Lessons In Gjetost

When I was 23 or so my aunt and I visited my sister in St Louis. We didn't have any plans besides definitely going to this adorable little spot The Chocolate Bar. Tax Aunt had been a couple years earlier. She loved it so much. We were all enthused about this plan! But then we left a little late and the drive took a little longer and by the time we got in, we'd have to race to the bar before it closed and we kind of looked haggard and we were spent, so to our dismay, we dashed our only plan.

But my sister rallied. She would make the cheese board of our DREAMS! And what do you know? When the cheese board was presented my aunt gasped at the sight of the gjetost on the plate. The fancy caramelized cheese we all first discovered at the Chocolate Bar! She said, "To be honest, the whole reason I wanted to go...was to eat this cheese." And then my sister said, "I just wanted to be with you both. I didn't care about going at all!" I agreed, neither did I! I just wanted for Tax Aunt to get what she wanted! And for us to have a nice time! And guess what? We did.

Fall Semester 2014 in 26 Snapshots

Graduated in May, but the semester life is far from over. This was probably the hardest semester of my life. Long train trips to the south side to bring a playwriting program to an underserved school, the neverending stream of late work from community college students, the lower paychecks, the higher rent, the days of inherent 4 mile walks, the beginning of the blistering cold nights. But I MADE IT. And, even, I am emerging from the swamp I felt I was drowning in back in August somewhat...victorious. Good student evals, a promotion, two new works on stage, opportunities to perform. There's gold in these hills, folks, and I am leaving the apartment everyday with my pickax and my bus pass, grammar books, and my hot pink mace.

HS boy with a high top explains how it hurts to hear men are jerks.

Screaming about soup with a vocal fry in the cabaret space.

Eating two baked potatoes across from my mom, janky steak house.

A billion cheese cubes in the VFW hall.

Droopy eyes at Bisque, Spiff dances wildly, Ogie the monster.

Bisque in the snow holding cocoa under the A. McMahon moniker.

"It could be so much better." I feel a mirror behind me.

Fall trot with Pookie to the shopletts on Broadway.

Sittin' at the southern kitchen table talkin' educational loans.

My dad takes photos of me getting the high score on Pac-Man.

The barefoot audition.

The Daily Burn, parfait, Friday Night Lights tradition.

Sneezing my face off in class. Gel making me use it.

Sitch and I are the annoying people on that Wednesday night bus.

Oopa! All the saganaki with aunt 'n' uncle.

Crying at what was to come in the New Mexico desert.

Kicking my feet in bed after opening the congrats email.

Using poofs as chairs for living room improv sets with Meat Gang.

Eatin' a ghost cookie on the hottest October (makeshift birthday) day.

The wannabe gym coach putting up his hood to read a poem in 100.

The quiet gamer pretending to flip a table in the 101 debates.

Ripping on the sweetie pies of Tuesday/Thursday.

The pros and cons of living in Saudi Arabia with my tutee at the library.

Wooden post painting where we are members.

The longest and most literal Labor Day ever.

The lightening machine at Science and Industry.

This list was so much harder to make than usual. I barely scratched the surface of things that are monumental because things are packed! Packed, I say.

Italian Birthday

Hoisted our duffels and made our way (regretfully) trainward ho. Goodbye, Cinque. I stopped in the teeny market for a little block of Parmesan and some native sweet bread. Four hour trip to Rome requires snacks.

We had a two hour delay in a quaint station with nothing but a trashy gift shop and a McDonalds. We decided to enjoy a couple lattes and were delighted by the assortment of pastries McDs had. I ate a super flaky, dusted with powdered sugar, ricotta cheese poof. Quite honestly it was the best breakfast I had all trip. If a year ago you would have told me my birthday breakfast would be from Ronald himself I would have probably assumed my life somehow unraveled to disastrous shambles and not that I would actually be very satisfied.

The weather was perfect. Creamy clouds and faint smells of countryside. On the train I planned to read more of A Room with a View, but we ended up in the most serendipitous of cars! Six little seats filled by three couples in their twenties from the US, Austrailia, and India. We spent the entire time asking each other questions about our cultures, comparing, contrasting, commenting on what we'd seen of Italy so far. I still can't get over this really. It seemed almost planned, but it was just the luck of the 19 Mag!

We decided to cab to our hotel in Rome to avoid pickpockets and a transportation headache after a longish trip. It was cheaper than we expected and much appreciated. I opened my window as the new city air whipped in.

For dinner we found a little checked-tablecloths and all pizza place. My main request was to have two gelato for dessert. The night was young. We visited The Pantheon, people watched for hours with gelato number one (chocolate orange) in hand.

We watched a street clown for a bit and headed to Trevi Fountain. Stayed on a bench from early dusk until it was completely lit watching couples kissing and large groups tossing coins behind them.

I chose a delightful lemon gelato two, Bisque made good on his promise for a backrub and we planned our very busy marrow. I reflected on the year as I drifted to sleep.

Italy: Part Three Point Five

Donned my new polka-dot suit. AM ferry to village four. Onion foccasia. Bisque saw the boat from afar, said, "We will be on the top level." As in, "We will fight anyone to the death if they try to take the unadulterated sunshine and ship breeze from us."

At Monterossa we had panna cotta cones and shuffled to the beach. We set a fifteen minute timer for Bisque's lily white skin, but he still came out pink.

The ocean was very cold. We waffled about how far we'd wade in, but finally I dunked  and never looked back. Every time I've gone to the ocean I waffle and then dunk and never regret it.

"My brain's a raisin," my lobster guy said re: the tired conversations we were having. Sunsleepy. We had dinner at the same little place. A cheese plate and followed it with real ciocollatta and cream. I ate a dang biscotti, which I had been clamoring about since arriving in Venice.

Bold but True Statement of the Week & Labor Day

Human History trembles, buckles its knees, and crumbles in terror if you force it face your Potential.

On Labor Day I enjoyed a cone of pear and gorgonzola ice cream. Photo with Shells here. Snapped by Bug.

You can't stop today as it comes speedin' down the track,

Child, yesterday is history, and it's never comin' back,

'Cos tomorrow is a brand new day,
and it's don't know white from black!

Best Sandwich Ever

Slab of mozzarella, laced with leaves.

Ciabatta as good--no--better

than the ones Kay's dad brought home from the bakery in Monterey.

We ate them on the couch while watching 12 Angry Men.

Buttery. Flakey. Thick.

I didn't think I could taste bread so good

and yesterday revisited that disbelief.

Hill said, "I will take you to the best sandwich ever,"

and it was not even a lie. Not even a little bit.

The semi-circle was hand-sized, comfortable,

and although the stories my friend told me were not pleasant,

there is something pleasant about it--

holding that cradle of tomato over brown butcher paper.

Life might be unfair, but it is just--

because we are walking justice.

Our positivity is the criminal system,

and if you refuse to be locked up,

you can't be.

Let them try.

You might bite down so hard your braces brackets break,

but still,

let them try.

In the end,

you might be at a picnic table

filling up on a champion lunch

and spinning your straw

in fresh whipped cream.

My Parents Support the Arts--Correction--MY Arts

“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”-Kurt Vonnegut

Cheesy, but we all need that sometimes.

Also, I would never want to hurt my parents, but, honestly, going into the arts would not be the way to do it.

This is a photo of my mom eating a red velvet cupcake on a Friday night in Phoenix, November 2011:



This is my dad eating at Taco Bueno in Texas. December 2011:

Char and Henne

Tira misu and berry torte from a bakery in Germany. 2011.

"I am literally counting every dollar because if I spend more than fifteen dollars a day, which, as you know, is easy to do, my life will literally be ruined. I'm doing a really bad job because I look around my apartment and see I have, like, four kinds of cheese, and I'm like, that is not a meal."--Henne on living in New York

"I really enjoy reading your blog every day. I'm sorry the only advice I can offer you is to poison your jar of nuts though."--Dad on the previous blog post about nut theives

Alice's Wasteless Space For Your Face

Work forced me to conquer one of my biggest fears ever: meat slicers. I have been afraid of meat slicers since the dawn of man. So shiny, so devious, so, purposefully sharp. So close to people's hands.

My fear was amped up about a million percent when Kay was working at a bakery and fell out of commission for a good two days because the slicer gashed his thumb open.

So, on my very very first day, very first hour of my sandwich job, I was trained to work the slicer. I didn't feel like on my first fifteen minutes of work I could stipulate I would rather clean toilets than stand near the death machine, so I swallowed the fear lump in my throat and learned.

Here's what the meat slicer has taught me: MEAT IS DISGUSTING. Obvi, I thought this before, but now, I KNOW. To slice a package of ham I take a "chub" of ham out of the fridge. It's a block of pinky flesh. I cut open the package and nasty juices spill out of it. It's pure rubber bits smashed together. (It makes you wonder how the meat got from pig, off the bone, and back into a neat lil package.) Nothing about the chunk reminds me that it was once an animal. Until it bleeds. Yes, on the slicer, blood oozes out and spills over the metal. Also, the meat is marbled with fat, which of course ends up in long strands in the slices. At the end of the entire process, there's a good inch that can't be processed by the slicer, so it just has to be thrown away.

So wasteful! Actually, inherently working food service exposes you to many wasteful practices. There's a lot of latex glove changing, a lot of "Oh this touched this, so throw it all away," a lot of storing things is disposable containers for freshness. Yesterday as I was putting a stack of provelone away, I dropped about half of it on the ground. The trouble with a family owned business, is that the owner directly pays for all of your stupid mistakes. My manager tried not to show her momentary hatred for me, but she could not bring herself to say, "It's okay" as I apologized profusely. I was thinking, I already feel horrible just for wasting the misshapen part of this cheese log. Believe me, I feel bad. You do not have to accentuate it.

I mean, I get it. Ultimately, I know about The Jungle, I'm grateful for the FDA and rules and stuff, but...if I walked into a restaurant and my waitress said, "Hey, in order to not use one hundred gloves a day, no one in the kitchen wears them anymore. Everyone still washes their hands." I'd be like, "Yes! I am coming here more often!"

If I got a sandwich with a misshapen piece of cheese on it because that's what happens when you get down to the end of the block on the slicer, and someone told me that, I'd be more than happy to eat it rather than see it tossed into a landfill.

So, my new plan is to have Alice's Wasteless Space For Your Face! A restaurant where we're clean and care about presentation...to an extent. The floor will be mopped daily, and swept often, so if your sandwich falls on the floor as the mustard's going on, we're gonna serve it to you anyway! I will serve foods that have been made improperly for half price instead of tossing them! NO, YOU CANNOT HAVE ANY PLASTIC SILVERWARE. So, does anyone know how to hide a business form the federal government?