses, shooting his mouth off and giving orders no one listens to. He tried to kill his nephew twice, which I suppose would strain any family relations, but every now, surprisingly, he does have his pearls of wisdom. Such as:

That’s what being a boss is. You steer the ship the best way you know. Sometimes it’s smooth. Sometimes you hit the rocks.

Junior means “boss” as in, head of an organized crime family, but a boss can be many different things. The ship he speaks of is the course of life.

If any one of us is never the boss of anything, we must always know that we are boss to ourselves. As for steering the ship, we make our ways through life the best way we can, doing the best with the weather we’re given. Sometimes it’s smooth sailing; other times, we hit the rocks.

I may not be a goomba, but I’ll always be my very own captain. We all are; no one can ever take that away. As long as there are no whackings, that’s a pretty damn good thing.