Naomi tells me that Luna Pieta down on Washington St brought her a plate of black
ravioli. I have to ask, she said, how do you get the pasta to be black? Oh, we use
squid ink.
And Naomi has to send it back because, after all, it's
passover week, and that means
squid is right out. But we wonder- where do you get squid ink? Do you order it separately (from whom? it's not at the
grocery store- or is it, in
Chinatown?) or do you have to have squid on your
menu and individually
tease out the ink from each of the little guys? Maybe you only need a little to darken your pasta but I imagine, to avoid turning it grey, you'd have to
milk a lot of squid.
I have my students play Pictionary in class (I find out later Spolin includes this drawing game in her Theatre Games for the Classroom) and one of the challenges I give them is to draw Quentin Tarantino. One set of students is stumped, but one of them actually draws a cariacature of Tarantino-- and she's not a fine arts major, either.
I call for a genre- I hear "Western," and ask for a state west of the Mississippi. I hear "Utah," and announce a Utah Western, which gets a slight chuckle.
I endow Tim Orr as "Proctor John" and tell him there's trouble ahead in the canyonlands. Protestants! Episcopalians!
It's about this time that I realize that we have about used up our entire stock of knowledge about Mormonism- and where we go next will either be offensive (to any Mormons in the audience), cheap stereotyping, or ignorant and make no sense.
The audience is pleased as we turn it into a gratuitously violent spaghetti Western, but we rightfully get a low score for our wimpy story and waffling on committing to the endowments.
So, I think, there has got to be a history to Utah- a cowboy history. Utah's part of the American West. Now I'm curious. What would a Utah Western be?
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote an editorial this week in praise of the Western Fence lizard for its contribution to the containment of Lyme disease in Western States. And while it gave a token nod to biological diversity and ecological interdependence, it seemed to gloat more over the fact that the Northeast, especially Connecticut (Lyme disease's home?) has no Western Fence lizards.
And hey, aren't we lucky? And ain't we great?
Dentist Monday. First professional teeth cleaning in --what?-- six years!
Okay, so suppose I crank out this article on balanophagy for the Oatmeal Review of Books, and come autumn I go out and shake the trees, collect a basket full of acorns, shell 'em, dry 'em, leach 'em, grind 'em-- and cook them up-- betcha I won't even like the taste.
Cattails are in season now. I could start with those.
Do you like soul music?
No.
Well do the trouser press, baby...
I'm wearing my new black
fleece jacket almost everyday. Friday on a
street corner I'm walking behind a couple in my same
demographic-- he's wearing a patterned fleece jacket-- and i realize that all I need to fit in to a total look is add a set of those ties, the "
leash" to my
sunglasses.
This disturbs me.