Midnight Radio (An Ode to Hedwig And The Angry Inch)

Last Sunday, in our area in particular, everyone seemed to exist in a hazy and glorious state of euphoria, too giddy and rapt to do much besides stare in awed disbelief at the magnificence just witnessed and every so often shake their heads in heady bliss or grin with wordless sighs. Yours truly and her best beloved were among those who were experiencing a happy state of altered consciousness, the remnants of which linger still in my memory and hit me like a warm lapping wave even now to be recalled.  The only difference between our felicific delectation and that of everyone else around us was that the root cause of ours was a million miles away from sports, sports ads, Katy Perry, half time shows, and Super Bowls in general and the Patriots’ Super Bowl in particular, but instead lay nestled in NYC, where John Cameron Mitchell rocked the the party-light fringed skirt off the very theater we call Belasco and brought triumph and tears to our hearts as Hedwig, the punk rock star who captivates us with her hilarious and poignant quest to find her other half. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, the original Hedwig is back.  When it was announced that Mitchell would return to the role he created and first performed as so long ago, there was much peeing in excitement among hed-heads. And also crafting of tee shirts to don as gay apparel upon our visit to see him from our gloriously unobstructed roost in the first balcony row.  

Because of the contemporary artists I can currently think of who bless us the gift of their creative imaginations, John Cameron Mitchell deserves a special glorious little ship of high praise and gratitude for birthing unto this world Hedwig Robinson nee Schmidt.  

Oh dear Hedwig, how magnificently you have aged. Your voice is a little lower, your words a little more tinged with weariness, but merciful heavens if you don’t know how to captivate your audience with the fierceness you still carry as tall and proud as your wig in its velveteen box. And lest there was any doubt, yes, you can cut a bitch as well as anyone ever could, bless your fierce East German heart.  

What is it about Hedwig, that sparkle blue eyeshadowed vixen, that so captures our hearts, our love, our fascination, never even mind considerable sums from our wallets?  As I try and name that energy that consumes me each time I absorb her story, I can’t help but return to the coincidence of timing with the euphoric haze that surrounded New England last Sunday that Gina and I were sharing in parallel play with, but were not a part of. How to explain the depth of stirring in my soul that Hedwig brings about in us? We have tried to explain it to those close to us, and even convinced two brave souls to partake in our Broadway JCM extravaganza with us, but yet I struggle to put the miasma of love and passion that Hedwig injects into me into words. As a writer this was frustrating to me until I realized, as New England existed in a haze of superbowl afterglow, my own post-Hedwig aura was probably the closest thing to a pang of sympathy I will ever have for sports fans who get swept up in the magic of their sport’s team doing fantastically sporty things like winning a big game in sports. Because I was equally swept up by the magic of my favorite work of art being performed in a big arty venue by the very artist who conceived of it. Super Bowl and a Broadway play: they’re practically the same thing after all, right? Right. So here goes.

Superbowl Sunday is the world that we live in. And the world we live in is made for people who want Super Bowl Sundays. But Hedwig is not of that world. She calls, without shame or apology through its din to those of us who are also not of that world, or not fully of it. To those who stand in its shadows and fringes. Superbowl World would ignore us or drown us out without a hint of remorse. In calling to us, Hedwig gives us visibility voice, and importantly, validation.

In Superbowl world, categories and conformity are necessary. A place for everything and everything in its place. This helps maintain the power structure and normalcy which are needed if the Superbowl World is to stay Superbowl World. But Hedwig defies such demands. She exists beyond category and does not conform. She is both man and woman and yet she is also neither. And neither is she wholly transgendered or gay or straight or feminine or masculine. She is both a fierce and powerful punk rocker, and also the “internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you today.” She is one half and she is one whole. She exists in a divide and as a divide. Both a bridge and a wall.

In Superbowl World, love is when the guy gets the girl in the end.  But to Hedwig, love itself is another kind of divide: it is the yearning you feel to make yourself whole again while wondering if your other half ran off with the good stuff or if you did. The shadow of loss is inherent in her idea of love. In the play, “The Origin of Love”’s message can be read in two ways: One way reads that there is someone out there for everyone, but the other way to read is, our other half exist within us already.  

Or as RuPaul so eloquently puts it:

When at the end of the play, Hedwig becomes Tommy Gnosis (her “other half” who ran off with the good stuff and made a platinum killing while Hedwig puts on concerts at the Sizzler salad bar to unimpressed audiences), the makeup gone, stripped literally bare (save an adorable pair of pleather briefs), I swear my throat swells to the size of a small orca and a briny curtain builds in precarious balance on my lower eyelids. it is a beautiful sequence of music and lyrics that build into an anthem of love and recognition for the magnificent rock star that exists inside the struggling (or internationally ignored) artist.

In Superbowl World, heroes are those who scrabbled their way up to some position of power. In Superbowl World, Tommy Gnosis is the hero. Hedwig is without the power or fame or recognition of Tommy Gnosis, but God love her, she refuses to relinquish or back down from being a hero and so demands we see her in the same way. And indeed she becomes the boot stomping, punk clothed, sparkle lipped and wig sporting hero of her own story. She will never hold power in the Superbowl World but she finds, in the end, that all the power she needs is within her grasp, within herself. 

Hedwig presents herself as someone you think you might not have anything in common with, and by the end of the play you realize you have everything in common with her. All of us stand with one foot in Superbowl World and one foot outside of it. Some of us straddle one world more so than the other but all of us, in some small way, stand in the divide. Who among us is fully of Superbowl World all the time?  None of us, and that is the power of the play. We are all forging through our lives and this world using “what we have to work with.”  Hedwig speaks to the part of us that stands in the shadows, alone, lonely or powerless. The strange rock and rollers. And she shines a light on us to let us know we’re doing all right. Makes us whole once more.

Bonus Track for all you Hed-heads:

Sigh.

COMPOSITE ARTS No.18: YOUTH

I am happy to announce my story, "Fumbling Towards Greatness," has made its grand debut in Composite Arts Magazine's current issue (No. 18: Youth)
And there was much rejoicing

"Fumbling Towards Greatness" is the title piece from my short story collection (and MFA thesis), and the piece I chose for my graduation reading in Berlin this summer. While I am fond of all the stories in my collection (with a few more to be still completed), in many ways this one is the most directly autobiographical. Not because I wanted to be a boy scout (though I  did. Mostly because I envied the sharp look of the blue Cub Scout uniforms, whose gold kerchief accent seemed to afford the Cub Scout boys a certain gravitas I could never quite achieve in my Brownie outfits, what with their brown and white collared shirts that looked, in my mother's own words, "like men's long underwear." Thanks, Ma!) but because I struggled with––I still struggle with––navigating the internal and external pressures that shape a person's slog through life and ultimately mold us into our identities. The search for identity is probably at the heart of this story: Who we are, who we can be; What we are, what we can be. Entangled in that search is the complicated notion of Destiny as colored and shaded by our favorite piece of folklore, The American Dream.

Anyway, this story found its way over to the Youth Issue of Composite Arts Magazine, thanks to a certain editor who also happens to be in the same MFA program yours truly was so recently graduated from, so thank you Joey Pizzolato! I truly hope you will take time to visit Composite Arts because the journal is innovative, funky, thoughtful, and artistically compelling.  And I am not just saying that because my words grace the center of the current issue. The journal as a whole is a beautiful and visually stunning piece of work so please check it out at this link below:

http://issuu.com/compositearts/docs/composite_no18youth . 

Thanks for reading, and have a Happy Wednesday!

The Idioms Are Running the Asylum

I love language. I love the shape and feel of different words, the twists and glides of sentences, and the flowering of phrases and paragraphs into story.  I love etymologies, the hidden history and carried legacies that hide within the lettered bounds of words. I love the sounds of syllables in fluid progression, the oily shimmer of a word like salubrious and the craggy heft of skullduggery. I love the mischief that language gets up to. I’ll admit I still snicker like a school girl to hear on NPR about “so-and-so, who is a HOMO(wner)”, and there was a time not long ago when news about a Massachusetts “Incan” Paint Factory (or Ink and Paint Factory) dominated headlines. I looked in dumbfounded disbelief when Gina told me her school’s motto was Gropers Who Achieve. (except her school thinks it’s pronounced Grow! Pursue! Achieve!) I am constantly delighted and surprised by the irregularities of our cobbled together English language. We have toad, load and road, so why doesn’t broad rhyme? And who on earth thought it made sense to have the intransitive “lie” (I rather think I might lie down for a bit and see if this ennui doesn’t pass.) assume the form “lay” as its past tense (She lay on the chaise longue until the doctor deemed her hysteria sufficiently quelled.) when ‘lay’ is also the present tense form of a different (but similar in idea) transitive verb (Dear, would you lay that compress over my eyes that my enfeebled nerves not suffer your offending visage any longer?)? Or how about the ending ‘ough’? A tough doughboy who thought he ought to march out with a plough to a Marlborough slough was felled by a cough. It’s a good thing I don’t have kids because if I had a son, I would really lobby to name him Geophgh (pronounced Jeff.)

 

 There are myriad wonderful ways to delight in our language and to revel in its textured complexity, but one aspect of it that seems never to fail to induce agitated palpitations in the hearts of the most phlegmatic of philosophers and stirs the dander on the staidest of staid scholars is, at its heart, a deceptively simple question: 

What is Language? 

This feather ruffling debate evokes such passion because of its philosophical nature. Is language living or dead? Are there certain fixed rules and usages of language by which we simply ought to abide? Or does language and how we use language evolve to suit the needs of those who use it?  Both sides have compelling arguments to make. If there are no standards around which we can agree language ought to be structured, then it ceases to make sense. The sentence, Peter hit Liza with a toy helicopter and dented her head for life.  makes sense because it follows conventional structure. We know Liza didn’t hit Peter, not only because she’s an angel and would never hurt a flea, let along her bullying older brother, but because our sterling grasp of grammar tells us subjects precede verbs and direct objects follow.  But what about this sentence?  Mother, upon hearing a kerfuffle, strode into the room and cried, “Forsooth! This might have been prevented if I hadn’t went to my woman cave for some peaceful repose!  Chances are, you still understand the gist of the sentence (Mother regrets leaving her children alone) even though ‘hadn’t went’ is a grammatical transgression that makes otherwise gentle folk twitch madly and blink their eye lids in aggrieved pain.

Let’s talk for a moment about pet peeves, shall we? Circle up your chairs, people we’ll all go around and count one off. I’ll start: Please don’t throw your slipper at Beulah and I!  Yes, it makes me twitch and spit. Because you wouldn’t ever say, “Please don’t throw your slipper at I!” Would you?  Adding one person or ten thousand people to the list of potential people you might throw a slipper at does not change the fact that you always throw your slipper at me, him, or her, and never at I, he or she.  Please don’t throw your slipper at Tom, Dick, Harry, Eve, Steve, Bathsheba, Genghis Kahn and his whole army, Beulah, him, her, or (especially!) me.  This is called consistency. This particular rule has its roots in Latin grammar, but the more important thing is, we still abide by this rule today. We say, “Don’t throw your slipper at me!” And thus, we also say “Don’t throw your slipper at Beulah and me.” That’s maintaining grammatical structure, and that is why I twitch and spit to hear “I” where “me” is what is correct.

Second pet peeve: Mangled subjunctive sentences: When people say something like If I wouldn’t have looked before I crossed the road, I would have been smashed flat by that speeding tractor. The subjunctive territory is tricky business, and I appreciate this. Perhaps because it is in the land of subjunctive where we slip from the solid ground of certainty towards the dreamy world of possibility: If I had a million dollars, I would buy you a K car (Bare Naked Ladies). If I hadn’t bought a case of mead, I would be anxious about running out this weekend (Liza M.).  I should have gone to the bathroom when I didn’t have to, so that later, if I need to go, I won’t have to (My grandfather. Not strictly subjunctive, but a tangled logical delight nonetheless). It is tricky because such sentences are conditional: if X, then Y.  If I had gone to the bathroom when you told me to,  I wouldn’t be in this smelly rest area toilet now.   If only I hadn’t gone to my woman cave, my precious daughter’s head might still be dent free.  Throwing around should have, would haves, and could haves with reckless abandon muddies up an already complex idea. You are entitled to one per conditional sentence. Are there any exceptions to this rule? Honestly? I am too lazy to dig around and try to find it if one exists. 

       Saying “should have went” instead of “should have gone” also grates on my ears, but I recognize that irregular verbs basically make no sense, so how they are declined can seem fairly arbitrary as well. The past (in Latin, perfect) tense of go is went, so it sort of does make sense that the past perfect (had verbed) would be had went. Except it’s not. It’s had gone. But I understand where you’re coming from with had went. I don’t like it, but I understand. Sigh.

Now it’s your turn.  What are your grammatical pet peeves? Why do they annoy you? And here’s a challenge for you to think about: Do they annoy you because you believe these transgressions somehow fundamentally undermine the foundation upon which our language rests? (See irksome use of “I” as a direct object, above.)  Or do they annoy you, well, Just Because? Here’s an example of a transgression that fails to unleash the full force of my fury: I will always fight for my right to proudly split infinitives. I believe this little no-no comes from the Latin again, where infinitives are one word. Esse means to be. That’s it. Just Esse. No matter how dextrous your Latining skills, you cannot slip an adverb into a Latin infinitive without fracturing it. But here’s where English is different from Latin: We can. Without too much effort, really. Because our infinitives come packaged for us with the handy little helper, to. To Verb. There’s a wee space in the middle, just large enough to squeeze in your adverb. So go ahead, try to casually slip in an adverb. See how easy that was?

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker breaks the debate around language into two camps: Prescriptivists, who talk about how language ought to be used, and Descriptivists, who describe how language in fact is used.  Where should we stand our ground and defend the integrity of our language in order to preserve its clarity and, ultimately, usefulness, and where should we step back and shrug our shoulders and say with a gentle chuckle, tempora mutantur lingua et mutatur in illis.* I don’t know in which camp I stand. I am of two minds, as I think most people who care about language are.  I know people who would just as soon smite any fool who doesn’t halfway know the proper time to use who or whom but who couldn’t give a fig about apostrophes, while other normally civilized souls might upturn tables in a fury over a participle that’s been left dangling, but then go on Facebook and write OMG, WTF!! And does anybody besides me care about the technical difference between a student and a pupil? My point is we all draw lines in the grammatical sand in an effort to Defend (or preserve?) Language, but then contribute in some other area to changing it. Sometimes we are right to defend it, sometimes we should stay cool and let things change. So where to draw that line? Those who would clutch their pearls and shriek that the word ‘gay’ has been hijacked from their vocabulary demonstrate their ignorance with the word’s sordid and ribald march through the ages. On the other hand, don’t we sacrifice precision and risk losing a rich etymological history when we say the crops were decimated by locusts and rogue children when what we probably mean is the crops were devastated by locusts and rogue children?

So all this brings me back to that question. What is language? What is its purpose? Is it a tool whose integrity relies on the steadfastness of its inflexible truths? Or is it a tool whose integrity lies in its ability to shift and adapt and change according to the needs of its users? The answer, of course, is yes.

* I am dusting off some cobwebs to riff off this speech from Illiad. Roughly, speaking, it means times change, and language changes in those times. With apologies to my friend and Latin teacher, Julia Brown.

Color Me Confused

Trigger Warning: Contents below are of a wonky/political nature and may inspire yawning, boredom, and in some cases, extreme eye glazing from those who have better things to do than watch Frontline documentaries on a Saturday night.

I’m really not trying to be dense here, and I haven’t been mining this story extensively, but I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this Edward Snowden/NSA leak explosion thing because there seems to a bit of a paradoxical angle to it all.

Let me see if I can get this sorted out:

Snowden’s decision to leak all these millions of documents to Glenn Greenwald and a few others has, in the words of the NSA and administration, threatened our national security. This may be true. It probably is true, but that’s not what I can’t wrap my head around. What I can’t wrap my head around is what Snowden's ability to leak details about NSA's secret program reveals about the efficacy of that secret program.

So as we learn from Snowden’s leaks, the NSA  ––hello there fellas!––  has been collecting anything and everything on us it can tap into: phone records, emails, library accounts and God knows what else. And as we learn the full juicy colored details of how two administrations and the NSA have been keeping full frontal tabs on us all, we have demanded to know what purpose this unprecedented level of data collection on US citizens serves.

And we are told––what? This unprecedented level of data collection on US citizens serves as a necessary means to detect and root out possible threats to our national security.

Threats to our national security like, um the Snowden leaks?

So how well is this program working again, NSA?

The very fact that Snowden was able to get such a massive leak out to the press demonstrates the glaring fallacy of their argument, doesn’t it?

Oh but he was using aliases and encrypted codes in his emails and communication.   Phew, that’s a relief. Because anybody with an intent to harm the country wouldn’t think to do that.

I guess I don't understand how the NSA can argue that the broad reach and extensive depth of their data collection on Americans has been working (and is therefore warranted) to keep America safe when their very system failed not only to prevent Snowden from posing a threat to national security, but failed to keep themselves safe from (embarrassing) exposure. Something about their argument for their program and against Snowden seems awash in self-invalidation.

It’s also not as though this particular secret program, with its capability to spy on Americans was the only system the NSA had developed in order to collect information that could pose threats to our national security. But I leave further exploration of that topic to Frontline’s 2 part series, “United States of Secrets.”

As I said earlier, it’s entirely possible I’m being dim here. it's possible I'm missing a large piece of the argument/situation/scandal but unfortunately this is about the condition of my brain right now.  I suppose this is what happens when I have actual things I need to get done for school.

So Hipster It Hurts

Ahhhh, spring!

It’s finally here. Nothing ushers in thoughts of another New England spring like a minor snow/sleet storm on March 31^st, but nothing that good roaring fire in the woodstove can’t eventually thaw out. Finch finally started to move again sometime yesterday afternoon and I am happy to report that she has nearly forgiven me for trying to turn her into an icicle on our Monday morning walk. (I wasn’t trying obviously, but such nuance, like so much else these days, escapes her dottering sensibilities.)  It was during this unwelcome deluge, when I sat huddled by the fire and under my blanket with two shivering dogs by my side––even the cat’s crankiness had seized up in the dank chill. It took too many calories to complain––that sudden inspiration struck. 

Paraphrase of Inspired Thought: 

You know, I could really go for a big slobbery vat of steaming macaroni and cheese about now.

If the first image that pops to your mind when I talk about this bastion of American cuisine is more or less this:

or even this:

I got one word for you:

Not that I have any complaint with the concoctions that fine food scientists from Kraft industries have unleashed upon our civilized world (even if their cheese powder continues to be an alarming shade of orange), nor those of their their wholesome hippy counterparts. That boxed stuff is perfectly fine for the macaroni hobbyist or dilettante who occasionally dabbles in pasta e fromage. Heck, I’ve consumed at one sitting entire pots of mac and cheese the shade of Chernobyl and have enjoyed every last slurp but let’s face it. Even Organic Annie’s is still down in the Intramural Leagues of Macaroni and Cheese Creation.

And Hipster don’t play that game.

I let the genius of my idea begin to take sturdy root in my mind and then commenced to gathering the provisions that could help me turn this dream into reality.

Because what the Varsity League* teaches you is there is no reward so sweet as the satisfaction of accomplishment earned through hours of honest industry and toil.

*You may substitute in “Puritan Inferiority Complex” here if that is more directly applicable to your own experiences.

 Which is to say this is just background and context to lay the groundwork for our main feature.  Please remember to silence your cell phones, now sit back and enjoy our Feature Presentation.

VARSITY LEVEL KITCHEN SPORTS

Episode 1

MAKING MACARONI AND CHEESE 

 WITH CHORIZO SAUSAGE, BROCCOLI, AND MUSHROOMS

Serves: Um, two. 

Prep Time: Approximately 5 Months, 4 days, 26 hours.

Bake Time: 10 Minutes

Bread Crumb Topping:

2 Tbsp butter

2 Cups of Fresh, Seasoned Bread Crumbs

Pasta:

1 lb Elbow Macaroni

Cheese Sauce

6 Tbsp butter

1 Garlic clove

1 Tsp Dijon mustard

¼ Tsp hot pepper

1 Tsp Dried Sage

6 Tbsp all-purpose flour

3 ½ Cups whole milk

1 ¾ Cups chicken broth

1 lb Colby cheese

½ lb Farmhouse Cheddar cheese

1 Cup Chantarelle and Morel Mushrooms

1 Cup Broccoli

1 lb Chorizo sausage

Other Tools Needed.

4 Gallons whole milk

Rennet, culture, enzyme, cheese salt, cheese cloth, brush, cheese wax, and pot dedicated to             cheese waxing

1 Cheese press OR lumber and hardware and tools to build one

1 Cheese mold

2  5-lb weights

1 Cheese cave  OR dedicated dorm-sized refrigerator

1 Mushroom collecting basket

1 Garden

1 Hot Pepper seed  OR flat

1 Sage seed  OR  flat

1 Trowel

Flour, yeast, water, sugar, and salt to bake an approximate 1.5 lb loaf of bread

1 Pig, meat grinder, and sausage seasoning ensemble OR  1 CSA farm share

1 Whole chicken

2 Bay leaves

Dash Pepper

Pinch Salt

Optional

1 Dehydrator

Prepare Ahead of Time:

1.  Taking lumber, hardware and tools to build cheese press, go ahead and build your cheese press.

      (Time: approximately 1 week)

Figure 1: Cheese Press (maple)

Gonna party like it's 1899

2.  While glue on cheese press is drying, start your garden. Using trowel, carefully plant your pepper and sage seed / flat. Water as needed. (approximately 5 months)

Figure 2: Dramatic reënactment of pepper and sage seeds just planted

3. While garden is growing, take 2 gallons of whole milk and enough rennet, enzymes etc. to make 2lbs of Farmhouse Cheddar curds. (approximately 4 hours)

Figure 3: Proto Cheese of the Cheddar variety. Or is it Colby? Or Mozzarella?

4. Using cheese cloth, press, weights, wax, cheese cave / fridge,  press curds into cheese and age approximately 6 weeks – 2 months. (approximately 2 months)

Figure 4? 

6. In 2-4 weeks, repeat Steps 3-4 for Colby Cheese, and age approximately 4-6 weeks. (approximately 6 weeks and 4 hours)

Figure ??  

7. While Cheese is aging, take mushroom basket into forest and forage 2 cups of Chantarelles  and/or Morels.  Brush and clean with soft brush. (approximately 3 days) 

Figure ∑: Basket-o-Chantarelles and Antler. A study (2014)

     

After cleaning with soft brush

       

Optional: If it looks like the mushrooms won’t make it until the other ingredients are ready, you may dehydrate them, reconstituting in water about an hour before you need them. (approximately 3-4 days)

Figures

8. Harvest pig; grind, and season into sausage. Alternatively, root through CSA meat share until you find packaged Chorizo.

Figurine: I see the hind do and sperribs, but where on earth is the sahsage I want to know? 

9. While your farmer is harvesting your pig and turning it into sausage, bake loaf of bread. You may eat portions of it while it is fresh, but purposely save/forget entirely about until it’s gone hopelessly stale, about 2 cups. (approximately 3 days)

Figure I'd rip this graphic off of www.dripbook.com

12. Harvest ¼ pepper, 1 tbsp sage from garden. Dehydrate or air dry (8 hrs – 3 days)

Figure 12:  Has not been properly licensed and has been subsequently blocked or removed from the site. We regret any inconvenience.

                                                            -The Management

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees

2. Grind up stale and forgotten about bread in Cuisianart. Season with dried herbs and butter. Award yourself five points if they are your own herbs, but that is not required. Set bread crumbs aside. (approximately 5 minutes)

3. Take Chicken and put in pot of boiling water to make 1 ¾ Cups of chicken stock*. Let simmer. Add bay leaves, salt and pepper.   When done, set aside chicken for future dinners (approximately 4 hours)

* An earlier edition had this incorrectly posted as 2 13/4 cups of chicken stock. Upon realizing this error, we had the offending editor summarily dragged from her post and shot. We apologize for any inconvenience.
                                                                                                                            -The Management

4.  Removing chorizo sausage from intestinal casing, crumble and pan fry sausage until cooked. Set aside. (approximately 15 minutes)

5. Reconstitute mushrooms, if needed.

6. Cook Macaroni, drain and set aside.

7. Use garlic, butter, flour, chicken stock and milk to make your basic beschemele sauce. Add mustard and your harvested, dried hot pepper and sage.

8.  Cut 1 lb of Colby cheese off your wheel and cut into small chunks, adding a little bit at a time into the bechemele while you stir with a whisk.

9. Repeat step above with Cheddar, using 8 ounces or ½lb.

10. Cut up 1 cup of broccoli. Combine broccoli, pasta, chorizo, mushrooms into large baking dish and mix together to evenly distribute.

11. Add cheese sauce and stir, coating noodles-n-chunks evenly

12. Sprinkle breadcrumbs over the top

13. Cover in foil and bake 8 minutes covered, then uncover and bake 2 minutes.

14. Present and Serve.

          Helpful Tip: Be sure to compliment your wife on her newly finished sweater vest and her other marvelous accomplishments . . . 

Figures of Loveliness: Seriously, isn't this vest sweet?  Did you notice the DNA up the center? Bad. Ass. Alright? 

. . . in order to divert attention away from the state of the kitchen as you’ve left it, and to lessen her shock when she does eventually does notice it.

      After an exhaustive flurry of activity that utterly unnerved the dogs and made me giddy with anticipation to taste the fruits of my industrious efforts, I proudly presented my masterpiece to Gina that evening at dinner. She was suitably impressed and allowed as how I must have been working hard to pull it all off.

 Oh shucks, I said. It was a team effort, really, I said. And though I was being sort of falsely modest because I was hoping to continue the praise, it was also actually true. She made the cheese, I made the cheese press. She grew the garden. We both foraged the mushrooms. Together we waged a war against ease, convenience, shortcuts, and every advance of modern civilization to make a big slobbery vat of steaming macaroni and cheese that was, as a certain someone used to say,

Perfectly Delicious

Gina took a bite and looked up. She smiled. You know what this macaroni and cheese is?

I unlaced my shoes and slipped my feet out the highly fashionable but stiff wingtips, letting my feet have a chance to wiggle free. No, what is this macaroni and cheese?

She breathed in, savoring the meaty apricot tang of the chantarelles and the sharp note of our farmhouse cheddar, now mixed together in beautiful harmony.

This macaroni and cheese is:

So Hipster it Hurts.  

She adjusted her fresh-off-the-needles DNA sweater vest.

 Ha ha! I said. That's great! So hipster it hurts!  By the way, your vest looks awesome.

Aww, thank you honey. By the way, this meal is freaking delicious.

Aww, thank you honey. 

I took off my fully functional prescription monocle and gave it a quick buff with its designated wipey cloth thing.

Hipsters! Us! Ha hahahaha.

And so we fell into the easy routine of our nightly conversations. She continued to compliment my efforts of the kitchen, and I continued to be as endearing and charming as I could possibly manage, silently crossing my fingers that when she finally looked up and noticed the mountain of dishes in the sink that stretched towards the heavens and teetered in precarious piles on every stretch of counter, she would remember the great feeling of satisfaction which comes from hours of honest industry and hard toil.

Figure The End.

On Animal Orgies and other Curious Strategies (and a little bit on my news habit.)

      First, a confession:  I was sorta kinda thinking I wanted to write something about the government-gone-wild romp through crazy-town which is, in case you haven’t had a pulse for two weeks, is the season’s newest and most disturbing reality show on the air right now, but Gina made me swear off news for the weekend because it leaves me twitchy and bug-eyed, and so I have been doing my weak-willed best to be obedient. She is off corralling children and horses on the other side of New Hampshire but her Spidey sense can pick up even the faintest whiff of political drudge on me, and she’ll know if I’ve been cheating.  Which leads me to my second confession.

            Really, and All Things Considered (Didja catch that?), I could be doing a lot worse. And most of it has been second hand, since I am up at Joy Farm with my folks who are a couple of incurable news junkies. The house is filled with NPR, and anywhere my mother goes, opaque clouds of Politico positively waft off her. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take a deep sniff now and then.

Joy Farm. For Health and Wellness.

 But I’ve been trying to be good. I really have. Until this morning, when I noticed with horror that I was idly thumbing through my BBC app. I realized what I was doing before I went all the way into the US section, thank goodness, which surely would have wrenched me fully off the wagon and sent me square back into the muddy gutter of political filth. But on my bender, I did espy a juicy little story, and let’s be honest: What could be more delightful to write about (and read about) than stories of animals whose epic sexcapades literally kill them.

Just a prelude:  the study I am about to relate, which is about marsupial orgies, was published in a journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. Um, how do you pronounce that again?

 Anyway, according to their study, some cute marsupial species have these tantric level sex fests because the number of times in a year when a female is willing/able/open to mating is exactly once.  And moreover the females have “synchronized their reproductive cycles” which means they all want it at the same time. So this narrow window of opportunity produces, when the time is ripe, an explosion of marsupial Don Juans on the scene. There’s a lot of wooin’ to be done, stat. Everyone tries to get it while the getting’s going on. (But it’s only the females that are “highly promiscuous” in the BBC’s report. Even though both male and female alike are in a mad dash to stuff and be stuffed with as much sperm as they can manage because for the males, it improves the likelihood of passing on their genes, and for the females, it insures against them having to scramble their own DNA with only the genetic dregs of some loser marsupial simply because he got there first). This romp fest triggers hormones, unsurprisingly, and lots of them. One of the hormones it triggers is the stress hormone, which goes into haywire feedback mode, meaning it doesn’t shut off ever. It just ramps up and ramps up because there is no brake for it anymore. This means the more a male does the dirty, the higher his stress levels go, and the higher his stress levels go, the more vigorously and intensely he is driven to mate. Until eventually the stress kills him. It’s a case of mass suicide-by-sex.  Though such strategies are not super uncommon, they generally remain the provenance of insects, fish, and other unhuggable/not particularly cute creatures but the authors note it can be useful for dense populations, and for these marsupials, it might also come down to food. When food is plentiful but once a year, it helps enormously if half your population suddenly stops needing to be fed just as resources become scarce.

            In other fatal sex maneuvers, I recently learned something about honeybees: The male honeybee, or drone, leads a pretty much feckless existence. Okay, that I knew. I knew that they don’t gather pollen, they don’t make honey, they don’t even lift an antenna to clean up the hive or construct it.  And I also knew (or at least it didn’t surprise me to learn, which is pretty much the same thing, right?) that they probably contributed something to the whole perpetuation of their species. I just didn’t ever think to dwell on the particulars of the event. But it turns out, I should have, because it's fascinating.

 So, spoiler alert: soon-to-be-queen bees have a lot in common with female marsupials re: mating windows, duration of. And, like the male marsupial, the opportunity to mate with a queen is literally a once-in-a lifetime experience for a drone. And like marsupials, Mademoiselle bee also doesn’t want to be stuck with the dregs of apianity (the bee equivalent of humanity. I might have just made that word up. Sorry.)  So she’ll mate with however many drones she feels like. So far honey bees share a lot in common with Marsupials. Can you guess how it’s going to end?  But do you know how?

            Well, I’m glad you asked! It turns out, the force of insemination is so powerful, it actually and literally blasts the poor drone in half, severing his penis (and abdominal muscles) from his body. The former serves as a sort of sperm plug inside the (queened) bee while the latter floats lifelessly to the ground, his glorious and genetically fruitful act having snuffed him out in a burst of glory.           

           

I hope you all feel edified now. Goodness knows, I do. 

A Trail of Brain Crumbs.

Hey, did you miss me? Well, that makes both of us. I feel like I’ve been wandering around these past few months in a sort of blog fog. Weather pattern for my head: intellectually cloudy with a certainty of haze. Or maybe I’ve just been mired in a blog bog; sunk into a sludge of sentient senescence and all I have to show for it is a mummified mind.

My brain on Bog.

Nah, I think I’ll go with the blog fog (though in truth, I’m quite fond of my sludge of sentient senescence for its pleasing, alliterative tingle.

Agnes often wondered who might please her alliterative tingle.

As I’ve been wandering lost on the moors of thought lo these many months, fighting my way through the dense fog and haze, my brain has been pro-actively dropping little morsels here  lest I need to find my way back, or possibly to help me find my way out.  They include, in no particular order the following:

My Dog Remus

 I once had a wonderfully dim dog named Remus (his twin brother was the devilishly handsome but regrettably more tempermental Romulus). Remus’s mother is a Shar-pei, lab mix, and his father was, I think, I greyhound bus or possibly a dump truck. Somewhere along the line, a hound dog slipped his genes into the mix because Remus could howl up a storm when he wanted to, and when he wanted to seemed to hinge solely on one factor: whether or not a dog in his immediate vicinity was barking. When we had three dogs, this was not an entirely infrequent occurrence, but what separated Remus from the other two dogs was that he had no idea what he was barking at. Or what the other dogs were barking at. But he enthusiastically gave it his all. Why have I been thinking about Remus even though he’s been gone for almost ten years?

Because recently, Indiana representative Marlin Stutzman (R) said this about the government shutdown: “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t even know what that is.” 

Man, I miss Remus.

Shutdown vs. Slimdown.

We are now entering week two of our government shutdown. Unless you watch Fox News, in which case, we are merely in a "slimdown" as if we were put on this collective diet and have discovered to our amazement that wow, this means we can throw away our government fat pants.  Um, okay. It is sort of like convincing yourself that a quarter pounder is dietetic because hey, you could have ordered the big mac.

Language, people!

While we’re on the subject of language, here’s a sundry list of language things that irriate me:

1) Government pronounced "Gummint.” It is a political entity, not a compound word made up of two breath fresheners.

2) Nucyoolar. 

Say it with me, ready?

New.

Clear.

Again: New.  Clear.

Got it? Put it together. There ya go! Nuclear! (see how it has the world CLEAR in it? That’s a hint.)

3) The phrase “The American People”, when it appears anywhere near a congress person’s mouth.  If a congress person feels awkward or unsure about what to substitute when the itch to employ this phrase overwhelms him or her, using the term “my constituents” is a decent place to start. If this doesn’t go far enough, then either of the following phrases is an acceptable alternative: 

1) “My good friends over at <corporation x>” 

 2)  “those amazingly persuasive lobbyists who have some really good points and incidentally contribute waaaay more to my campaign funds than any of y’all have ever ponied up.”

4) The word “negotiate” when it is spoken by anyone who has a tendency to confuse it with “demand your way on everything and when you don’t get it, try bullying, throwing temper tantrums, and holding your country hostage until you do get your way.” It can be a nuanced difference I know, but language is powerful, and I just think the word should only get to be used by people who know enough to understand that "compromise" is not a four letter word, and that Honolulu is not a suburb of Nairobi. 

Book Club

So, I joined a book club recently in my neighborhood and we had our first meeting the other night. It was fun but I accidentally used the word 'seminal,' and then trotted out TS Eliot.  And this was after Gina made me promise I’d try to use regular words. She knows how I can get. But I’d had a glass of wine and it just happened. It's really embarrassing to have to admit you're a pretentious drunk. I wasn't trying to be, but I'm still feeling a little douchy about it.

Baby Season! (Permits not Required).

We have fecund friends these days, and the New Year is poised to positively explode with babies. Gina and I remain content to run our retirement home for gracefully aging canines but look forward to periodically taking in the various small children with whom we will be acquainted, and introducing them to the delight and wonders of sticky things before returning them to their parents at the end of the day.  Hopefully, before they poop.

Subtopic 1: Pregnant Women, and also Garfunkle and Oates.

  Having never been pregnant, and not really planning to be, I think this song is hi-larious, which probably shows that breederless women are also smug. . .

Subtopic 2: Odd Behavior.

I’ve noticed this funny thing that happens when I baby-sit our Newphew Leif. I feel this sort of hamster ball of sudden and urgent importance envelop around me. Leif may be the catalyst for its appearance, but as his appointed protector and defender for the next three to five hours, I am fully at the center of its orbit. One afternoon, my mother and I took him for an afternoon into Boston––which, if you’ve ever been in a city, this won’t surprise you––was filled with people. Brimming with people. People at the crosswalks, people walking in the park, people standing in great big viscous globs all over the halls of the science museum. The problem is, the stroller that we for him is approximately size of an oil tanker and maneuvers just as easily. As we pushed our way through the crowds, parting the intransigent crowds like a molasses sea, I am not proud to admit that ensconced in my hamster ball of importance that I was, it occurred to me more than once, MERCIFUL HEAVENS PEOPLE, GIVE US SOME ROOM, CAN’T YOU SEE I HAVE A CHILD? Any doleful wail, however, from the lips of an OPC (other people’s child), and I darkly think: Gah! Have mercy on our eardrums, for criminy's sake. Perhaps this is nature’s way of showing me I probably should stick with dogs.

The Birds and the Bees.

My friend, Sarah, recently and successfully harvested her own eggs to donate to her sister and brother-in-law.  If it takes a village to raise a child, she and her family’s collective efforts prove that it also sometimes takes a village to make a child in the first place. It also takes, I am told, an arse load of needles, a not insignificant amount of funds, loads of hormones, and harrowing trips into Mass General.  But she braved it all; the needles, which squick her out, and Boston rush hour traffic, which would squick anybody out, and the torrents of hormones which gave me sympathetic PMS just to hear about. And all for a sister who, for the first two and a half years I knew Sarah, was only ever described to me as “soooooooooo annoying.” (When I had opportunity to augment Sarah’s historical accounts with my own empirical data, I drew a different conclusion but I do not fault Sarah for her initial reasoning[1].)  Anyway, all of this is to say that I am so proud of Sarah for undertaking this process and emerging from it like a champ. It also illustrates a most fundamental but often overlooked truth about how babies are made. The three ingredients needed are, in no particular order: An Egg, A Sperm, and A Womb with a View. (That last one is Gina’s little brain child. Isn’t that adorably clever? I think so too.)

Sorry, Porkchop

So, Pennsylvania’s Lehigh County Commissioner, Tom Creighton said recently: “The state has a ban on same-sex marriage, so why should the county be offering benefits for same-sex marriage? I don’t feel the county should be looking for new ways to give away taxpayer money. Next it could be giving money out to people’s pets or whatever. No, it probably won’t go that far.”

 You never know. It’s a slippery slope from marriage rights to diamond studded litter boxes.

Is that a genuine Ermine wrap PorkChop????

The Pil Ville

Gina and I have a new television obsession. It’s not new television, it’s a new obsession. Once upon a time about ten years ago, PBS started making ‘house’ series reality shows. For instance, “Frontier House” takes three regular families and flings them into the wilds of Montana for five months where they must live as if they’re in 1883. That means they have to live in modest cabins (that they have possibly constructed themselves) and build their own privies, haul their own water every day, milk cows, chop wood, harvest four effing tons of hay by scythe, not wear underwear, and do everything as if they are actually homesteading, and the year is 1883. It’s sort of reality television meets historical immersion.  And it's fitting, I think, that we discovered this treasure ten years into its existence. This is why I like PBS. With a focus on history and the past, my technological lolly gagging doesn't seem so hopeless. 

Anyway, the last of these series that we saw was Colonial House. This one's premise throws a bunch of people into 17^th century New England colonial life complete with a Governor, various servants sprinkled amongst the landed gentry, and mandatory Sabbath attendance, and then says, "ready, Go!"   I kept calling it Pilgrim Village which in due time became Pil Ville.  It’s a great show and not just because of the poofy pants the guys have to wear, though that certainly helps.  The shows consult historians and period experts to try and replicate as authentically as it can the worlds of history each show portrays, but being a reality show, it allows 21^st century people to be their 21^st century selves. The people who are chosen to be on the show like to philosophize about whether they might have ‘made’ it or not in the "real" time periods.  One of the fun things Gina and I like to do is speculate about our own chances of survival had we happened to live in those days. We ponder our various assets such as our robust constitutionals and hearty work ethics, and debate whether our fortitude and pluck would have helped see us through, knowing all the while that whatever we say is hogwash because the first thing that would happen to us if were actually in 17^th century New England is we'd be tried for witchcraft and burned at the stake.

Carolyn Heinz. Queen of Pil Ville

And not to give away any spoilers, but there is a woman on Colonial House that is the actual living embodiment of every character ever portrayed by Catherine O’Hara in any Christopher Guest movie. 

Catherine O'Hara Queen of Satire

Drag Queens.

And so we return to Drag Queens. Why? Because Drag Queens make everything better. Not all drag queens, obviously, just the awesome ones. RuPaul's Drag Race has started again and so we are happy campers.  Once upon a time, when I had just watched an episode of Drag Race, I had what I thought was a brilliant flash of profound insight. Ready? The fractal property of drag queens as demonstrated through Jinkx Monsoon.  Allow me to explain. Or just walk away now, that’s fine too.

Why are you looking at me like that?

Subtopic BONUS!

 Official Fan Art.  I am both proud and a little sheepish about this. Ah, I'm mostly proud, who am I kidding?

You've seen this before, but recognize the pictures on the shirts? Aw yeah, who nerds out at the varsity level!

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[1] Sibling relationships sometimes just need to age for a few decades before they mellow and mature. Like a good cheese.