Grab Your Mallets and Your Mouse(s)

I'm stoked about Julie & Julia opening this Friday. Its timing conflict with Lollapalooza means striking a hard bargain with my husband to wedge a viewing in somewhere between Andrew Bird and Jane's Addiction over a sweaty marathon music weekend. But so be it. Madame Streep as Julia Child is simply not to be missed, and I'm absolutely giddy to have a foodie movie to sink my chops into since Ratatouille. (You can only get so much culinary mileage out of animated vermin, even if it comes from the genius pen of Pixar.)

Many of my compatriot bloggers are not however so enthused about Julie Powell's turn of fortune in all this, and we have what's left of the tattered newspaper world to tell us so. I don't mind dissent in the ranks. In fact, among bloggers I think you have to presume a certain constant dull roar of it. Snark is our favorite candy. 

It got me thinking though. Julie & Julia is a two-part story that offers up two heroines. Both are brash, fearless upstarts entering the culinary world during entirely different eras and through entirely different means. How each enters the fray is a fascinating look at how much life and popular culture have changed, but both women have the moxie to search their foodie souls in full public view. And at a minimum, isn't Powell's version of that moxie exactly what all food bloggers share? I hope so.

Memories of School Food

The people behind the Memories of School Food contest at NBC must be counting on the fact that they're opening a Pandora's box of formative traumas. The only place I remember more grade school angst going down was at actual recess.

I went to Catholic school, where we had rules for everything, poly-blend uniforms, and mass on Fridays. And nuns. An army of them, scorning our innocence into military-like precision under the beatific gaze of our loving Lord Baby Jesus and Virgin Mother. I encountered my first school-engineered meal in the first grade at Our Lady of Fatima. After months of knowing only the homemade fare packed into my metal Strawberry Shortcake lunch box, I piled into our burnt-orange 1981 Volvo one morning to my mother's shocking announcement: "I couldn't make you lunch this morning. Here's money to buy it." She handed me a tenner. This was more money than I had ever held in my entire six years, and I was stunned into silence. Buy it?...You mean like those kids whose mothers don't care about them? With this? No one is allowed to have $10 by themselves. The food stinks like grease and plastic...

Seeing my worry, my mom walked me into class, where she briefed Sister Ada about my monetary surplus situation. Sister slipped the bill into an envelope and said I could get it before lunchtime. As if I wanted to. Lunch eventually rolled around and I obediently picked up my cash and made my way into the eating hall line like a little prisoner clutching an atom bomb. My menu options were sweaty hot dog in flaming hot plastic or gritty hamburger in flaming hot plastic. Both sat shrieking under the gamma rays of a heat lamp. Distrustful of the grease collecting at the bottom of the hot dog packages, I chose a naked burger, burning the total crap out of my fingers.

My stomach churned as I approached the cash lady with my specimen, who did a double take at my loot. "This is all you have? This can't be all you have. Oh, well..." and she dug below to change the $9.25 in singles and coins. At which point I began sobbing because I had no idea what to do with all that money. (No pockets on a standard issue first-grade plaid jumper, strangely.) The lunch monitor jumped to my aid, promising to keep the money for me if I would just get some milk and sit down. Humiliated, I did so, taking refuge in my cold dairy goodness and nearly gagging on the smell of the burger as I attempted applying mustard to it.

My peace didn't last long. Sister Lucille, our 5 foot tall, bulldog of a principal in a dress, brought 80 clamoring children to a halting silence with the repeated bang of her keys on the metal cash box. "Who put the wrong money in here?!! Someone paid with ten dollars!! This is the WRONG MONEY! WHO PUT IT IN HERE?!" She was facing the children, and she wanted names. No one, apparently, had discussed with Sister Lucille the idea behind this particular form of currency being legal tender for all debts public and private. Nor the virtues of stocking the till with plenty of ones. I looked at the cash lady. She avoided my glance, probably nearly as afraid as I was. And that was the first time in my 16-year parochial education that I had the thought: To hell with the nun and her crazy talk, I've been through enough.

Feasting on Life

When one of my closest friends went through a horrible break-up five years ago, I gave her this poem by Derek Wolcott, which I'd since forgotten about. She stumbled across it last week and mentioned it to me this morning. Reading it reminds me of two things: 1) God, am I glad our 20s are over, and 2) the imagery of nourishing oneself back to wholeness with food and wine after heartbreak would certainly resonate my Italian aunties and mom. No wonder I love it.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.