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In My Life (I Love You More) by
25
(26 Stories)

Prompted By Beatles vs Stones

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I think there’s likely a statistically significant relationship between how old you were when the British Invasion hit and which group you preferred, if in fact you had a favorite. I was too young for the Stones’ bad-boy act, I never got over the opinion that the they were just punks. Plus I couldn’t understand the lyrics.

Not only do I still have all the original albums, I still have the fan magazines.

As a nation and a generation we were still grieving the shocking Kennedy assassination, and the Beatles’ music was just what we needed at the time; happy, upbeat, and made you smile. After seeing them on The Ed Sullivan Show, my Mother asked the question everyone had to decide (and then answered for me): “So who’s your favorite—Paul?” That would have been her answer.

For some reason I found it difficult to tell her the truth, that John was way more interesting to me than the “cute” one. Those James Dean brooding types always seemed deeper, and more complex.  And of course, we all imagined ourselves as complex creatures too.

The local radio stations were all-in, not just playing the music nonstop, but hyping it with contests, interviews, give-aways etc. One of them, WJBK, spent weeks touting an interview that one of their DJs had snagged with the Beatles when they were in town. This sounded so cool! It was broadcast at 11:00 pm on a school night. No problem—my transistor radio had an ear plug (one, not stereo) and I listened under the covers.

The giveaway from the WJBK interview.

I’ll never forget the breathless buildup of the DJ walking down the hall, waiting, descriptions of whatever he saw, waiting some more. Finally 55 minutes into it, it’s almost midnight, there was five minutes of conversation. I went to sleep exhausted from the excitement. The next day it was topic A, and one of my friends said, “What a disappointment. They made us wait around so long for that?!” She was right, we’d all been scammed. Lesson learned.

I still have my trove of Beatles memorabilia; records, magazines, ticket stubs—yes, I actually saw them live, twice!—buttons, and God knows what else. Some of it might be worth money on eBay.  Or not.  But priceless to me.

 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways by
25
(26 Stories)

Prompted By What We Read

/ Stories

Like many of us, I was a voracious reader as a child. I don’t even remember learning to read, it just seems as though I always could.  Also like many of us I could read before I started school, having been read to every night for years. Alice in Wonderland was my hands-down favorite. I don’t know how many times my mother read it to me, but I suspect that I demanded that we start again the minute we finished it. I remember being extremely impatient in the first grade, when we were seated in front of a huge, floor-standing version of the canonical Dick and Jane with one word in 180-point type: LOOK. Okay, got it. Can we turn the page, please??

My gateway drugs to cosmology were Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters.

During lazy, boring grade school summers my best friend and I would bike several miles to the public library and load up our saddle bags with as many books as we could manage. Then we’d go home and race to see who could plow through them the quickest. I have wonderful, vivid memories of our sleepovers: the two of us in her bunk beds reading as if our lives depended on it—until her mother finally turned out the light in exasperation.

But I also remember that it was difficult for me to find books I was interested in.  Looking back on it now, it makes perfect sense—in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, society was not interested in girl power, and the books reflected that. We read the Little House on the Prairie series; Lois Lenski’s regional books about Southern life which we had no inkling of, Bayou Suzette and Strawberry Girl; and of course the whole Little Women saga. I still have my original copy of the first of the series.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

But my favorite book from those years was a YA biography of Elizabeth and Robert Barrett Browning. I slowly devoured it one summer while on a lake vacation when I was on my period and—frustration!—couldn’t go in the water for a few days. Feeling supremely betrayed by life, I was just the right age and in the right circumstance to be receptive to the romantic tragedy of the Brownings’ lives. And the poetry blew me away too! Here was something new and different that I could sink my teeth into. More of this!

After that I was done with kids’ books. I briefly tried mythology and sci-fi, but was never one for make-believe. I skipped the whole Hobbit/Lord of the Rings mania that gripped my college cohort. (Which, 30 years later, my goddaughter simply could not fathom—how can I not be enthralled??) Shrug.

Then came the counterculture and the era of spirituality and seeking. I wasn’t a spiritual person, my BS meter was finely tuned at an early age by virtue of being the youngest of four siblings. (Never believe a word an older brother tells you.) This was the era of Stranger in a Strange Land, Watership Down, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Vonnegut, and Allende. My boss at the time was smitten with Carlos Castaneda and tried to engage me, so I had to feign interest. But there was nothing for me here. I stopped reading for a while.

Then, sometime in my mid-twenties, I picked up a book of essays that paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould had written for Natural History magazine. They were his musings on evolution for a lay audience, using everything from baseball to architecture to chocolate bars to illustrate his points. Here’s a typical SJG insight:

“Thus, the paradox: Our textbooks like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design—nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf by a butterfly or of a poisonous species by a palatable relative. But ideal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense.”

Whew! No one ever ‘splained it to me like that. And then: Wow! That was exhilarating! I raced to the end of the article thinking, where have you been all my life? I felt like Saul of Tarsus, gobsmacked on the road to Damascus, albeit in my case on the way out of Damascus.

There was some crossover between spirituality and science. My gateway drugs to cosmology were Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters, both darlings of the effort to conjoin quantum mechanics with a purposeful universe. But there was also Richard Feynman to bring things back down to earth.

Spirituality puts you at the center of the big question: who am I, why am I here, what is my purpose? Science flips the script and puts us in our place: How do I fit into this magnificent universe that was here long before I showed up and will be here long after I’m gone? It’s much more fascinating question to me, and I’ve spent decades trying to parse it.

So the bar is high for a story to capture my interest. I appreciate great writing; I can tell immediately if a given author has a voice and a tale I want to live with for a while. When I want a break from science these days, I rely on my friends to recommend novels that are lyrical, and not edgy just for the sake of pushing the envelope.

But my library of books is all non-fiction, mostly scientific—specifically evolutionary biology, quantum mechanics, and cosmology. There is a lyricism to science writing just as much as fiction, and science has the added benefit of not being angst-ridden. These days, the story of the universe is the one I want to read.

Stars by
25
(26 Stories)

Prompted By Restaurants

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Chef and restaurant owner Jeremiah Tower at his newly opened Stars restaurant in 1984.

In the 1980s and ’90s, a restaurant reigned in San Francisco that changed everything. Conceived and created by master chef Jeremiah Tower, Stars was in a class by itself. Located in the Civic Center just steps from Davies Symphony Hall and the Opera House, and approached via a seedy alley as if it were a speakeasy, Stars was every bit the stage that the theatres were. Tower, previously of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, presided over the nightly festivities with his trademark glass of champagne in hand. He put his California cuisine and showmanship skills on full display. And what a show it was.

We ate ethereal soufflés and listened to the pianist sample the Great American Songbook till closing.

Once through the door you ascended a stairway to the cavernous but somehow intimate space. A long bar flanked one wall with the (then revolutionary) open performance kitchen dominating the other. In between were bar tables, a grand piano, and raised platforms of dinner tables. It was gorgeous, loud, bustling, delicious, and above all fun. It quickly became the place to see and be seen, especially as a before- and after-concert venue. Sophisticated and casual—at a time when restaurants had to be one or the other—socialites, politicians, celebrities, and stars came to Stars to feast on raw oysters, duck confit, or a hot dog.

It had been our favorite pre-concert hangout for supper and a drink, but it was during our years with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus that we became regulars. We couldn’t eat much before singing a concert, so afterward we were starved. We were also on a performance high and dressed in formal wear—as were many others. The after-concert crowd often included symphony players as well as soloists and guest conductors, all rubbing elbows with the occasional Hollywood star. We ate ethereal soufflés and listened to the pianist sample the Great American Songbook till closing.

It was a heady and formative experience. Stars was elegant without being stuffy. The clientele were artists, movers, and shakers. The music was from another era. The food was a revelation and started my own culinary odyssey.

Then, in 1999, Stars suddenly closed. We later found out that Jeremiah Tower had burned out. We patrons could perform and then come to Stars and relax. Jeremiah had to perform there all night, every night. And, we learned from the recent documentary “The Last Magnificent,” he was a perfectionist. “The hardest thing about life,” he confided, “is having to face the terrible reality that every day is not to be like one’s dreams and hopes of what some future day might be.” No wonder he couldn’t maintain the illusion.

But while it lasted, Stars was the perfect expression of its time and place.

Paradigm Shift by
25
(26 Stories)

Prompted By Sports

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Photo Credit: Daily Mail

The 2018 Olympic ice dancing competition has just ended, wardrobe malfunction and nip-slip included. The costumes and skaters have gotten ever skimpier as the envelope is pushed to the limit. There were some beautiful performances this year, but for show-stopping exquisite sensuality, I find myself fixated on the 1984 Olympic performance of Torvill and Dean, the team from Great Britain.

When some random country prints a stamp commemorating your performance, you've made an impact.

For those uninitiated, this was one of those seminal moments when something altogether new, different, exciting, and brilliant happened. Like other leaps in art, music, science etc., it emerged from the old forms, and took the discipline to new heights by re-conceptualizing and re-imagining them.

When ice dancing first became an Olympic “sport,” it had some of the same credibility issues as rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming. Yes, it takes a great deal of skill, but is it a sport? Half of the score in these events is an artistic one, but that’s true of snowboarding’s half-pipe, and no one would argue that it’s not sport. We loved to hate-watch it.

In the early years, the skaters really were ballroom dancing on ice. If you’ve ever seen a professional ballroom dance contest, you know how stiff and regimented it is. The worst part was when instead of the short program of today, every couple had to do their interpretation of one specific pre-determined dance. The year it was the paso doble, I thought I’d lose my mind.

Then came Torvill and Dean. It’s hard if not impossible to view this performance from the perspective of today. It may seem tame at this remove, but at the time it was revolutionary. It began inauspiciously (for me) with the music: Ravel’s Boléro. No! Not five years earlier, Boléro was the soundtrack to the hit movie “10,” which ruined its serious cred forever. However, its driving, relentless energy turned out to be the perfect selection for this performance.

The tension was palpable from the beginning. They began kneeling on the ice facing each other swaying side to side looking much like courting birds.* OK, this is different. Once on their feet, their movements were slow, sinuous, rhythmic. More skating than dancing. Really different. Moving in twists and turns, holds and embraces, they became as one, barely letting go of the other. More foreplay than skating. As the choreography and music built in intensity, and the performance ended with them collapsed on the ice, the crowd went nuts. We all need a cigarette. This was the ultimate expression of the art form. Collective head slap. We knew in that moment we’d witnessed something transformative.

The judges agreed: it was the first across-the-board perfect artistic scores in history. I think the fans would have stormed the ice if it had been otherwise. There may never be another like it.


* Ravel’s original Boléro composition is over 17 minutes long. Olympic rules state that the free dance must be four minutes long (plus or minus ten seconds). When Torvill and Dean went to a music arranger to condense Boléro down to a “skateable” version, they were told that the minimum time that Boléro could be condensed down to was 4 minutes 28 seconds—18 seconds in excess of the rules. Torvill and Dean reviewed the Olympic rulebook and found that the actual timing of a skating routine began when the skaters started skating. Therefore, they could use Boléro if they did not place their skate blades to ice for the first 18 seconds. They timed the performance so that when Torvill first placed a blade on the ice, they would have the maximum skating time remaining. (Adapted from Wikipedia)

The Show by
25
(26 Stories)

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Suburban 60s Moulin Rouge

Like many young girls of my era, I was a dancer. My studio started everyone out with a combined class of jazz, ballet, and acrobatics. Later, if we stuck with it, we would have separate classes in ballet and pointe, and maybe tap. It was an eclectic but ultimately well-rounded curriculum that made for an interesting mix of music, dance styles, and costumes.

One of the mothers made these costumes. Yes, I still have mine.

My studio, however, did not have the usual end-of-the-year recital where they rented the local school auditorium and invited parents, grandparents, and siblings to an hours-long ordeal involving the whole school. Instead, family and friends were invited to each individual last class of the year, at which we showed off our stuff. As you can imagine, although this was fun, it didn’t have the panache of a stage show. In its place, the most advanced class was invited to perform two numbers in the traditional yearly local Lions Club fundraiser, which was billed as a “minstrel and variety show.” We didn’t really understand what this meant, but for us this was The Show.

In 1967, my first year in the show, our teachers choreograph a can-can—definitely not your standard issue ballet class fare—which we practice for an eternity. Imagine a flock of sweet young things who’ve been drilled in turnout, high half-pointe, and “attitude.” Now suddenly we’re supposed to bust loose, shake our skirts, and literally whoop and holler while we dance. It’s an overload of high energy, high kicking, G-rated … something. Each of us will take a turn in the front of the group with our solo move. Some are assigned cartwheels and tumbling passes, others split leaps. Mine is turns of some kind: a half dozen fouettés, or maybe a wheel of piqué turns.

The dress rehearsal arrives, at which we and the Club will go through the whole show. We walk on to a darkened stage and see a chorus on risers, and a few men sitting downstage—all in blackface. I’m thinking this is very weird, but since I have no framework for it, I ignore it and just dance. We don’t see or hear much of the rest of the show, but the chorus and soloists sing songs while the ones downstage are the MCs and the comic relief. We are the teenaged eye candy.

I have no idea now how racist this show is because I don’t even realize it is racist. I have no context. I have never met a single black person in my suburban life, and innocently think this is an homage, an honor. Maybe it is on some level, but Detroit will erupt in riots later that summer, so yeah, maybe not. But the Club is doing it all for charity. That’s a good thing, right?

It’s astonishing at this remove how innocent we were. For us it was all about the dancing and nothing else. Before every performance our teachers would say: “Do your best, you never know who might be in the audience.” Which we believed meant there really was someone in the audience just waiting to discover our tremendous talent. Whatever was going on behind us was just another example of men doing inscrutable things. That has never changed.

This View of Life by
25
(26 Stories)

Prompted By Science

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I almost flunked high school chemistry because I refused to memorize the valence table for a midterm. I understood the concepts and the math, and demonstrated that with the few valence values I knew, but my life was too busy to bother with something I could easily look up in a book—not that I’d ever need to do that. But the whole episode left me with a real sour taste for science, a field that in another reality would have been my life’s work.

“If you believe in eternity, then life is irrelevant.” Gregory House

Sometime in my mid-thirties I picked up a book of essays that paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould had written for Natural History magazine. They were his musings on evolution for a lay audience, using everything from baseball to architecture to chocolate bars to illustrate his points. Here’s a typical SJG insight:

Thus, the paradox: Our textbooks like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design—nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf by a butterfly or of a poisonous species by a palatable relative. But ideal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense.

Whew! No one ever ‘splained it to me like that. And then: wow, that was exhilarating! I raced to the end of the article thinking, where have you been all my life? I felt like Saul of Tarsus, gobsmacked on the road to Damascus, albeit in my case on the way out of Damascus.

I’ve never been a spiritual person; my BS meter was finely tuned at an early age by virtue of being the youngest of four siblings. (Never believe a word an older brother tells you.) It’s one reason the whole counterculture movement didn’t interest me; replacing one form of spirituality with another bored me to tears. Search all you want, I thought, the answer is decidedly not out there.

But evolution was a concept I could get behind: We’re here as a result of a process that was set in motion 13.8 billion years ago! I don’t give a crap whether a god somehow set it in motion. The fact that it happened, and that we’ve been able to figure out that it happened—that is mind-blowing.

Spirituality puts you at the center of the big question: who am I, why am I here, what is my purpose? Science flips the script and puts us in our place: How do I fit into this magnificent universe that was here long before I showed up and will be here long after I’m gone? It’s a much more fascinating question to me, and I’ve spent decades trying to parse it.

Nine years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was early stage, but a rare, aggressive variant. (Of course. I had to be different.) My doctor, the head of oncology at a prestigious institution, had no treatment to offer that had been shown to increase my chances of survival, so he decided that we should just throw everything in the arsenal at it. Never mind that all of those nasty treatments were going to fuck with my body and brain in ways too gruesome to list; it was what he believed in and so it was what he prescribed. I challenged him on the wisdom of this and he became abusive. I fired him.

I spent the next several months researching everything I could find about my condition. I was stunned to find that the treatments in place at the time were little more than a hope and a prayer. Doctors will tell you that a course of radiation will decrease your chance of a recurrence by 40%. Sounds pretty good, yes? What they don’t tell you is that’s a relative percentage. If your absolute risk of recurrence without radiation is, say, 5%, you’re actually reducing your risk of recurrence to 3% (40% off 5) with treatment—only a 2% reduction! They also don’t tell you that it moves the needle on mortality not at all. In other words, it won’t help you live any longer. Huh? Not so good, in view of the significant damage that radiation can do to your body.

The overriding takeaway of a study of evolutionary biology is that everything is a system. Species evolve in response to changes in their environment, not just on a whim. Our bodies are an ecosystem too; change something in one area and it ripples through the whole. Cancer treatments like chemo and radiation cause heart failure, cognitive difficulties, and other cancers. If your life is in imminent danger, then it is prudent to take this risk. I demanded personalized medicine before it was a thing, because I understood that dumping a chemical pesticide on a weed contaminates the soil all around it. I just could never understand why my doctors didn’t understand this. This is why teaching evolution and marginalizing creationism is so important—our worldview has real-world consequences.

Chauvinist Pig by
25
(26 Stories)

Prompted By Women's Lib

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I’ve seen this movie before, but last time it was ironically billed as The Battle of the Sexes, a winner take all match between a loathsome middle-aged sexist and an athlete in her prime: Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs playing tennis as if the fate of the world depended on the outcome. To some of us, it felt like it did. He had been needling her for months to accept his challenge, and she realized that if she did, she simply had to win.

This time, the only thing missing is the piglet.

Title IX, mandating equality in men’s and women’s sports in schools, had just become law the year before, and the prevailing societal attitudes varied from mild amusement to disgust. “Why should we spend anything on women’s sports? Men will always be better at it than women;” “Women’s sports are boring;” and my personal favorite, “Women don’t want to play sports.” Two of these ideas were manifestly untrue; this match was a test of the third. Could a woman actually beat an equally accomplished male opponent?

Now clearly, one match could not possibly confirm or deny this preposterous setup: If Billie Jean lost, everyone would just say, “See? We told you so.” But if she did manage to win, would they concede the point? Could a win move the needle on this tiresome argument even a little? Basically, we were talking about bragging rights.

In the fall of 1973 I was at all-women’s Mills College, and taking, yes, tennis lessons. I was a big fan of Billie Jean and seriously invested in this. Most of my dorm gathered nervously around the common room TV. We knew a victory would be mostly symbolic, but what a symbol. Shutting up this loud-mouthed creep and his minions, if only for a while, would be sweet.

The match had by this time taken a backseat to all the media hoopla surrounding it. Before it began, King presented Riggs with a piglet, a message not lost on anyone: No matter what happens here, you’re still a male chauvinist pig.

Billie Jean got behind in the first set, and we started to pace the floor. Bobby was hamming it up on the other end of the court, as if he just had to phone it in for a win. Then things settled down, and Billie Jean started to pull away. Even playing by the men’s best-of-five-sets rule, she beat him resoundingly in three straight sets! Let the backlash begin.

It was clear to any unbiased observer that King was the better tennis player that day. That didn’t stop the pundits from opining that if Riggs was her age he’d have beaten her, or that he threw the match to clean up on bets he’d made on himself or to pay off debts he owed to the mob. Because the earth didn’t just stop spinning on its axis, did it? A woman beat a man in a sporting event, what’s next?

This seemingly meaningless circus really did have a point and made it resoundingly. Billie Jean King was a professional, kick-ass athlete who was mesmerizing to watch. We didn’t need her to beat the men her age, we just loved to watch her play her game, and we expected her to be paid commensurately. She herself admitted that if she’d lost it could have set the cause back 50 years. That may have been a slight exaggeration, but I think the reverse is true—the win opened the door for others to follow her and get the respect and compensation they deserved. If it takes a circus to get the point across, so be it.

It’s now almost 50 years later. We’ve certainly made progress, so thank you Billie Jean for all the doors you opened for women. But here we are again, engaged in the same misogynistic circus, the only thing missing is the piglet. But this time our opponent is a bigger clown and the stakes are much higher. Let’s hope he really does throw the match this time.

Train Wreck by
25
(26 Stories)

Prompted By The First Time

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It was my first concert singing with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. John and I had sung with a community chorus for several years and studied voice privately before deciding it was time to audition for the big show. And here we were.

Mistakes were made ... but not by me!

We had performed many concerts with the community chorus, much of the music sung a cappella or with piano accompaniment. Occasionally we got to sing with an orchestra, but mostly the concerts were presented to smallish audiences consisting largely of friends and families of the chorus members. The individual chorus members varied widely in skill and preparation, so on any given night the quality of the production was a crap-shoot. If someone came in early or otherwise sang a wrong note, well, we tried our best. It was also great fun.

The SFSC, on the other hand, was a group of serious professionals. Just being surrounded by the pros during rehearsal made you into a better singer, like playing tennis with someone better than you. This was not a concert one could phone in. I knew the music cold—The Duruflé Requiem, conducted by the reigning lion of choral music, Robert Shaw.

That was the other perk of being part of a professional organization, performing with the biggest stars in the classical music world: the orchestra director and musicians, guest conductors, and soloists.

I was nervous and excited, but confident as I processed onstage in my new black gown and saw the full house of almost 3,000 people who had paid real money to hear this concert. The one thing I didn’t want to do was mess up. Holy crap it was heady.

Downbeat, we begin singing and I can’t believe how much fun I’m having. Then, about four or five pages into it, the time signature starts to change with every measure; 2/4, 3/4, back to 2/4 then 4/4, with a 9/8 thrown in every so often, just for shits and giggles. Suddenly I realize I’m not with the conductor. But I know I’m right, aren’t I? I couldn’t have gotten off the beat that fast. I freak and stop singing while frantically trying to figure out what to do. You can feel the panic in the ranks. I quickly realize—in fact, we all quickly realize—that Maestro Shaw had skipped a beat! But what am I supposed to do? Follow him incorrectly? Sing what I know is right? What is everyone else doing? It’s what is known to musicians as a train wreck, and this one is colossal. This is not supposed to happen here!!

In a flash I reason that the orchestra is too big a ship to turn on a dime and has not followed his miscue. So I pick up where they are and sing out confidently, praying it’s the right call. The rest of the chorus simultaneously makes the same snap decision. All of this happens in a relative eyeblink, but it feels like an eternity at the time. By then Maestro Shaw realizes and corrects his mistake, and all goes smoothly from there. Welcome to the big time!

Food Porn by
25
(26 Stories)

Prompted By Cooking

/ Stories

The careers of several visionary women influence the way I cook today: Alice Waters (of Chez Panisse fame), Martha Stewart, and most importantly, Julia Child.

Most of the recipes from these $50 doorstops I will never attempt, but drooling over the descriptions and pictures will do just fine.

Alice‘s passion is freshness and seasonality; Martha’s thing is entertaining and presentation; but Julia was a force of nature. Hers was one of (if not the) first cooking shows on TV, and she changed the relationship many of us had to food. Quirky, irreverent, and not afraid to screw-up on camera, she was grounded in technique but also championed flavor and fun.

I love cookbooks almost as much as I love cooking. I’ve been to the restaurants of many celebrity chefs and sampled their cuisine, but Julia and Martha never had a restaurant empire, they wrote books. So began a lifelong love affair.

When the second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1970, we all dutifully bought it and even read some of it. Unlike the blogger who recently spent a year making every single recipe in both volumes, I’m pretty sure I’ve never made anything out of either.

Instead, I was smitten with her next books, From Julia Child’s Kitchen, Julia Child and Company and Julia Child and More Company. Accessible and foolproof, many of the recipes are still in my rotation, like her leek and potato soup and the corn timbale all my friends must be sick of. Which is not to say they are all quick or easy, but the time and effort is well rewarded.

Martha wrote the first coffee table cookbooks, more photo-spread than groundbreaking cuisine; she catalogued her gorgeous catered parties and her impossibly perfect kitchen garden. Talk about aspirational!

I progressed through the Sunset Magazine library, three Silver Palate books, the Chez Panisse oeuvre, then The Greens Cookbook and Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. The farm to table movement took off in California and Hawaii, and chefs became celebrities and every one of them began writing cookbooks.

Part storytelling and all marketing, these are serious food porn. Most of the recipes from these $50 doorstops I will never attempt, but drooling over the descriptions and pictures will do just fine. I’m still inspired and get useful ideas from them. Thomas Keller (of French Laundry fame) is an industry unto himself and his acolytes have gone on to open dozens of restaurants and write yet more cookbooks.

Every recipe ever written is now available online but I can never have enough cookbooks, Santa. Just sayin’.

Retail Therapy by
25
(26 Stories)

Prompted By Temptation

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The offers flood my inbox every day: Final day; Ends tonight; 75% off everything; Buy one get one free; Our biggest sale of the year, etc. Translation: “You know you want this. You can have it tomorrow. It will make you so happy, fulfilled, beautiful, or whatever. Besides, your friend was a total dick to you today—you so deserve this.” Facebook, porn, booze, gambling, I scoff at your addictions. Resisting the siren call of blowing all your money on “stuff” is the new black.

The thrill of the hunt, the lure of the new. No, I’m talking about shopping.

Remember how it was back in the day? Shopping used to take effort and a trip to town—downtown, where the big department stores were; or uptown, home to the local mom and pop stores. The first big mall near my home, Northland, opened in 1954, and was designed to provide the downtown experience but without all the office buildings, street people, or ethnic dives to harsh the middle class spending buzz. By the early 1970s another mall opened even closer and it was a completely enclosed space. I still remember the awe I first felt in this massive temple of commerce, a brilliant innovation in shopping in the dreary midwestern winter and humid summer.

Remember before credit cards? You paid with cash or checks. The big department stores started offering their own credit, an improvement over layaway. But then bank credit cards came along and allowed you to charge anywhere, so the smaller stores and catalogs could now compete.

Remember the early catalogs? Sears’ was a veritable doorstop of a tome with all the allure of the phonebook. Later in the ’60s the upscale catalogs began to arrive, but you still had to mail in your order. Phone ordering made the time to acquisition quicker, but it still took weeks for your order to be delivered.

Fast forward to the internet. 

Now I don’t even have to drive to town or travel to a distant land or even pick up the phone to purchase just about anything I can think of. I don’t know how we survived before Amazon et al, and I don’t know how we’re going to survive it. Why is it that we haven’t all bankrupted ourselves with the fire hose of retail instant gratification?

It’s certainly made my life easier, but at the same time the romance and the satisfaction of a serendipitous purchase is lost. Just as always getting your news from the same like-minded sources as yourself, always buying your clothes from REI is boring and unimaginative.

The evolution of shopping is a story of efficiency. But shopping used to be a quest, and a social one at that. Good stores have as much visual and design appeal as a gallery or museum, as does quality merchandise. I am energized by the new. I don’t always have to possess it, but I do want to experience it. You can’t touch or smell over the web. Once we’ve commodified everything, where is the art? Where is the challenge?

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