Beautiful Things, Part One

The shop “Beautiful Things" had been a fixture on Sycamore for as long as anyone could remember and was one of those old fashioned anchors that fix time in a fast changing neighborhood. The street on which the store stood actually was not called Sycamore but merely had a number; these nondescript numerals however did no justice to the long rows of large trees with peeling barks that lined the sidewalk, so I decided to change the name. “Sycamore” was only one block long, a winding and steep incline connecting two broader commercial avenues and had a kind of mid-century appeal that made this part of the city feel more like a village than an urban grid of humorless red brick buildings. The street housed just four small “ma & pa” businesses alongside the two-family houses and pre-war apartments: a bakery, a tiny beauty salon, a shoe repair and the gift shop; together these comprised a small town fantasy in the midst of a large, noisy and increasingly annoying residential area that slowly had been taken over by the usual gang of chain stores and an influx of tacky merchandise. The chain stores sold things like plastic serving trays with strange Santa motifs, fuzzy red stockings of unidentifiable fabric for hanging on your non-existent fireplace, suspiciously out of date shiny bags of Ghiradelli chocolate and big, ugly rubber skeletons that during the earlier October holiday seemed to kick off the whole seasonal madness.

Beautiful Things was wedged in between the shoe repair and pastry shop about halfway up the hill, its hall mark a display window that though quite small was nothing less than mesmerizing. It was impossible to resist gazing into this semi-precious cave of wonders while out doing the chores or running from one mind numbing, mundane errand to the next without stopping. On rich, black velvet jewelry pads carefully placed for optimum viewing sat marcasite pins that blazed like diamonds, glittering ovals of amber and polished stones of blue topaz sharing the reflected glow of the overhead track lights with pewter letter openers and miniature Tiffany-style lamps; semi-precious objects totally unnecessary for survival but succeeding in prompting all sorts of forgotten longings and desires for small luxuries. The window itself faced southwest, and when the afternoon sun bounced off the glass the whole sparkling collage became addictively hypnotic. 

The interior of the store was no larger than fifteen by twenty feet or so, with a kind of closet-office in the back hidden behind a flowery curtain. Once inside one immediately was bedazzled by the jewelry boxes- some of them musical with slowly turning ballerinas- as well as a colorful selection of silk scarves and ties, one-of-a-kind tea pots, ceramic vases, hand-painted dishes and of course piles of rings, bracelets and chokers, all neatly stacked inside the three-tiered glass case behind which the proprietors ruled their little kingdom of chotchkas. There were also a few obligatory gag gifts such as miniature slot machines and sleek, tiny clocks with sun dials that went all the way up to the year of infinity, but everything was tastefully arranged and carefully selected at the “shows” which Mel and Ruby always seemed to be attending. I know just what you’re looking for, Ruby would assure you after the better part of an hour spent considering a of shiny array of objects, none of which exactly did the trick; You want something smaller, daintier, perhaps with an amethyst in the center, right? They’ll probably have them at the show we’re going to next week- come back then. And she acted very much like she meant it. She would find this for you. Her mission was not to stoke the embers of your flagging, mindless consumerism, that vague yen that left you succumbing to ads trying to convince you that what you really required were seven different kinds of bathroom cleaners or a thirty-eight different face creams, but actually to locate that one special object that would totally change your life, or at least this was what she wanted you to believe. Ruby wasn’t really being helpful at such moments, even though she appeared to be holding out the carrot of finding “exactly the right thing,” this mainly having to do with her insane anxiety. She was so incredibly anxiety-ridden she could barely conceal her maniacal sense of impending doom for fear that perhaps one of the display “trees” of dangly earrings might just topple over with the customer’s next sneeze; this nervousness of manner comprising a kind of existential tick tended to upset the whole tight little sense of controlled cordiality she tried so hard to maintain in the store. . . .

The Works

It’s clear that this food thing that's taken hold of me is a kind of run up to Thanksgiving and probably will not desist until the last kale chip has been crunched. . . . Yet even as I continued to complain bitterly about the plethora of weird veggie dishes lurking far, far west of the New England border, as it turned out my shock and awe at being thrown on the mercy of SoCal cuisine paled next to the realization that there are things even worse than braised broccolini twists, and that everything is indeed relative. . .

Amid the unrelenting blaze of a sun an hour or so south of LA, with rays so trenchant and searing they actually burned through your clothes, in my ultra violet haze I had all but forgotten that another “country” existed in the Golden State too, the ultra cool Bay Area, and that this part of the land had its own particular set of trendy horrors as well.

It all started a few years before when I had occasion to visit San Francisco and wound up having dinner in Berkeley one evening. Almost everything in the area, every business, every eatery, every yogurt stand, had a tendency to give itself a name that ended in “collective” or  “works,” or worse, “worx,” with a dive called Wok Werx being the last straw; eventually we’d had enough and were looking for something a tad more grown up. Through word-of-mouth we found a restaurant located on the main street of a quiet residential neighborhood; a modest store front that led us into a small, squarish dining room, with a tiny bar at the front used mainly for waiting. There was however a lovely little garden in the back visible through a floor to ceiling window wall and the effect was one of space yet intimacy; needless to say, every table was taken and the chatter was the proverbial lively yet subdued. Had we finally struck pay dirt?

It was late in June and the days were long, though thin shadows already were forming at the dinner hour. Ravenna was the type of place that struck you as low key and unassuming and yet quizzically reminded in some way of the Italian Riviera or perhaps an exclusive English club peopled entirely by the Energetically Hip and Environmentally Enmeshed. The wait staff was efficient and professional, almost to the point f making you feel as if you didn't quite measure up, though they stopped just short of that, leaving you dangling on the precipice of insecurity and self-doubt. The menu- the essence of nouvelle cuisine- took itself tres seriously, and the diners albeit casual in attire were anything but cavalier about their vittles; they read their menus intently and there was a quiet insistence in the way they grilled their servers about the special nuances of each and every ingredient. The end result for me was one of hesitancy about ordering anything for fear of making a mistake; it was clear no one would help if you faltered and the atmosphere could best be described as hipster-formal. I recall sitting rather stiffly on my chair with a half smile plastered to my lips, hoping not to reveal my total ignorance of the culinary refinements and eccentricities of NoCal cuisine, either to our waiter or the nearby diners with their impeccably perky yet knowing restaurant deportment, lest I be found out as the uninformed east coast naïf that I was. . . .

To make matters worse, after putting in our prosaic request for two poached salmons and a salad, we noticed the couple next to us had self-devised a kind of intricate tasting menu, wherein they would share each mysterious little dish that was successively placed before them in the middle of the table for sharing, then comment to each other with a kind of thumbs up/ thumbs down action before signaling the waiter to bring on the next delicacy. This obvious display of expert knowledge and discernment made us feel even more clueless and callow. What kind of cave people soothed their palates with two slabs of fish amid such esoteric choices? We continued however to bravely nurse our wine- thin stems with giant bowls and about an inch of chardonnay at the bottom- and were much relieved when the house mesclun salads finally appeared, determined as we were to get through the evening with egos somewhat intact.

It was just after our entrees arrived and the neighbors were up to their tenth or so tiny tasting dish that the first rumblings began. The sound was like distant thunder but much deeper in pitch and a bit longer lasting. The diners momentarily ceased their activity for a second or two with a kind of brief and fleeting suspended animation almost like an afterthought before the clatter of cutlery noisily started up again. A couple of minutes later the rumblings began anew, only this time louder and more persistent with eerie echoes in the background, and everyone more or less froze in place, forks in hand. All eyes shot to the garden for some strange reason, which suddenly had taken on a vaguely sinister air. It was as if these belching tremors of the earth were making an announcement over a cosmic PA system: Look at me goddammit!!! Stop with the gourmet shtick already and drop your butter knives! I am here to introduce the coming of the Big One! Hey everyone, it’s the Big One, the Big One!! The one you’ve all been dreading. . . .

The terror was palpable on people’s faces even as they attempted to tamp it down by pretending to be merely mildly concerned. With this latest round of roaring kabooms all the activity in the room instantly had propelled itself into a kind of terse, silent pantomime that lasted at least ten agonizing seconds, after which the tension spontaneously dissipated into a mildly hysterical collective buzz, and the whole uptight atmosphere turned into one giant Love In. Everyone suddenly was consumed with the desire to make small talk with their neighbor. Cheese Doodle lovers were hangin’ with coq10 addicts and Wise potato chip aficionados schmoozed with the au gratin set. The tasting twosome next to us insisted on knowing our names while politely averting their gaze from our poached salmons. It was party time! The Big One had been forestalled yet again, at least for one more day.  And this was a way to live??? An entire population of flax seed aficionados swam before my eyes as I pictured them slowly downing that last strip of gently marinated rhubarb before the earth opened and swallowed them, for good. 

We passed on dessert as the portions were fairly large, and honestly we felt as if we could not digest another morsel. All in all probably not the most relaxing ambiance, but I will say that the place was clean and the food fresh, if a tad overpriced.

I give it three and half stars mainly because of the location, a major fault. . . . 

Dinner Mexicano at the SoCal Corral

I am screaming.

Those around me are screaming.

One of my table companions has just stopped screaming- I know this because his lips are no longer moving- and I am attempting to scream back.

I scream ‘till I am hoarse but it’s of no avail as no one can hear me and no one ever will, not here anyway. The “acoustics” in this cave-like rotunda that opens onto to the street are non-existent; it’s just a long space with some tables nearer the sidewalk and others way back in the heart of darkness or should I say el corazon oscuro at this “SoCal” eatery that specializes in something called “Mexican Fusion” even though all the dishes have beans and guacamole and look like tacos and are hot. So there are no acoustics, just silent screams amid the deafening din and collective roar of a hungry crowd.

The place, a bit like a patch of the rodeo, sort of rumbles and can best be described as “all the rage” since both the patrons and servers seem to be in various states of fury. After several minutes of mouthing screams and engaging in other futile pantomimes our waiter finally appears, suddenly and rather startlingly, contentiously aiming a small flashlight at one of the menus, the very one in fact which I am holding every which way in an attempt to decipher the words in the near pitch blackness but with little success; however this almost too sharp beam of LED illumination does not do much to clarify a list of arcane ingredients and dishes which I am having exceptional difficulty in comprehending. The truth is I have never heard of most of these concoctions and suspect that the reason is they do not actually exist, nor have they ever existed prior to the fashioning of this complicated list of “authentic” fare that really is comprised of old dishes with new names. This is of no matter though, as the guy makes it painfully clear that if I do not decide within the next three and a half seconds he simply will move on to a nearby table of screamers and we may never see him again and certainly not until hell freezes over. He seems anxious, petulant and on the verge of bolting, so in a moment of induced hysteria I point frantically to something under the category of “salad” that has the world “tomato” next to it along with some other letters that I cannot make out.

When my plate eventually arrives abut a forty-five minutes later it seems that everything on it is chopped into miniscule pieces and piled up perilously high into a kind of pyramid of diced shards; ironically I am not able to discern anything that resembles tomato. When I tentatively stick my fork into the side of this small, fragile mountain of hotness and tension, the whole thing shudders and shakes somewhat violently and then comes tumbling down like the bric-a-brac off a shelf during a small California earthquake.

I make a small meal of little chunks of bread that taste suspiciously like A & P and hunt for a door frame under which to stand while the others finish their meal. . . .

Flying Food and Crazy Lunch

 "Our Clean Store Starts Here"                                                                                                               
This is what the sign quizzically proclaimed outside of “Mother’s,” a chic and purportedly motherly(?) Santa Ana version of the Whole Foods scene. So why would this self-described allegiance to the quality of pristine constitute a problem for me? Am I some sort of unrepentant slob of a food shopper who gravitates primarily toward besmirched dairy cases and encrusted globs of produce? No, no, a thousand times no! It’s just that really, really clean though I will admit to being- as in hating and avoiding food stores with grimy, loose grapes rolling about a sticky produce section- I actually am not that clean that I need to be forewarned about the state of my food markets; and I am also wondering if anyone is that clean- to the point of having to be reassured with a sign no less about the state of the premises prior to entering- outside of course of a few unfortunate OCD sufferers in the world. And along these same lines, if this assurance is indeed needed to attract customers, am I then to believe that a large swath of Orange County is afflicted with the strange compulsion that so beset Lady Macbeth, among others?

Probably not, but why belabor the point- it’s just a sign.

So I ran my hands under the awaiting germ killing soap dispenser that stood sentry outside the doors and ventured into the Clean Store convinced that at the least I probably would not contract ebola or even the common cold, quickly eyed the cute little stools at the lunch counter facing the large front window that offered a view of the mall with its merciless sun shining malevolently down on the cars and brand name shops, and decided I would go the self-serve way and load up on some exceptionally creative and tasty west coast nutrients for an easy and perhaps insanely healthful lunch.

And that’s when the craziness started, the frightening plethora of exotic choices that suddenly appeared, and it became distressingly confusing, fast.

There were soooo many ways to attack that burgeoning-with-eternal- life, self-serve salad bar and hissingly steaming, large hot food counter at the back that I quickly became disoriented, anxious and tentative. Did I really want to shovel all the goodies into what looked like a rather unappealing brown cardboard container, or rather slam the soup, taboule dishes and such into a few of those small, round, white cardboard coffee cups??? Would I chuck the whole cardboard debacle in favor of standing in line for something mysteriously entitled “The Bowl” and opt for Styrofoam-like security instead???” And there were so many dishes featuring tofu that almost all the selections listed were in quotes to indicate that they were perfectly and mercifully safe and animal free, such as “chicken” and “turkey” and “eggs” and “milk” and finally, “food.” Then the very descriptions of the salads themselves made my head spin:

-salsa, cilantro, guac lentil balls with sprinkles of natural licorice and dabs of serenity

-saffron rice with smoked corn kernels and infusion of exceptionally long life

-cous-cous, carob, cauliflower, citrus, cranberry, chile crepes and anything that begins with the letter “c”

I could go on and on but will just mention one particular juice drink that I found particularly upsetting:

Cuke, celery, kale, chard, spinach, granny smith apple, wheat grass avocado, mint smoothie and nothing non-green need apply. . . .

You’ve probably gotten the picture by now and may be wondering what you would have done faced with a similar choice. Well, in the service of simplifying I opted for the brown cardboard catch-all box of god-knows-whats all mixed together from the brimming buffet thinking this would handily solve the problem, then speedily installed myself on one of the little window stools only to realize they were exceptionally low, even for me, and experienced further and almost unbearable consternation when I found that the large flaps used to close the box for carrying had a nasty habit of falling into the food when opened as you attempted to eat your healthy, diverse bunch of salads, even when you tried to push them back and fold them safely away from the food; they were almost like living things.

I felt as if I were losing my mind, downed a few forkfuls and couldn’t wait to get out of there.

In the end of course, I told everyone what a great place it was and why on earth don’t we have more choices like that here. . . .
                                 

Food Flying Breakfast and the Music that Drove Me Mad

A Marriott breakfast is a thing to behold.

Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” plays mercilessly in the lobby of the hotel albeit at 7:00 in the morning even though it is not Jackson himself zinging it over the speakers but a Jackson imitator- an hour or so before the unremitting sun begins to burn through your clothes- alternating with simulacra performances of much too familiar Beach Boys tunes. Occasionally a genuine Aretha Franklin ditty is thrown in to imbue the musakical soundtrack thunderously wafting through the large space perhaps with a modicum of authenticity and plant the notion in your brain that this is not really a form of mind control.

Ah, morning in Irvine!!! The entirety of Orange County appears to be  cloaked in a kind of moaning soft rock subtext that is not all that “sub” and sort of bangs you over the head wherever you happen to be, with melodies mainly from the nineteen fifties and sixties that were better left behind; the ubiquitous soundtrack however seems to fit perfectly in some truly terrible way with the huge sunglasses everyone wears to stave off early blindness. You are assaulted with this noise at all the big box stores and some little ones too; it becomes impossible to grab lunch or find the kind of tissues or toilet paper or SPF 1,000 sunscreen you seek while these cacophonous beats drill through your consciousness.

A typical day: I exit the elevator with its sonorous ping way too early  as I do each morning, nod in the direction of the unusually friendly and alert front desk folk and bop through the lobby to the sound of knock-offs from the “Thriller” album, not fully awake yet, not entirely clothed, but yearning for one of those frozen undersized bagel look-a-likes and tiny packets of solidified cream cheese or hardened dollops of jam similarly wedged into foil; from a distance the thing on which these odd condiments land resembles a bialy gone very, very wrong or a weird, uncooked donut, but close up it tastes sort of like one of those stiff, round objects found in the supermarket frozen case minus the highly chemical, vaguely onion flavor that makes these soft sponges of re-heated ice chips almost palatable when you prepare them at home in your toaster oven. Be that as it may, I devour the repast in about two bites and thank my lucky stars for the cappuccino impersonator that accompanies this meal because at least it looks like the real thing. The word that most comes to mind in this neck of the woods is “cardboard,” because it’s all recyclable.

After a couple of days of this sad though exciting ritual of unappetizing food and rousing music in a scene peopled largely by bright-eyed-bushy-tailed corporate conference attendees roaming around in identically colored pale blue shirts with an assortment of ties and slightly glazed stares, I have all but forgotten that low fat double chocolate muffins exist and that there are aromatic beans sitting in huge barrels three thousand miles away at Zabar’s, giving off a pungent, mouth watering scent of real coffee as a suitably classical piece on low volume gently nudges the background, and that there are  lines of slightly edgy shoppers cracking cynical, funny jokes with the servers and looking comfortably scruffy; that it may even be raining or at the least cloudy and that all this exists as we speak, as I type, as Marriotts all over the globe begin to serve their version of breakfast.

Fear of (Food) Flying, Part One

I survey my fellow passengers to rule out potential terrorists and am relieved it’s a fairly benign looking group. Asians tend to wear surgical masks when flying and the guy across the way has a really neat one on- it has a thick double ear loop and a sturdy, rather sleek looking breathing cup to match his streamlined, shiny laptop with which he is seriously engaged. I’m tempted to ask him where he got the mask but desist from doing so and am convinced in any case that he will be food-less during the flight because of the mess involved.

We are on our way to Food Police Central Command- California! - and I am dreading what I will find on the menu there, but for now we are at ground zero of that which is barely edible and will remain in this position for several hours as we cozily rub up against our strange new companions on even smaller, slimmer, more crowded, more energy efficient planes as the flight attendant explains when we comment on the coffin-like atmosphere; she rhapsodizes that they too miss the old 767s where next to these you could dance in the aisles. As soon as the seat belt signal goes off, people stealthily start whipping out their meager airport provisions trying not to bump elbows with their seat companions. The couple next to me quietly produces two cellophane wrapped sandwiches and when the guy chomps down on his it oozes a substance from all sides resembling vegetable cream cheese, even though I know it cannot possibly be vegetable cream cheese as he simply does not look like a vegetable cream cheese kind of guy but more of a pulled pork man. His pony-tailed companion carefully unwraps something tidier, a pile of closely packed thin slices in between two brownish squares of whole grain bread and a bit later she will discreetly place a banana peel on the tray carefully folded and then leave it there for the duration, during which time I will have to gaze upon it every time I incline my head to the right.  It’s ironic, air travel really does not inspire hunger  and yet the smell of those invisible plastic “snacks” they heat up in the back- rewarmed frozen pizza? Petrified chicken cacciatore? Sizzling Twinkie-like cakes?- creates a sort of sense memory of longing for a hot meal, perhaps like the old aromatic canned spaghetti and ketchupy sauce once served at the automat. I myself have stowed a low-fat double chocolate muffin from Zabar’s but since I had to purchase it two days before flying it implodes when touched.

Three and a half hours into the flight they’re coming around again with the rolling carts, this time with myriad little cups of feces water, a liquid which I refuse to drink having just learned from Yahoo that you should never partake of airline H2O for above reasons of gross contamination, and so I ask for a seltzer. An hour or so later I am sitting close enough to business to see the flight attendants deferentially deliver warm, damp facecloths to the One Percent comfortably ensconced in their big seats, then collect the towels as if in a sushi bar before delicately plopping them onto a tray with some sort of pincers; the action is a cross between a ritual that happens in the operating room and a fancy Japanese restaurant.

The clouds are starting to look like generous masses of white mousse with ice blue streaks flowing through and I wonder what flavor that concoction tastes like and if I will find it in the land of All Things Fresh and Good. As we start to deplane like a long, slow conga line at a 1960’s “Love In” I bid a fond farewell to the trail of chip and pretzel wrappers glutinously dotting the aisle like petals from a flower girl’s basket along with the random, defiant gatherings of crumbs here and there that seem to say they do not give a fig (or an olive or a pomegranate for that matter) about the land of nouvelle or novel cuisine- a place where I will encounter the foot soldiers of chocolate chip-soy-avocado shakes and worse- and I prepare to meet them bravely. . . .  

The Food Police and Tyrannous Gluten

What’s worse than being born with three heads or the prospect of a nuclear holocaust? The unabashed tyranny of gluten, that’s what- a scourge that is truly hard to fathom in a twenty-first century world!

It’s egregious, this complete disregard for dietary evil personified, a rampant addiction to toast and bialys that has more than a whiff of the sacrilegious about it- do we really wish to live by bread alone? Clearly, we are still in the stone age of nutritional, spiritual and mental health. I mean, how stupid and in denial are we, thinking that those spine chilling glutinous substances only present a danger to the 1 in 133 Americans clinically diagnosed with Celiac disease. Now everyone can act as if they have this unfortunate affliction- why discriminate? We like to pride ourselves on the fact that we are an inclusive society, and what better place to start than where it counts, in the gut?

And speaking of grains, whole or otherwise, these guys are far from innocent, being the very hosts in which the culprit thrives plus having their own set of malfeasances. An entire wannabe pop best seller recently devoted itself to the horrors of genetically engineered grain monsters that purportedly result in the flesh eating, soul mashing condition of something (I shudder to say it) called Wheat Belly. . .  a prospect meant to frighten, warn and disgust. As we know, any belly of prominence is to be scrupulously avoided unless you want to look like a rotund silly whose buttons are too tight and have pants that strangle, but this particular chubby mid section against which the author admonishes apparently presages something far, far worse: instantaneous fatality followed by eternal damnation by the Food Police; I really have to force myself to avert my eyes whenever I see ads for the book and have had trouble saying the word “belly” since I learned of the phenomenon. So between the nightmare of gluten and the slippery slope of Thomas’ Whole Wheat English Muffins, what’s a breakfaster to do? A hearty repast of merely butter and jam? Just a few baked blueberries, no actual muffin? Invisible popovers? The chocolate chips minus the cookie dough? And if you’ve ever had the pleasure of interacting with that yellowish, translucent, strangely tasting rice product that’s meant to stand in for ziti, or those sickeningly sweetish, stale looking masses of crumbs pretending to be pastries, I think you will agree that look-a-like pretenders are out- the only thing worse than being maimed for life by gluten is engaging with anything that touts itself as “gluten-free. . . .”

So many dangers out there, so much treachery at every turn, but it would appear all pales next to gluten, the genuine perpetrator of everything unseemly in the cosmos. Forget international terrorism and the spread of highly contagious bubonic plague-like diseases, worldwide hunger, endless war, pestilence, famine, cyber attacks and the destruction of the ozone layer, to say nothing of the polar ice caps melting away- this is all mere child’s play. The real and present threat we face on a daily basis seems to be that which croissants are made of, and why may I ask is our dysfunctional congress not doing anything about this??? Bid your birthday cakes adieu. Bagels will soon be a thing of the past. Pizza is more destructive to your digestive system than arsenic. Baguettes simply have got to go. And yes, even whole wheat pasta. . . well, in this last case it may not be such a loss.

The media of course has been suppressing the extent of the gluten pandemic, probably on the orders of government officials sworn to secrecy in order to prevent widespread panic and other catastrophes like bread burning orgies and the large scale dumping of bags of pretzels into the oceans thus leading to further environmental damage. In truth, the only way I can even wrap my brain around the horrific possibility of an imminent gluten Armageddon is to think back to one of my favorite sci-fi movies, “The Blob” with the ineffable Steve McQueen. Who could ever forget the scene wherein the gooey rather glutinous as it happens mass of red jelly that has been taking over the world suddenly oozes through a projector room, swallowing the projectionist and sending the story’s theater going audience running  screaming as they flee for the exits. . . .

Ah, those were the days of sheer imagined terror! In truth, I think we miss ‘em in these times of real catastrophes and thus the need for a new bogey man, often disguised as a nicely spherical San Francisco sourdough or a mild mannered raisin challah, with the occasional kaiser roll or chillingly fearsome rosemary ciabatta thrown in for added shock value. They’re saying that if you gaze too long upon a peasant bread your partner will turn to salt. Will this never end? I try not to think about it and have sworn off watching or listening to the news for fear the “g” word may be mentioned. It’s just too darn upsetting. 

The Food Police: Quinoa

There’s a distinct snob value in knowing how to pronounce quinoa (keen WAH). You do not want to be caught musing aloud in the health food store or at the burgeoning tabouli-bulgar-cous cous-wild rice section at Fairway that for some time now you’ve been itching to try kee-NOA (or much, much worse, kwee-NOA). It immediately will brand you as some kind of retro, twentieth century food ignoramus who still eats fruit loops.

In truth, it’s all about the name here and it can be quite intimidating. The food police like to remind us that there are basically two types of people in the world: those who know how to say the word and those who do not; this division of food class creates chasms of socio-political-economic differences that speak volumes about your dress style, choice of music, voting habits, number of plastic bags used in a lifetime, breed of dogs cleaved to, type of movies watched, whether you have an iphone or an android or neither, if you practice yoga or pilates, cross training or walking, which browser you prefer, the vagaries of your moral compass and life expectancy to the minute.

It’s all so smarmy, and for what? The particular grain, whose name I refuse to type again lest I give “them” the satisfaction of knowing that I too have succumbed to pressure and learned how to bandy it around without a shred of linguistic awkwardness, is completely tasteless and tends to make people stutter when trying to say it. It’s a loser big time against such formidable competitors as kasha, which can also be used to help comprise a knish, and wheatberry, another fiber blockbuster with a much more charming name evocative not only of all things wholesome and clean  but also of fairy tale meadows. Are they kidding or what? The stuff has a weird, trick spelling and is boring beyond belief. And most sadly, there really is no way to jazz up that ubiquitous, obstinate mulch of tiny kernels completely devoid of any flavor- the dish is simply the queen (pronounced KWEEN, not KEEN) of bland.

Bland, bland, bland!

And I will not take back those words, even at the threat of being excommunicated from the kitchy kwizeene klub.

The Food Police: Kale

Organic produce is not pretty. I just needed to say that. It has to be said.

C’mon folks, when was the last time you actually had the urge to bite into a nice, crumpled organic peach, or worse, a creased and spotted nectarine? They look a bit like shriveled spaldeens. The avocados are positively growth stunted and the limes more than a bit creepy. But the organic insanity is just the tip of the iceberg, no pun on that much maligned, prosaic head of lettuce once used basically as sandwich filler in the glory days when Wonder Bread reigned. Nowadays it’s all about giant globs of food foliage, huge bundles of garden fodder that look like mid-sized bushes or house plants on steroids, whether pure and straight from the earth or tainted, partially frozen and sprayed with baddies; it has to arrive on a stem and be big, very big. And this “greens” craze can be downright scary if only in terms of the actual space these humongous, unruly plants and veritable small trees take up in your shopping bag and then your fridge, with or without pesticides. Despite these obvious detriments, I succumbed to the hype; and as a result this tale could very well have been entitled “Kale: A Journey of Love, Loss and Acceptance.”

I first started hearing about kale through my vegetarian friends, those good intentioned souls in search of immortality through beta carotene who casually throw off now and again with just the slightest hint of sanctimony that they sautéed some up for dinner; or that a clump of branches from the edenic shrub had been included in their weekly food co-op delivery. This cornucopia of healthy fare comes by way of a local growers cult that basically rations what you will be eating under the guise of “available and fresh,” even though you live in the food capital of the universe and the untamed, somewhat feral looking contents of the box left outside your door often look amazingly unappetizing. Though not a cult member myself I had heard the word “kale” without actually ever having had occasion to use it and knew that it was something crunchy, curative and cool along with its pal the rather dashing and romantic sounding “Swiss chard,” but beyond that I had not given it much thought. Would I even recognize it in the produce section?

My encounter with Big Green happened as I stood staring at the veggie counter one day trying to figure out if I should try some watercress or just play it safe and just grab the romaine. But in truth the watercress could wilt before you even got it home and I desperately needed a change, even at the risk of being called fickle. And that’s when I first noticed it, that big curly-headed lug of a Green with a capital “G” that made me think of bouquets and spring and unheard melodies. The large swath of exotic foliage looked so fresh and happy- dare I say sexy?- I was envisioning detoxifying like crazy, garnering intense light rays of energy as I went and possibly achieving immortality. And so I began to figure out how to prepare it.

For those of you who have gone this terrible route, starry eyed and hopeful only to be crushed in the end by the sheer weight of the leaves themselves, this will not come as a surprise; to the others, heed a warning. In essence there is no way to cook or eat kale; parboiling and then sautéing is an abysmal failure. The texture is akin to cowhide, and chewing on this stuff interminably, as one must do in any attempt to digest, evokes unsettling images of the very animal from which the tanned aforementioned leather emanates. Unless you are in need of serious jaw exercise, probably best to skip; in addition, you will never get it out of your teeth. Baking is no better and reduces it to the kind of miniscule flakes that often fall off dead geranium leaves. It’s a fad boys and girls, created and promulgated by the foot soldiers of the Food Police! But fads take on a life of their own and grow tentacles. A recent NY Times real estate piece brazenly announced: Union Square: A Place to Converge and Buy Kale.

It’s obvious they control the media now, so shut all your devices, put your screens to sleep, chuck your phones, head for the hills as far away from lower Manhattan as possible, tell no one where you’re going and include a month’s supply of Twinkies in your back pack. 

Exit 41, Part One

Sartre in his absurdist drama “No Exit” once indicated that hell is other people, but as is often the case with such high-flown observations of grand philosophical import, he was wrong; it’s really road trips, and occasionally billboards. But I get ahead of myself, so let’s start from somewhere else, perhaps a point of light.

It is 4:30 in the morning at the Vineyard Haven ferry dock and a deeply textured sky of layered indigo seems to blanket the entire harbor except for a few shafts of brilliance reflecting off the bay- lights from a cadre of small yachts, seabourn little adventurers now anchored and bobbing quietly on the waves in plain sight of the pier. It really is quite magical and almost perfectly still, although the dead-of-night aura stealthily and invisibly is beginning to give way. Just as I am starting to channel Melville and Conrad I realize that If I were not totally and completely wiped out after being torturously kept awake for upwards of twenty-four hours, the absolute serenity and mystery of the scene combined with the damp, reassuring smell of the ocean surely would be something in which to revel and possibly exalt; as it is though, I am in that strange netherworld between dozing envy and bare semi-consciousness that is causing me to wonder how long it will take to start hallucinating. Ugh, bummer! Romantic visions of Lord Jim, Ishmael and Billy Budd dashed to pieces! My husband drowsily points out from where he’s slumped in the driver’s seat that in the near distance a crazed skunk appears to be scampering to and fro at intervals, from ticket office to nearby bushes and then back again to ticket office. We imagine the little creature wanting to be the first to snag a coveted round trip spot on the ferry for the holiday weekend when the counter finally opens, much in the same way that we are the first and only people in line for standby in more or less the middle of the night in order to leave the island on the first boat, or any boat, without a reservation. As I sink tiredly into the pre-dawn comfort of the salty air and a watery blue heaven devoid of the usual noise and distraction of life on solid land, my transcendental swoon intermittently gives way to thoughts about the effects of sleep deprivation, along with vague notions of how long I actually can go without the benefits of delta waves or even short bursts of REM as we face up to the long trip ahead. . . 

Why would anyone want to leave such a phantasmagorical tableau of nautical charm- a veritable aquatic Valhalla- and return to the jarring and rude terra firma of the mainland, and at such an ungodly hour? I guess you could say it all began the moment we went online looking for “a nice place to stay. . . ."

Skype is Weird

Skype is weird. I've said it before and I'll say it again. 

This week's blog is part reprint of an earlier complaint, part continuing rant against virtual "face time," part frustration because I did not have a new and fascinating post ready in time this week having spent days fixing computer glitches, thus the slightly re-edited skype post. But the idea is relevant, more than ever!

In addition, the very word has become the same kind of word that "fridge" once did, way back when during the heyday of Frigidaire products when they first replaced ice boxes. I mean, does anyone still even use "Skype" or has google taken over that world too? Should we call it "Googype??"

Yes, Skype is still weird, small or capitalized, in color or black and white and of course Google Hangout is not much better. Let’s face it- you’re not really hanging out. . . .

Two dimensional encounters devoid of real, human contact amid a screen of wavy lines, where the distraction of myriad pixels interferes with the actual talking and being- the human sharing connection- is weird; and this is to say nothing of frozen frames inter-dispersed with moving portraits held hostage to flat, staccato, marionette style images and movements that do not create an environment of intimacy or communication, meaningful or otherwise. 

Occasionally the sound goes out and we have to resort to screens and phones, like something from an old Flash Gordon movies.

Oh yes, you can display things and objects, like haircuts, toys, pets and funny faces as well as living arrangements- kind of like show and tell- but it really doesn’t fly, does it? Group video fests are even more chaotic and incomprehensible, with everyone screaming at each other and the screen simultaneously.

Virtual in actuality means “almost” or “not quite.” The brave new world may long have been both with us and upon us, but the “picture phones” of early sci-fi dreams from days of yore (when people still used the entire name "Frigidaire" to signify an electrically powered ice box) now function in the age of the internet as primitive, almost stone age devices. I picture earthlings of decades and centuries hence looking at the old footage and roaring.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: skype is weird.
That's all. Just needed to say that.

Cities of Summer: La Vie Charmante

Sometimes English just doesn’t say it.

There is a sign on the ground at the inner harbor of Baltimore set near a small though impressive installation of seagrass that reads “Seahorse and Seagrass” which then goes on to explain: Seagrasses are vital to the health of the Chesapeake Bay. Vast beds of aquatic vegetation provide oxygen and improve water quality. Steps away from this mini-paean to environmental issues and the workings of aquatic nature is posted yet another sign of a more simple sort:

Crab Cakes

Ice Cream

Cold Beer

Raw Bar

Steamed Shrimp

And not far from that sign is an outdoor restaurant display “thing” (for it can only be described as such) featuring a kind of gigantic, sidewalk diorama of the strangest misshapen little guy vaguely resembling ET in a straw hat and sunglasses attired in the weirdest Hawaiian shirt next to the tackiest fake palm I’ve ever had the pleasure of running into. It makes the sizable pink flamingo sitting atop the Café Hon (as in honey) in the hipster Hampden section seem like high art.

But the waterfront magic prevails just the same. There are places to sit and gaze and music in the air- electronic though it be- even at the ungodly hour of eight in the morning though the quiet of the harbor at that hour somehow makes it seem serene. There are cafes and a giant aquarium and joggers and World War II ships sitting in dock for eternity, and homeless souls sleeping like babies on the clean, metal benches for tourists and well-dressed professionals on their way to work and profusely tattooed guys with shmatah bandanas adorning their heads on their way to the job. And all around is a profusion of flora lushly and generously planted at almost every turn in various dazzling arrangements: begonias, impatiens, pansies, cedar and grape vying for the spotlight with lavender, black-eyed Susan, the most resplendent, sunniest lilies ever to be seen and foxtail grass as well. And some people still smoke like everywhere else in the world as the fit-as-fiddle joggers fly past them with their accelerated heart rates, and the cigarettes are probably not of the “e” variety.

But oh the triangles reminiscent of great sails are everywhere. Tall, green, glass edifices shaped liked sails. An outdoor concert space with an entire sail-evocative roof suggesting a conglomeration of horizontal billowing canvass, little bowed bridges for footpaths by which to cross the water, reflective sides of buildings like mirrors in the form of triangles. Terra cotta and moss colored rectangles of stone comprising the walkways reminiscent of something historic, and though only simulacra they still manage to work. The great, hulking Barnes and Noble that dominates the entire scene however is totally real and housed in the old early twentieth century Pratt Street power plant at Pier Four, the chimney and bolts still in place and running up through the middle of the entrance lobby, creating a humongous time warp of fascination; the exterior of the imposing structure authentic too, with terra cotta trim and steel frame construction, the entire façade covered in worn 1900 red brick with a huge guitar sitting atop this gigantic collage and touching the sky to remind you of the present. If this doesn’t get you to browse for a book, what will?

Along with the crime, the poverty, the drug scene at the other end of town in places that will freak you out if you get lost and find yourself driving through by accident, there are neighborhoods that will slay you with charm. Like many iconic American towns, there lives in weird co-existence the good child alongside the evil twin, and the Baltimore of the “The Wire,” a violent, scary trash heap of archetypal inner city woes and dangers made even more violent and scary by the sensationalism of the TV series itself is also the Baltimore of self-styled “Charm City,” where when they call you “hun” they don’t mean the marauding mobs of the failing Roman Empire but rather something quite the opposite, like “sweetie.” I must admit the place has an ineffable, eccentric factor of cuteness that blends the funky and dinky, the creative and the louche. Did I mention the ubiquitous hanging fuschia? The zillions of antique stores? The small, slightly tatty coffee shops that smell like perfect, finely brewed beans not the bitter corporate swill sold in Starbucks, with homemade, indescribable, totally high-fat muffins not shrink wrapped but done sloppily by hand? The perennial Christmas lights in shops that specialize exclusively in nostalgic junk? The slightly Mayberry feel of a fictional 1960’s TV show? It is after all the south. There are grits in those diners, make no mistake, and breakfast repasts named “Dixie Corn Cakes.” And these eateries sometimes are called by girls’ names that have the word “Miss” in front of them.

Aaaah, small town Amerika.  Love it or leave it, myth or reality, it definitely has its ineffable moments of kitschy charmante.

Bobo and Tex, Part One

When I was in college, a long, long time ago, in some freshman sociology class where everyone thought the teacher (who had a lyrical Armenian name, Broudian, Proudian, Saroyan?) was a total hot shot, I learned that the perfect number for a group was five. What the professor neglected to tell us or I conveniently forgot to note as I doodled away in my spiral notebook was that this pentagon of individuals did not necessarily ensure that the group would function as a unit, or function at all. There are, as it happens, five characters in this story: two loosely defined adults, one alter-ego, one child and one blue teddy bear. And even though this little narrative is eons away from a time when writers like Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell and Mark Twain and possibly William Faulkner might use the word irascible, I must alert you that irascible is exactly the term called for as I begin to introduce my characters in the next paragraph. Reading this over, I am also wondering if anyone actually uses that word anymore, and if not, why not? Is it that although we love seeing these old fashioned, subtly nuanced descriptors in print we often are unsure of how to say or use them? Or is it because we know that once we start verbalizing something as opposed to just thinking it, then it must be true. . . .

Beer with Havel, Part Four

Rachel’s Havel caper made perfect sense and was right in line with her uncanny ability to cut through the crap and make meaningful connections, occasionally changing the order of things as she went. Her effect on people was instantaneous, not always for the good, but when it succeeded good outcomes did ensue. I was in the midst of a life change when we met and needed to find full time work to proceed though I was not entirely conscious of this fact. She insisted early on in our friendship that I apply for a job at the school where she taught, which I did and which freed me to move on. While we were still working together she went through a stage one spring semester where she gave herself over almost entirely to the art of knitting, in just about every spare moment and somewhat furiously- skeins of colorful yarn trailing everywhere in the vicinity of her chair amid the sound of fast clicking needles during the lunch hour and free periods. As the usual knot of teachers sat around schmoozing over thin, bitter coffee, sugary donuts, bad students, good students and the lousy administration, naturally people became curious and questioned her about this newly acquired somewhat unlikely activity to which she had so zealously cleaved. She quickly filled everyone in. It seemed that one of her own kids- there were three from two different marriages and this was the one who did not bathe in the ambient glow of Rachel’s forceful personality- had joined an ashram somewhere in the wilds of the Catskills; and this same daughter, who had always maintained a difficult relationship with both her mother and the world, was now giving even more cause for concern. So through a few well-timed weekend visits to Rip Van Winkle’s latter day Shangri La for new devotees of eastern philosophy, Rachel slowly insinuated herself into the recesses of the organization and all its colorful chakras by turning out a series of orange and red sweaters- in what she deemed “Buddhist colors”- for the leader and some of his acolytes. Was she stealing the guy’s thunder by crocheting the gild off the guru’s lily so to speak? Or did she just assert herself through small, relentless acts of perseverance disguised as kindness? Maybe a bit of both, but the errant kid about whom she so worried eventually did  rejoin the ordinary stream of things and marry-  with another member of the coven as it happened- and they both left the meditative tranquility of 24/7 spirituality to settle into the predictable safety of a sort of anti-bourgeoisie, radical bourgeois existence, continuing to satisfy any counter culture leanings through an avid interest in the environment and a strict diet of mainly vegetables and rice, with only a hint of an eating disorder.  

I could only knit stories, and who would have ever read them, much less worn them? My own children were still too young to imagine ever losing them, but if they did happen to stray into some Netherland of the soul I learned that perhaps it was best to stray with them, at least part of the way. The last time I saw her she was charming the apron off a spiffy young waiter on whom she had at least three score or possibly more, at a neat little neighborhood bistro in Chelsea- one of those places with the original tin ceiling and the old, miniscule, white hexagon shaped floor tiles that were always chipped- and where at her suggestion we had agreed to meet. She was on one of her solo whirling dervish visits to the city- over the protests  of her older, responsible daughter who worried about her traveling alone-  and was planning to mix with the rabble, check out the latest museum exhibits, catch a movie and inhale some street theater; idyllic college towns apparently had their limitations.

You could not talk about death with Rachel because she was too busy living and making things happen, and sometimes it seems as if I have spent most of my own life waiting. Of course she did not endure, nor did I not become her. And like everyone else, she had her dark side and her “moments” too. But her friendship changed me, change being the one thing you can count on in a world that seems both finite and unending yet never stays the same.

Beer with Havel, Part Three

So where did the playwright-essayist-poet-dissident and first President of the CzechRepublic come in? Rachel’s predilection for molding minds never faded, nor did her taste for adventure. Ten years after she was unceremoniously prodded out of teaching in the New York City public school system- carted away as it were kicking and screaming because of a mandatory retirement age of seventy- she happened on a new opportunity that trumped even some of her previous madcap flings. After she was forced out of the job she remained in the city for a couple of years, did a bit of traveling to the usual places, spoke nostalgically of having done the fox trot with a hulking and totally charming Irishman she met in the lounge of one of the hotels but she eventually relocated to the college town that housed the Ivy where her son-in-law was a professor. True to form, she did not fall into the placid way of reading novels and munching bonbons but quickly became involved in tutoring adults learning English as a second language. This newfound way of being kept her occupied for a number of years, and when I visited I noticed that her digs, though smaller and simpler in style, still had her unmistakable mark with a huge and rather wild oil of vaguely Jackson Pollack-ish demeanor covering the better part of a wall, and a stack of the latest reads in hardcover sitting slightly askew on an end table, waiting for her attention. Between her intermittent visits back to the city- which created small bouts of cyclonic activity that usually left me dazed and enervated- along with her dozens of new friends and interesting teaching gig, for a while she seemed quite content. Around her eightieth birthday however she finally surrendered to the urge of creating some real excitement by enlisting in a program through something like the Peace Corps that ultimately sent her and all of her eight decades to Czechoslovakia. Apparently a few of her adult students were from the region and had piqued her interest. Glasnost was still in its childhood, tourists were not hitting the spot in droves yet, and to this inveterate arm chair wanderer the idea seemed quite exotic. Though not a great traveler myself, a passing acquaintance with the narratives of Kundera had me picturing cool Slav hipsters clad in black on black who were intensely interested in the unbearable lightness of being and other existential conundrums of the late twentieth century, abstract conflicts which though I did not entirely understand, I admired. She applied for admission, and during the screening process Rachel was advised that among her application requirements she would have to submit to an HIV blood test; as she recounted the story later, her response to the screeners was that she was “truly flattered;” needless to say, she passed the interview with flying colors and the laughs were thrown in free of charge. Vaclav Havel was the Big Thing in the news in those times with everyone who had even a vague interest in theater or politics or both scooping up his biography, and naturally she managed to make contact with the colorful artist turned politician himself. When she returned after about six or seven months with tales of stark conditions, spartan accommodations, bad food and the pervasive nicotine addiction of Eastern Europeans, she said these small inconveniences, annoying though they could be, were nicely tempered by having gotten to hang out in some dark, smoky, former Eastern bloc beer joint with the legendary leader of the Czech political avant-garde, swilling hops and talking about god knows what; needless to say, he was “wonderful” and “electrifying,” with “a great sense of humor” and yet “down to earth. . . .”

Beer with Havel, Part Two

Of course I was not Rachel, nor could I ever hope to be. Her beloved husband Harry- a mild-mannered retired businessman of mini stature and grand manners had been filling the Number Two slot for many years after a brief, disastrous union earlier in her youth. Unfortunately he had a stroke in later life (Harry had at least twenty on Rachel), and as soon as he could stand she began hauling him off to Sunday afternoon tea dances at Windows on the World. He was just ambulatory enough to allow himself to be glided around the snazzy observation deck of a dance floor in the carefree decades before 9/11 and the moment in history was not lost on Rachel. Had I ever had to face a similar situation I probably would have sought out every pop and self help book on the vagaries of destiny and neuroscience I could find and then spent the rest of my energy railing against the unfairness of things. Luckily I was trying to get out of a failing marriage of my own at the time so the idea of healing the infirm through fancy stepping was a kind of a moot point anyway, but still something to tuck away for later should the need arise. It was all about motion for Rachel and in the peacefully catatonic years prior to both the internet and the sudden, ubiquitous onslaught of women tri-athletes, she also proved that movement was indeed life by frequently walking the proverbial three or four miles over hill and dale to her high school English teaching job when the weather “permitted.” Once arrived, she would jar awake the pre-conscious awarenesses of thirty or so sleepy adolescent minds, catapulting them out of their collective swoon by relentlessly peppering them with insanely thought provoking questions about heroes and villains at the intensely thought provoking hour of eight in the morning, or to be more precise, at exactly seventeen minutes after eight when the late bell rang. But her penchant for mobility stopped short of ever letting herself resemble a sweat drenched alley cat of a jogger during her bouts of self-inflicted cardio. You would never catch her in one of those strange, unflattering get-ups for runners and other compulsive exercisers that now serve as familiar badges for the burgeoning movement trade. She had a passion for hip, arty outfits fashioned out of intricately woven fabric that you find only in expensive boutiques and managed to conjure up all sorts of colorful, teeny sized ensembles in the most stylish manner before there was a real selection of petite sized clothing available for petite sized adults, that is, short (no pun) of having to shop in the children’s department; it was still a time when smaller women basically had to make do with endless bouts of alteration lest they wind up with comically long sleeves,  pants legs that dragged, or worse, rolled; however she somehow managed to finesse these ripples without winding up looking like a kid parading around in her mother’s pinned up dresses for Halloween. Her one concession to practicality was the sensible shoes she clomped around in for the many miles of hoofing it. I was still wearing jeans and clogs back then, more than occasionally rolling the cuffs and thinking that exercise was overrated, a fad.

While Rachel was still in her late sixties and seeming older than the hills to a woman not yet forty though already dreading the day, I once asked her if she ever thought about death, and if so, specifically what she thought about it; we were in Bloomingdales and I can still see us standing at one of the many beauty counters splattering and immersing ourselves in all sorts of densely aromatic samples with particularly careless abandon, when the question came up. Skipping barely a half beat, she looked aloft to the recessed lighting that so flattered the mannequins as well as the shoppers and said with certainty that there was no point in thinking about this since she would not be aware of what was going on in the world anyway. This theory of course eventually would lead to the natural conclusion that one must live life as if each day were the last, a thought more unsettling than death itself; but at a less radical level of consideration it still offered food for thought. I had been obsessing about mortality since my first brush with a felled pigeon back in kindergarten, and zillions of hours spent reading novels since had done not much to dispel the thoughts, though it did drastically increase the strength of my lens prescription each year. And although she read far into the night with the best of them and consumed as many words if not more than the geekiest of geeks or most cozily contented and battened down of bookworms-  and not just fiction but non-fiction and biography too- Rachel did not seem to require eyeglasses. Her one anatomical failing, or that which bothered her most intensely about her mortal coil as she called it- a favorite line from the play she loved to teach- centered around her hands and feet- she positively hated her fingers- and this visceral antipathy to her own digits led her to having her hammer toes surgically corrected, though she normally avoided going to doctors even for a checkup. She appeared in school one day after a brief absence wearing those weird, splint-like things that look like snow shoes with bandages and said that if breaking a few bones meant she could  finally look good in sandals- a lifelong dream apparently- then it was well worth it. Was she vain? Not in the usual way; she had lots of wrinkles and wore her completely gray hair cut short and uncomplicatedly, in a style befitting the most mythical of chocolate-chip-cookie-baking grannies from the Midwest; it was all about the earrings, naturally. That, and the slightly Brooklyn accent. . . .

Beer with Havel

Rachel had thirty years or so on me, give or take a month, but when I was not yet forty I could barely keep up with her. A typical whirlwind jaunt through the upper west side- sometimes after a full six hour and twenty minute day of grappling with a barrel of exploding hormones in a high school English class- might very well involve checking out any number of boutiques and book stores where we undressed and redressed at lightning speed and thumbed through myriad novels, stopping to speak with random strangers on the street as we went, then grabbing a quick snack of arroz con pollo in some postage stamp of a Cuban Chinese eatery to fuel our further wanderings before we careened back up the West Side Highway in one of her newly acquired second hand Volvos, which she frequently insisted I drive because that was the one thing she really hated.

I met her in the laundry room of the building in which we both lived  and she began talking about authors as if we were old friends who simply were in the middle of a conversation we’d been having for hours. I was hooked. She was barely five feet tall with a gravelly, knowing voice and the proverbial piercing, sea blue eyes set in a face straight out of a Russian shtetl, from whence it turns out she actually had arrived nearly seven decades earlier at the tender age of barely toddlerdom, back in the glory days before WWI. Her impeccable diction and intonation belied these infant immigrant roots and emanated straight from the universe of FDR, where the only theng to feeah was feeah itself. She was a tiny and well read presence of great importance and in a word, authoritative. She also had a dry and potent sense of humor of the caustic type, a scarily discriminating eye and a hugely capitalized Gusto for life. In no time at all she became my role model. I wanted to be Rachel when I grew up and old, and go anything but gentle into the good night.

Non Ode to Winter

I think therefore I am, I am

I think I think therefore I can

Can what? Can do, can be, can am!

Green eggs & ham?

I never touch it-

If truth be told,

Don’t think much of it.

Before too long I’ll be a loon

If the #@***#! sun does not show soon.

In a real short while I won’t be fine

Unless that blazing orb does shine.

Apollo, Hyperion & all you Phoebes

Shoot thy rays on my heebie jeebies

And please forgive this verbal mush

I’m just so sick of snow and slush

It’s near impossible to pass the lanes

My boots ache and a drowsy numbness pains. . . .

Sprightly at the Seashore with Downton (Nothin’ But Spoilers!)

After the final episode of Season Four of Saga Grantham last Sunday night, in all its glorious ninety minutes or so of fantastically idyllic and exquisitely coiffed endings, I had the persistent urge to hum “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” the irrepressible Jazz Age ditty so campily revived by Tiny Tim in the late 1960’s.

C’mon folks, is it really just a hop, skip and a jump to dispensing with Anna’s dastardly violator via a careless push in front of a fast moving trolley? Between the forgery, the pick pocketing and those inscrutable looks, the episode could more aptly have been named “The Long Hand of Bates.” Edith surprisingly assumed the distinction of best dressed slut of the season- I particularly liked that black print sleeveless number with vague intimations of something “oriental” as she assures Lord G. she would never do anything to hurt him- and the hapless, feckless Moseley turns out to be quite a guy after all! Who would have known? Barrow has reverted to his vile recidivist behavior and as my friend Paula so perceptively pointed out “there is no finer person than Mrs. Hughes.” Anywhere. On the planet. At all. Ever. Suitors abound, Lady Mary is thinner and more slickly cutting and cutting edge than ever, and those brash Americans give ‘em a run for their fast disappearing money, though for the love of me I could not imagine why Paul Giamatti was decked out in a penguin suit and not drinking pinot noir in mid coast wine country instead.

I positively hated the sight of a slightly unfrocked Carson timorously dipping his toesies into the bubbling surf (dare I intimate “oncoming tide?”) with the help of the sainted, though strangely jocular housekeeper, but I more or less swallowed everything else whole. And of course I imbibed shamelessly again the following night on WLIW, lack of HD notwithstanding. Waiting these next eleven months will not be easy, and so I’ve constructed a small entertainment to occupy my post-post Edwardian sensibility and am hoping fervently that my readers will join in the fun:

What could possibly happen in Season Five (to follow Fellowes as it were)??? Entries do not have to be 25 words or less, it’s fine if you’re related to the producers, this is no holds barred millennium recession fantasy, so bring ‘em on! All submissions will be considered.

Stardom, Part One

MacNeill from MacNeill & Lehrer. . . .

Rick dropped this completely deadpan and apropos of nothing about twenty years ago, as we marched up Seventy-ninth Street from the park toward Columbus, staring into the middle distance as he uttered the words, without even slightly turning his head or altering his pace or glance one centimeter. To a casual observer we might have seemed perfectly in step and involved in serious talk up until that subtle, almost imperceptible digression, but as always he was on the lookout. MacNeill seemed quite tall to me as he ambled toward us from up the block and looked a lot like MacNeill, older of course as they always appear without their make-up and having just alighted from a typical “classic” New York pre-war--  was this where he lived? The possibility of unearthing such a fascinating detail would have made it even more intimate for Rick, but my thing was always buildings and various monuments so I was much more intrigued by the architecture of that old west side palazzo than by the legendary figure of TV news who emerged from it.

It was maddening, frustrating. Made me wanna strangle him at times. Stop it, pleeeze stop this- I really do not care about MacNeill!  We were just in the middle of a conversation! He laughed off my words. I really and honestly was not into stargazing and found the practice intensely annoying, but my lack of interest never deterred Rick. He had this uncanny knack for spotting minor and major celebrities on the street, anywhere, anytime of day or night. Character actors from old Woody Allen films, those with unforgettable, distinctive weird faces made for comedy; stars of old sitcoms like the guy who played Fonzi on “Happy Days”- what was his name? Bygone news anchors whose names we never knew to begin with as they rattled on each evening with strange bursts of enthusiasm about a building collapse or the next snow storm. And now, in the flesh, a familiar, no nonsense commentator from the revered PBS itself, the network that was always so intent on projecting Integrity and trying hard to exude “balanced” credibility in their choice and handling of stories. Having once worked for a newspaper I knew of course this pretense of fairness was just a sham and that even the most dignified seeming of the media outlets were slanted in one way or another- it was inevitable. But it wasn’t about the quality of reporting for Rick, or how funny the movie or TV show really was, or how effective the politician or dastardly the gangster, it was about stardom, simple and sweet, the glow and after glow, the ambient light associated with nearness to the heavens- and in a further interesting little blip of random irony, I also found it quite amusing that even his very name had a whiff of stardust, as it just happened to allude to the dashing main character of Casablanca. We never ran across Bogey of course, his blaze having  left the cosmos long before we happened on the astronomical street scene, though we did make regular passes around the Dakota where the star had resided when still a living luminary. You never knew who would pop out of that famous courtyard, with 19^th century electrified gas lamps framing the arched entrance of its porte cochere rather dramatically on either side. Carriages once trotted through here for godsake! The edifice was complicated and amazing, evocative of another time in its eclectic design and period detail, a true classic if a bit fussy. But it was only the possibility of star studded foot traffic that mesmerized Rick.  

Rick was so infatuated with the idea of celebrity that he didn’t even have to get very close up and personal with it; just catching sight of a place where one of the “greats” had lived, or hung out, or walked a dog, often was enough to provoke a spirited mini-lecture on celebrity trivia. Early on naturally he took me to the “White Horse,” mistakenly believing I’d be blown over by first sight of Dylan Thomas’ name scratched drunkenly on the bathroom door of the famed tavern. What he didn’t count on was that every English major east of the Mississippi and a fair number west, south and north had already made the well trod pilgrimage in order to guarantee their status as bona fide member of the avant-garde in good standing. And so he  stepped up his efforts and eventually set his sights further uptown. One sunny afternoon in late spring, a short time after the “White Horse” debacle, as we strolled placidly by the Ansonia on Broadway he let it be known that here was where Evelyn Nesbitt hunkered down after her notorious affair with Stanford White. Now the Ansonia was not really my cup of tea design-wise, with its beaux-art façade and myriad turrets flaunting far too many curlicues like a giant tray of ornate pastries; in short, it was a tad too busy for my liking. And as it turned out, this juicy “fact” of star habitation probably was not even true. Although everyone from Theodore Dreiser to Babe Ruth supposedly had hung their hats at the famed residential hotel with a raft of well-known opera singers and musicians tucked ostentatiously in between, there is no real evidence of Nesbit ever having actually lived there. I know this because Rick’s mention of White’s name got me started on my own self-guided tour of the colorful architect’s famous city landmarks, and from that moment on it was only a hop, skip and a jump to my own untoward descent into the maelstrom . . . .

Oh Downton, My Downton

We’ll gather in the drawing room at eight o’clock.

         -Robert Lord Grantham of Downton Abbey, to Carson, the butler

Gather in the drawing room???

Unlike the fantastical food fests and decorum orgies that take place on PBS peek-a-boos into lavish English country houses, no one seems to gather anymore. It’s sad. The truth is there’s also a dearth of drawing rooms in the twenty-first century.

Not so in PBS world! Let the recession continue to limp along unsteadily toward an unsure future, let worlds continue to collide, let the deteriorating infrastructure of our city continue to jolt my car out of alignment on any given day and play havoc with the motor mount at regular, dispiriting intervals- it’s just one big Jewish wedding at Downton, especially when there are weekend guests! No one arrives simply for an evening’s dinner and some chat at these massive, merry conglomerations of aristocratic glitterati- it’s a several days long though appropriately restrained bacchanal of gorgeous attire, sparkly tiaras and mysterious, scrumptious looking desserts. The suites where the weekend guests are housed and duly pampered even have exotic names, like “the Egypt room” among others. Forget about chopped liver and melon balls. All that’s missing is a steady stream of punch joyfully spouting from a gilt-edged fountain in the shape of a lion or unicorn, but why even give a thought to such trivialities of catering when your cellar is replete with the most exquisite of rarified wine selections from the year one of winemaking. . . .

I want to anticipate gathering and be dressed to the nines and have a “lady’s maid” arrange my coiffure and select a marvelous piece (or two or three) from the priceless mulch of gemstones overflowing my jewelry box and then gather in the drawing room with other similarly attired and festooned spirits. But Wait! What exactly is a drawing room? I sort of get the general idea, but not entirely. . . I’ve gathered it’s not for drawing, as in sketching or doodling, but rather for drawing people in, as in the act of gathering around gaming tables for civilized amusements like whist and bridge amid the delicate tinkle of cordial glasses and ever so thin crystal stems of champagne while bubbly undertones of laughter and snippets of clever, intriguing small talk decide the fates of marriages and nations.

Oh, the battle of waterloo was indeed won on the playing fields of Eton!!!  And here I am, stuck in an outer borough, waiting for next Sunday night.