Oh blog-followers,
I have been so neglectful of late. Things be crazy! But soon. Soon. Within a couple weeks-soon. Updates. They’re coming.
Lentils, Part 4
This is the end: Part 4 of a 4-part series. It is designed to be read in order, so please read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 before you read this final episode.
The hospital bills bankrupted you before you even woke up. Not that you’d had much money to begin with; five years ago, you’d taken up a crippling addiction to drugs to handle the guilt of being an imperfect fool who doesn’t always cook or eat eco-friendly lean protein. So now, in the hospital, you’re spinning into a horrific withdrawal.
A bag of lentils, wearing a diaper, crawls across the ceiling and you vomit again, inside the sealed plaster cast covering your face and body.
The one bright moment was when your friend’s boyfriend thought you were your friend, so when he came to visit, he gave you a tender knock-knock with his knuckles on top of your hard plaster-wrapped head. It was the most human contact you’d had in weeks.
Well, that and when Rihanna, who as it turns out, is your doctor’s cousin, came to visit Dr. Doctor. Through the thick plaster shell covering your ears, you heard her sing, “Thank God my body is plaster-cast free. Hey, maybe I should sign their full-body casts!” Then she laughed, and it sounded like pure and sweet and slender, like the tinkling of flat-abbed bells. “Not.”
You are destroyed.
Months later, almost a year after the accident, you’re finally carved out of your full-body cast and your lentil-free body is able to walk again. That’s when you find out your hand-woven placemats had been torn apart in the accident. They’d been unused; you’d never even had your friends over to stain them with cheap Chilean wine. “I’m sorry,” says the doctor. “Raffia’s just not hardy enough to sustain a truck-flip.”
“Thank God all my other belongings survi—”
“All your other belongings in the cargo-bed vaporized in the accident. Except your poster-tube. I mentioned the placemats as a segue into asking if I could have your Beiber poster for a collage I’m making. I just figured, you know, now that you’re homeless and all, it’s not like you can tack it up anywhere.”
“I guess.”
“Cool. But yeah, no,” the doctor says, “you own nothing. You own literally nothing.”
You feel dizzy. “I own nothing?”
“You own nothing.”
You furrow your eyebrows and think. There’s a pounding in your head. The world is spinning.
Then you relax your face. “It’s okay.”
You say it like it’s an epiphany and stretch your limbs. It feels good, like your heart is opening up like a flower with smooth cardiac muscle instead of petals. A cool breeze rumples your skin into little goose-pimples, but it’s nice, because it’s the first time you’ve felt air on your skin in close to a year. Your blood is starting to pump again. Your muscles are starting to move.
The sun breaks through the blinds in the hospital room. “It’s okay. It’s all okay.” You start to walk out of the room.
“Wait,” says the doctor. “Also, your friend driving the UHaul died on impact.”
“Who was lying next to me?”
The doctor shrugs. “Some guy.”
You nod and start to walk out of the room. “Your stuff!” calls the doctor. “Your cell phone. Your wallet. There’s thirty-eight cents in your change purse. Your ID.” He hands it to you.
“No,” you say. “I don’t want those things. I am a new person.” And you feel like a new person. You feel…is “better” the word? No. Not better, but wonderful. You feel…at peace. You don’t have your silly material things anymore, like your scarf, or placemats, or friendship, but you feel freer, lighter. Unencumbered. Holding onto nothing extraneous, nothing that makes you feel guilty.
Sure, your blood-sludge courses a little slower, being made up mostly of Easy Mac cheese from the hospital cafeteria. Sure, you don’t look like Rihanna or Gandhi, and sure, you’re no George Harrison. You’re still not going to cook as often as you should, and you’re still going to sometimes forget your tote bag at the grocery store. But you have accepted yourself as you are. You don’t need lentils to be a better person. You are a human being who is kind to others, and treats people with respect no matter what’s in her pantry, and who’s just trying to do her best.
“Keep them,” you say. “Keep my wallet and cell phone.”
The setting sun pulses God-rays surging through the window, and they are gold and pink and amber and their syrupy colors course through the blinds. You approach the hallway.
“Wait!” says Ron Doctor. “At least take this.”
He holds something in his hand. Something the size of a child’s fanny pack. You can’t tell what it is.
And then you squint. Could it be? It slowly comes together as an object you’ve never seen before in this context. What…no. No. Could it? No. It couldn’t be.
“It’s lentils!” says the doctor.
Your feet go numb. “What.”
“Lentils.”
But those aren’t just any lentils. No. You know that particular bag of lentils. For all the willful, stubborn lentil-ignoring you did, for all the ways you tried never to think about them whenever you saw them in your pantry, you know that particular bag of lentils. You would know them with your eyes closed. You could recognize them with all four senses that aren’t taste.
It is your very same bag of lentils.
You steady yourself on your roommate’s EKG machine.
The doctor grins with too much teeth. The room tilts a little bit. Somewhere, off in the distance, a patient in the dementia wing cackles.
You blink several times. “No. No, it can’t be…” Icy sweat beads on your brow.
“They saved your life,” says the doctor.
“They what?” It feels like a leech is clamping on to your lungs.
“Yeah. Truck went skidding out of control, on account of the car’s depressurized half-shift front-loading engine bit, tire oil tire oil dipstick wheel, and it flipped over half a dozen times and you went flying through the windshield.”
You nod vaguely, your face a queasy pantry-beige.
“Just so happened, this bag of lentils cushioned your cranium when you fell.” He’s still holding them out. “Your head landed square on the lentils. They’re why you didn’t crack open your skull.”
The loveseat-sized bag of lentils rests in the doctor’s hand.
“In fact,” he continues, “this little clip over here hit your temple just so, and happened to put pressure on an artery that was bleeding out. It stopped the bleeding.”
He grins and forces the bag of lentils into your clammy palms. “Here. You’d better keep these. They saved your life; they’re lucky!”
Your palms leave snail-trails of slick sweat on the plastic.
“Plus,” he says, “they’re a great source of lean protein. And they never, ever, ever, ever, ever go bad.”
And you’ll never, ever be rid of lentils.
Lentils may not expire, but they’ll always go bad.
Lentils, Part 3
This is Part 3 of a 4-part series. It is designed to be read in order, so please read Part 1 and Part 2 before you read this episode.
Your friend honks the UHaul. “Come on,” she shouts.
Your hands hold the sort of stuff people’s hands hold when they’re at the tail-end of the moving process: a floor lamp, a half-full garbage bag, a shoe that didn’t fit in the box, and a novelty pencil eraser you found grinning up at you from the molding of the floor.
“In a second,” you shout back. You stand in your empty apartment and look at that bag of lentils.
Six years ago, you’d actually used some lentils. It’s true! You’d had a little time on your hands and you were trying to get this hot guy from Greenpeace to do stuff to you, so you invited him over to watch a Netflix documentary about the disappearance of South American rollie-pollie bugs. The recipe had only called for two small handfuls of lentils, so you’d cut open the corner of the plastic bag, poured a few, and folded it over and closed it with a plastic clip advertising Slomin’s.
He had said it was very good. (He had also said, “What? Lentils absolutely do expire,” or something.) You had kind of pushed the lentils around your plate without eating them and discretely picked out all the paneer to eat instead, because “paneer” is Indian for “cheese.”
That night had made you realize how surprisingly simple it was to cook lentils, so throughout those six years, you considered cooking more lentils. Every time you looked at the lentils, you felt guilty. There are starving children in other countries! Thank God you don’t read the newspaper, so luckily you don’t know what countries those are. (They’re probably the countries where your friend from the yacht club studied abroad and took all those neat Facebook pictures of himself hugging little brown children, but who can tell?)
But for six years the bag has been like, open. It’s clipped shut, sure, but it’s, y’know, open. And…well, you’re not a princess or anything, but…you were never, like, sure that bugs didn’t get into the lentils through the hole. Just saying! It’s been hanging out there in the shadowy corners of your pantry with a small hole, and who knows what could have maybe crawled in? Maybe something too small and too terrible to notice.
Don’t get you wrong, you would never throw away 8,958,476 meals (8,958,473 if you’re feeling greedy). Certainly not because you think there’s a miniscule, tiny little chance that a bug maybe could have snuck into the bag. That would be spoiled and silly. Still…
She honks again.
You had spent thirty-nine cents on that bag of lentils. That floppy bag of lentils sits lamely, a single, dry, cadaverously gray witch’s breast incapable of inspiring or providing a modicum of lust or sustenance. It would be a shame to waste those tens of cents. Plus, lentils are heart-healthy. Plus, in your new place, you’re going to have so much more time to cook.
Two honks. “Come on!” your friend yells. “We still have to go donate your cookbooks to the Goodwill on Barker Ave.”
Lentils never, ever, ever, ever go bad.
“We have to return the UHaul by eighteen-o-clock! Let’s go!”
(Yes, eighteen-o-clock. When the diabolical secret plan Canada’d been working on in underground bunkers – since the Battle of Ogdensburg – finally came to violent, cruel, but rather polite fruition in 2016, and they invaded the US – or what was left of it after Kansas seceded, which was awkward for everybody because Kansas is landlocked – French Quebec instituted military time and the metric system. President Palin’s response had been absurd, but then, none of the exhumed Monty Python guys really wound up having a knack for public office. Like the constables they’d put in charge of every state, who were just too goofy to put a real dent in the national crime rate. You can’t chase Crips with a silly walk.)
You look at the toddler-sized bag of lentils, glaring at those billions upon billions of dung-hued tumors. They radiate guilty, fat feelings into your soul. You sigh at the garbage bag in your hand.
Honk! Honk! Honk!
You grab the lentils, dash out the door, toss the garbage bag and novelty pencil eraser into the dumpster, and approach the truck’s open abdomen. It’s absolutely crammed with your belongings. You wedge the floor lamp and the shoe in between the cardboard boxes of your life. Then you push the bag of lentils into the only crevice available. You turn ninety degrees and shove in the hot-air-balloon-sized bag of lentils with your shoulder. The plastic tears a little, creating a little stretched-plastic blister in the bag. You secretly hate these lentils.
You climb up into the passenger seat. “How did packing go?” your friend asks, flicking her eyes up to the rearview mirror as she creakily veers the truck out of the alley.
“Good,” you say. “Nice glass eye. I like that it doesn’t have an iris.”
“Thanks. It’s new.”
“I noticed.”
Then your friend’s face contorts slightly, like she’s smelling something foul. You don’t drive cars, but you can tell she’s got that look on her face that people who drive cars get when they’re driving cars and something drive-carring-related is irritating them.
“The gear shift x-90 stick reverse tire oil is pressurizing the gauge valve,” she explains. This is what you hear whenever people who drive cars talk about cars.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re just slightly too heavy. Did you add any cargo?”
“Just the floor lamp and that wooden clog,” you say.
“Huh.” She fiddles with some car-dials. “You didn’t add anything, like, beanbaggy, right?”
Your face goes cold. “No.”
“Because anything beanbag-like would throw off the weight balance in a really dangerous way and cause a horrible, horrible accident.” She pulls into traffic. “But I trust you.”
After the accident, you and your friend lie side-by-side in the hospital wearing identical full-body casts. Like in the sitcoms. Your TV’s audio happens to be on the fritz, and the only sound it plays is sitcoms’ laugh tracks. Your life, due to these lentils and the vicelike grip they hold on your conscience, has literally turned into a joke. You’re always hot and itchy and spit-vapor clouds the face-part of the cast twenty-four hours a day.
To be continued.
The Flat-Handed Finger Wobble
On OkCupid, you can answer several questions about children. One of them is:
Kids are:
(a) Annoying
(b) FUN!
I skipped this question because there was not a third option.
(c) Fucking terrifying.
I am fucking terrified of children.
My nanny friends are constantly trying to get me to do what they do. They send me links to SitterCity, an online resource for nannies and the people who hire them, and they tell me how easy it is to make good money. And I resist. “Oh, no, I’m good, thanks. I don’t need money or goodness.”
I respect child-rearing as a job, however. It’s an ancient profession. It’s primal. Monkeys taking care of other monkeys’ monkeys. I like that.
In theory.
Thing is, I was the youngest in my family and I have no experience with children, and between their unnaturally tiny size and the fact that they aren’t fully formed (no offense, children, but it’s true), they’re probably so easy to kill. Like plants. They’re like plants, if plants had high stakes.
What if, for instance, you leave the child in a room with the window open and turn your back for just a split second and the next thing you know, the child has been blown up into the air vent? What if you give a child a crayon and it punctures its finger with it and goes flying around the room, deflating like a balloon? Can that happen? That can happen, right? Can that happen?
What if you touch the child on the head and you accidentally thrust your arm elbow-deep through its fontanel? What if the child gets wet and melts? What if you stop looking at the child for a second and when you look back, you cannot find it, because it is so small that you (I) have lost track of it?
What if it breaks?
And who knows what children are thinking in their unfinished brains? And what sort of primal emotions must children have stirring inside of them, having only been exposed for less than a decade to the vital, emotion-quashing parameters that society inflicts upon us adults, who are polite and perfect?
But what truly terrifies me about children is the social thing. You know how my primary goal in life is to appear perfect and the best to every single person I meet? I am terrified – absolutely terrified – of interacting with children. Because I remember being a child. I remember it so vividly. And whenever an adult was bad at interacting with kids, I just remember thinking, “Jesus, dude. Get it together. This isn’t hard; just treat me like anyone else.” I’m simply too self-conscious.
I also remember there being two distinct types of children: kids who were okay and functioning, and kids like me. When a kid is good at interacting with people, I – a lady in her twenties – get jealous of the child and I become standoffish, not coming out of my shell until someone gives me a present, like a juice box or a crayon or a beer. And when a kid is weird at interacting with people, I have flashbacks and rock back and forth in a corner until someone hands me a present, like a juice box or a crayon or three beers.
My theater company (see “about,” above, for details, then visit our website and donate several dollars) just closed its second show this past weekend, and to my horror, we had to cast not one but two separate real-life children. Instead of child actors, I repeatedly advocated the use of puppets, tadpoles, Saltine crackers, bags of googly eyes, or small rocks, but my ideas were not accepted.
Luckily, the rest of the cast and team are great with kids, so the children were always entertained and kept safe. The rest of the cast and team are the sort of wonderful adults who know just how to interact with miniature mystery beasts, and who get genuine enjoyment from it. They think children are “fun” and “awesome.” They draw with them. They have normal conversations with them. They play with them.
And they genuinely seem to be having a good time, although there is a part of my brain that thinks when they say it’s “fun,” it’s like when people describe side salads as “filling.” Really? I like lettuce, but you’re actually saying it’s more satisfying than pot pie? You really think interacting with kids is “fun?” As fun as swearing, or drinking to excess, or having sex, or reaching things on tall shelves? Really? Really?
The production took place not in a theater but in a creaky old mansion (isn’t that cool? go donate) with dark corners and deep oak filigree, and every now and then I would turn a corner and find myself in a room alone with two children. I would hastily make an excuse and back out of there.
One day, I came into the kitchen to find Child 1 and Child 2 chasing each other. I thought I could just grab what the book I needed and back out slowly before they saw me, because since they are not real people, it would not be rude.
And also because perhaps children’s eyes aren’t fully developed so maybe they wouldn’t even notice me. Like perhaps their eyeballs are too small to see things, or perhaps they are like lizards’ eyeballs, or the light-sensitive flesh pods of ancient squid…I don’t know. I know that sounds silly in retrospect, but hindsight is twenty-twenty. How was I supposed to know better at the time?
I started to back out, but then Child 1 and Child 2 both looked at me. Straight at me! Like they could see me! Sweat rushed to my palms.
Child 1 pointed at Child 2 and accused Child 2 of stealing a quarter from Child 1. Child 2 said, “No I didn’t!” Then they chased each other, like they hadn’t said anything.
I gulped and glanced at the door. Wasn’t someone supposed to come offstage right about now? Wasn’t anyone coming to rescue me? The book in my hands slowly slid between my fingers.
I literally stood there, my back to the door, watching them for a full two minutes. Finally, I said, “Um, you didn’t…they…don’t go stealing things. Don’t go…don’t go stealing things. Y’know.”
The book slid more.
“Did…did Child 1 steal, like for real?”
They stopped running. With a face that was at least twenty percent pity, Child 1 said, “No, we’re playing.”
“Oh. Oh! Playing. Good. Okay. Good. Great. Because stealing…stealing is not…” I backed out of the door and ran.
Over the course of the week I kept trying to avoid them, lest they think I’m imperfect or not the best, but I had a couple of jarringly sudden interactions with them. One of the children would come up to me and just start a conversation, like we knew each other. Or I’d surprise myself by joining their game of Red Light Green Light. (“Not because I like or understand children,” I’d tell myself. “I’m simply bored, and they already have this game going on, so. This is for me. This is me treating myself.”)
Two weeks later:
Right before the end of the one of our last show, when the whole cast was lined up for our curtain call in the darkness outside the living room (where the actual production took place; cool huh? Go donate), we spoke in voices more quietly than a whisper so the audience wouldn’t hear us before we entered to bow. The children were looking at their hands.
“hey,” I less-than-whispered. I put my hands together so they flattened out but left my middle fingers free to wiggle on either side. “checkitout.”
They each tried to do it, and a couple of my fellow grownups whispered and positioned the children’s hands so they could try.
“Like This??”
“shhh.”
“likethis?”
“yeah.”
Then I clasped my hands together and made my index fingers wiggle…sounds the same, but it’s a totally different effect. A totally different skill set.
“i can’t do that one.”
“that’s okay. it’s hard. it took me forever to learn.”
Then I showed them the classic tearing-off-your-own-index-finger trick, complete with a silent scream (to really sell the illusion).
These finger-tricks, like the paper fortune tellers we’d been playing with that day, are the exact same amusements that older kids and grownups taught me when I was a child. The first two aren’t even magic tricks, really. They’re just things. Finger things. Things to learn and things to teach. They’ve probably been performed in caves and shacks and houses and apartments on every continent for millions of years.
As we all squatted on the staircase in the darkness, whispering and moving our hands around for the sheer pleasure of killing time pointlessly in silence, I couldn’t help feeling, beautifully, like a monkey.
Ten minutes prior, the children had played Angry Birds, but now, we were just animals, playing with our hands, moving each other’s fingers, finding amusement in the most basic, convenient toys: the ones at the ends of our wrists. What’s the point of the flat-handed finger-wobble? Why is it amusing? It has no beginning or end. It doesn’t trick. There’s no conflict or objective.
And I realized the craziest thing had happened.
By the last performance, I was actually interacting comfortably with both of the children – and it. Was. Awesome! And fun!!! Actual fun. It was just as fun as the other adults had made it out to be. We had had freestyle rap contests, we had exchanged fortune-tellings, we had had conversations about the universe (really!)…it was badass. And my costume wasn’t sweated through or anything. My comfort with and enjoyment of hanging out with children had totally snuck up on me over the course of fourteen days.
I’ve been in dozens of shows throughout my life, and it always surprises me how closely and quickly I bond with castmates. Something about the way a play – every play – gets put together, no matter where or when or what it’s about, just puts people together in a fascinatingly tight way.
Even, apparently, if two of those people are highly breakable mystery things with squid eyes. Because in the span of geological time, the difference between seven years and twenty-two years is nothing but a blip. Because really, we’re all just monkeys, squatting on a rock and looking at all our fingers.
Feelin’ Grovey
I hated my name as a kid.
“Well,” you say, glancing up to the top of this page. “I mean…”
No, my first name.
“Oh.” You shift uncomfortably. “Sure. Of course. Go on.”
I’ve gotten used to it, I guess, but as a kid, I had five primary grievances with the name Rebecca:
1. It was not Zoey.
2. It was not Cloey.
3. It was not Selena.
4. Its disturbing structure and lack of consonants — I’ll explain in a second — simply made it ugly and clunky. I felt like I may as well have been named Kuhkutt or Gobduh or Piduhdob. I felt like I was being forced to wear a boxy linoleum poncho for life.
5. It was not Glinda.
Perhaps a noble backstory would make me forget about the name’s clumpity sounds. “Why did you name me Rebecca?”
“We liked it.”
“And?”
“And…so we named you it.”
“That’s it?”
“We thought it sounded strong. Rebecca is a very strong name.”
“Strong?”
Strong? This made it so much worse. Even at age six, I had enough self-awareness to know I was a coward. (“Guys, you guys, I don’t think we should do that…I don’t…it’s probably not safe and we’re probably going to get in trouble or…guys…”)
And during presidential fitness tests, I would do less than zero chin-ups. How is it possible to do less than zero chin-ups? I’m not sure. But it happened. Every year. In front of everyone.
So not only was I stuck with Gobduh for life, but I wasn’t even doing it justice. I was lying. Rebecca the Strong? I was Kuhkutt the Undeserving. Bokolk the Physically Fit and Inaccurately Titled. Rebecca the Strong? More like Orateedum of The Thousand Chin-Ups.
Of course, Rebecca doesn’t actually mean strong. I found out its true meaning one day in Sunday school in first grade. Our project was to find out the meaning of our Hebrew names. Then we were write the Hebrew on construction paper, draw pictures of those meanings, and give them back to our teacher to laminate and put on the wall for our parents to see.
Finally, a chance for my name to redeem itself! Laminatedly. In front of everyone.
The Hebrew version of Rebecca is Rivkah. My middle name is Adriane, and there’s no Hebrew equivalent of that, so my parents chose a Hebrew middle name that started with an “A” sound: Ashera. I was glad to have two Hebrew names, as it doubled my chances of being named something awesome.
One by one, my classmates approached the desk, where my teacher sat with a book of name meanings. Then they each returned to their desks with a fistful of crayons.
Isaacs drew pictures of laughter, Sarah and Sara got to make princesses, and other kids drew pictures of flowers. Some classmates colored in rivers and illustrated “blessing,” and a couple of lucky ducks even got to draw animals: beautiful birds, vivid fish with an array of colors, elegant crayon deer.
“Rivkah, Rivkah…let’s see…Here we are!”
“What is it?” I strained to peek over the desk.
“‘Noose, tie, or bound.’”
What.
“Now let’s look up Ashera!”
I drew a rope and two trees.
All Rebecca needed was a letter in there to act as a sail and help the name’s sounds float more gracefully. Either an extra consonant, or a consonant that would replace one of the existing ones. Something.
For instance, my name should have at least been Rebelca, and it could have meant something more accurate, like “She of the Fishsticks.” Say it out loud: Rebelca. Or Redelca. Redelca of the Extensive Free Keychain Collection. Or Rebecta. Or Retelda. Retelda of the Sticker Book.
I would have accepted any of these.
I mean, dammit, how hard was it for the ancient name-inventors to throw just one extra letter in there? When they invented “Rebecca” and dragged its ink across their vellum or papyrus, apparently none of them – none of them! – paused to say, “Guys? Maybe, before we patent this, we ought to try this one out loud, just to make sure it’s not another Bokolk.”
“Yeah okay,” a second name-inventor would have said. “Let’s try it.”
Light from the oil lamp flickers across the dim, amber cavern. He places his quill back into its pot of black liquid and clears his throat.
“Rebecca.”
The dull syllables bounce back to them off the rock walls like dense, custardy cubes.
“Ugh. Good thing we checked. Toss it in the satchel with Fythmyth and Huh.”
A third scribe hesitantly raises his hand. “I didn’t think it was so bad.”
“Shut up, Maagdagdagdargl.”
“Actually,” says the original fellow, “the satchel of discarded names is so full, it’s messing up the camel’s spine. Made it swell into a big hump or something.”
“Let’s just switch out one of the letters, then. Check the amphora for t’s.”
Or, instead of Rebecta, my name could have been something truly curlicued and luxurious sounding, like one of those mysterious, beautiful words I heard that was so pretty it must mean something wonderful. Gerontological. Cubic Zirconia. Chlamydia.
And it would have invoked one of my more positive real-life qualities.
Chlamydia of Crafts.
Chlamydia, who’s a snappy dresser.
Gerontological the Youthful.
Cubic “Yogurt Cake” Zirconia, who won first place in her girl scout troop’s bake sale with Yogurt Cake.
Chlamydia the Future Rabbi.
Oh yes. When I was nine, I went through a brief period during which I wanted to grow up to be a rabbi. No, my family was not orthodox. Not even conservative. Not even believers. They were very active congregants, on all the boards and in all the clubs, but really just for the friendship, community service, and rugelach.
(As an aside: how freaked out would you be if your child, for no reason, started being more religious than you? Holy moly. From my parents’ perspectives, that must have been almost as terrifying as 1998’s Bug Phase. Though probably less scary than the great Boarding School Phase of ‘95, when I had to be physically restrained from tacking flyers up on the telephone polls to recruit neighborhood children and run a boarding school from inside the house.)
Rabbinical Phase was quickly replaced by Detective Phase once I realized that keeping Kosher would disallow spaghetti with clam sauce. Perhaps it would have been more fitting if Rebecca meant not “strong,” but “apt to shirk the spiritual for the culinary” or “She Who, When Deciding Between Adonai the One True God of the Universe and Seafood From Cans, Chooses the Latter. Within Like Three Seconds.”
Of course, it would have been unspeakably delightful to see Nicole the Normal or Zoey the Actual Mermaid on my birth certificate, but those just aren’t in the script the universe wrote for me. And those things aren’t what I really am, anyway.
No. Unfortunately my name is “strong” and it means “bind” and “grove of trees” and “she who runs up famous stairs in a gray sweatsuit to ‘Eye of the Tiger.’”
Oh well. At least it’s not as embarrassing as “Bokolk” or “Orateedum” or “Michele Bachmann.”
There’s so much we can’t control about ourselves, so much we’re merely born into at random. Most of the time, it’s stuff we have to spend our lives fight against: a disease, the short end of the socioeconomic stick, embarrassing ancestors, weak forearms that leave you dangling off the chin-up bar like a waterlogged pinata.
But sometimes, we just need to take what we’re given, and work with it. I can change my name if I really need to, but a person’s name is the few things that were decided before one’s birth, and when those things aren’t completely detrimental or embarrassing, they serve as pretty strong ways of being bound to other human beings.
And besides, recent Googling tells me that the non-“grove” meanings for Ashera are totally effing badass. So sometimes stuff works out.
Lentils, Part 2
This is Part 2 of a 4-part series. It is designed to be read in order, so please start with Part 1.
You also buy other groceries. A few vegetables, some fruits, some crackers, some peanut butter, some eggs…you’re doing well! You’re a real person! You stock your pantry with some Campbell’s. “For emergencies,” you say. You stack them in front of your lentils.
A few weeks pass, and you eat the crackers with peanut butter, and the vegetables, and then just the peanut butter, and you remind yourself to go grocery shopping and say you’ll do it on the weekend, but then the weekend simply flies by because you find out Benji knows a guy who can get you some poppers, and then you finish the fruit, and then you are left with no groceries.
No groceries. And now you’re hungry. You’ve eaten egg-jerky omelets with diced Slim Jim from the corner store every night, and now you’re even out of eggs. Except…what’s this? An extra Easy Mac, left over from your last life.
Plus, canned noodle soups. Canned soup-ownership is disaster insurance. When the Apocalypse happens, you will need to sell your canned Chunky for cigarettes and use the alphabet noodles from the soups to spell out a message like “S E N D M OR E S O U P S”. You’ll make the lentils tomorrow. Right now, you’ll stir up a batch of Easy Mac. The next day, you start in on the soups.
And so you go another three days without grocery shopping.
Then one night, you stumble home from your upholstery class, thinking you have a can or an egg left, but your fridge just has mustard, maraschino cherries, and batteries because your grandma used to keep batteries in the fridge and it’s just something you grew up with. You go to the pantry. “Maybe I can wrassle up some Ramen. Or use my imagination like in that scene from Hook with all that lovely colorful food-paste.” You go to your pantry to see what you can see.
What you can see are three items:
1. A dusty can of offbrand tuna.
2. A container of allspice. You read once in Cosmopolitan that Rihanna just sprinkles granules of spices onto a tongue depressor and licks it every hour on the hour and it totally kills her chocolate and potato-chip cravings, plus it provides her with enough energy to avoid food that’s any bigger than granules of spices.
3.That unopened, basketball-sized bag of lentils, sitting there all dumpy and dimpled and expectant. It naps peacefully next to your wine-stoppers like a bumpy little Buddha. You haven’t noticed the bag of lentils for several weeks. It was always hidden behind Campbell’s and Easy Macs. Its muted, soil-hued mud-olive heft had been receding into your pantry’s beige wall while the super-green!-popcorn boxes and the bright-red!-Ritz and the good-times-orange!-Kraft the stole your eyeballs’ attention.
But you ate all that. And now, there are only lentils. Lentils. Lentils.
You really ought to cook those lentils.
Guilt and shame fill your empty stomach as you dial the takeout place. The guilt causes you to order an extra order of pad see-ewe. The hot, wide noodles will feel like blankets for your tongue, you tell yourself, but it doesn’t make you feel much better.
The cellulitic pile of dull gray lentils sighs at you and you feel even more hot shame, which causes you to say, “You know what, throw in an order of crab rangoon.”
“Crab rangoon” is Asian for “fried cream cheese.” You once saw a documentary where a materials scientist ran tests on fried cream cheese and concluded, scientifically, that fried cream cheese is literally, chemically, the opposite of lentils.
If Rihanna was here, her eyes – pale blue, like the peepers of a flat-abbed wolf – would alight on that dusty can of tuna in the pantry corner, and then she’d spot the lentils, and then she’d say, “You know, you can mix up some of that tuna with some of those lentils, even throw in a couple chickpeas if you want a little kick, for a high-protein, flat-belly meal.”
“That’s okay,” you pretend-think at pretend-thought Rihanna.
You pretend that imaginary Rihanna think-replies to you, “But you have all the ingredients. Even toss in some of those spices.”
“I heard you,” you think at her.
“Testy.”
“Look, Rihanna. Chickpeas are healthy, true. And they are perfect for drawing tiny faces on for when you’re making tiny heads to create miniature reenactments of Body Heat.”
“Yes,” says Rihanna.
“But taste-wise, chickpeas don’t add ‘kick.’ They don’t taste like ‘kicks,’ Rihanna, they taste like ‘furtively swinging one’s leg-stump around.’”
On the phone, the Thai place lady says, “Did you just threaten to kick me?”
At this point, nineteen years pass. Your pantry generally has enough food and your grocery life has continued more or less uneventfully for the past several years (save for 2021’s Great Molasses Debacle – you’ve still got the scars – but that was more of a international issue, really, and is an anecdote for separate blog entry).
And now you’re moving to another city. For whatever reason – maybe a glamorous job change, and/or a dramatic art heist, and/or a torrid love affair with loads of hot, incredible sex-adventures for you, Dear Reader, to read about…
The reason doesn’t matter. This is a story about lentils.
You’ve packed up everything in your apartment. You’ve already rolled the placemats up with your J. Beiber, Jr. poster (even more bad-in-an-ironic-way than his father, who choked on his own vomit during yet another black-tar heroin bender back in 2025) and tossed them into the UHaul, and you’d thrown the Filene’s scarf away years ago when you started seeing a guy who hated Peruvians.
But those lentils are still there. Your ottoman-sized bag of lentils – that same one you bought from the bodega when you first moved in – still sits in your pantry. They’re still there. They are still fucking there. What once looked like a bastion of self-sufficiency and eco-friendly decisions now slouches on your pantry shelf like a bumpity, lazy fatass. Like a bumpity, lazy fatass that says things like, “It’s so cool you let me crash on your couch for so many months. By the way, you’re out of deodorant again.”
“I know,” you groan. “I should cook you. I’m busy.”
Your apartment is entirely empty, except for your kitchen, which just has a few items. When you were packing, you wound up inventorying every single object you own, from pillowcase to promotional bank-logo keychain to dried-out nail polish bottle. You threw out dozens of garbage bags filled with stuff you didn’t want anymore.
You even found stuff you didn’t know you had. Like a crock pot under your sink. A perfectly good crock pot, how random! Who knew you had that? Now that you know you have it, you’re going to use it all the time in your new place. You start packing your dishes and wonder how come none of your bowls match.
To be continued.
In (Half-)Defense of Hipsters: The Chairs and Caves of Rad
As a child I read about genie lamps and fairytale palaces, but nothing held as much mystique and glamour as rad teenagers. One rad teenage habit I admired greatly was the way they sat: backwards on chairs. I didn’t know if it was because of an archane law, or perhaps some anatomical shift in the skeleton that happened to one’s hips and spine from fourteen to seventeen, but rad teenagers all, as a rule, sat backwards on chairs.
At a dress-up event I once attended as a kid, I saw high-backed chairs with maroon velour upholstery. Instantly, upon seeing the furniture, I didn’t picture princesses, but rather, a dinner party full of rad teenagers. I imagined a well-appointed ballroom with a long, glossy oak table, and those fancy high-backed chairs all around it. Facing out.
This was the early-to-mid nineties, so a certain amount of grunge was required to be a sophisticated elder of fifteen. But rad young things – especially girls – had to be super-smart, too. Pre-Kardashian pop culture taught little girls that Janeane Garafalo, Daria, Gwen Stefani, and Clarissa had coolness that depended, in large part, on intelligence dispatched in a low-toned voice. (The other part of the coolness consisted of the negative space collected in the ripped denim over their kneecaps.)
Time and time again as an adolescent, I’d look down while sitting, thighs all nerdily horizontal and dorkily parallel (laps: soooooo embarrassing!), and wonder when sitting backwards on chairs would become an unavoidable urge. When would I become a true rad teenager, who couldn’t help but spread her legs to look cool?
The contrast, in my daydreams, between the backwards-sitting and the fine china, indicates the smart/grunge dichotomy of the time. Now that everything is ironic, it’s assumed that everything has some sort of inherent dichotomy. “Katy Perry wears candy-pasties? She’s totally subverting the genre!”
This dismal state of youth affairs makes me nostalgic for the coolness of my childhood. People say that all we have in the way of rad youth now is hipsters, people who say that they are not hipsters, non-hipsters, and people who always say the word “hipsters.”
“What is a ‘hipsters?’” you ask, having not witnessed Western Culture, ever.
“Don’t be rude,” you say, having read the above sentence I just typed about you. “I was in a faraway cave teaching abandoned wolf babies how to suckle stalactites for sustenance.”
Wait, you were what?
“It was very noble of me. So sorry if I’m behind on my www-dot-Internet-dot-com. But what is ‘hipsters?’”
Some people say hipsters like things that are too unlike other things. Other people say hipsters like things that are too much like other things. Others say hipsters don’t like any things and that by saying hipsters don’t like things, the speaker is automatically a hipster. But the important thing to remember is:
You do not want to be a hipster.
“But I still don’t understand,” you say. “Does this have something to do with hats?”
Partly, yes. It relates to hats.
“Oh, it’s a youth culture thing! I’ve read about youth cultures. Denim pants and such.”
Well, we call them “jeans” these days, but yes, Reader.
“Same with the other youth movements,” you say. “Zoot suits, greasers, hippies, metalheads, and disco-people, from what I understand, also generated much trouserian controversy.”
You’re catching on quick.
“My cave does not have Internet, but it does have 1995 Microsoft Encarta.”
Well, you’re right. Hipster/anti-hipster controversy revolves primarily around the moral indignation relating to certain categories of denim pants.
“That’s why I like my cave,” you say. “I get to wear whatever I want and no one ever accuses me of being a ‘hipster.’ Like when I’m in the chilly cave with the wolves, sometimes I wear a sweatshirt with an airbrushed picture of wolves.”
If you’re our age, you must constantly police yourself to make sure you like and dislike the appropriate things, but make sure no one knows how hard you’re working to carefully read that line.
“Why?”
Because you have to.
“That sounds about as boring as playing I-Spy in an empty cave with mute baby wolves.”
I’d imagine it is.
“Isn’t there anything you can do to not take part in this hipster/non-hipster nonsense? Some sort of pop-culture opinion akin to telling your gym teacher you have your period?”
Only one, Dear Reader. Only one.
“Pray tell?”
I lean forward and lower my voice. I lean forward to bestow upon you the secret of avoiding the whole hipster thing altogether, of never being called one and never having to call anyone one. The great, precious secret for the ages. Something hipsters and hipster-haters both disagree with:
Disliking Radiohead.
“Is that a band?”
Yeah.
“That sounds good, then. I’ll dislike The Radio-Heads too.”
No, no, no, Reader! Disliking Radiohead is my thing, not your thing. It is my PE menses and my PE menses alone.
“By citing an un-nuanced, judgmentally contrarian opinion on a specific piece of pop culture – Radiohead – aren’t you just employing a two-dimensional cultural signifier, thus enforcing the false dichotomy of hipster/anti-hipster and legitimizing the very language that creates the hostile environment you complain about?”
I…
But…
It’s really hard, okay?
Having lived in a far-off cave, you can’t possibly understand the emotional hipsteria that convulses our generation, where you’re constantly, constantly trying to prove that you’re less or more of a hipster than everyone else.
“That sounds about as exhausting and useless as trying to attach toupees to baby wolves.”
It is. Picture a constant game of musical chairs, but instead of chairs, it’s plaid.
“Yeah,” you say, “but you should relax. I mean, every generation has too-cool-for-school crowds who pretend to be poor and pretend they’re more countercultural than they were.”
What? What do you mean?
“Woodstock was organized by two rich guys trying to turn a quick buck. Bob Dylan was an upper-class kid whose real name was Robert Zimmerman. And are we to believe that Clarissa was wearing ripped jeans out of financial necessity? Come, now. Her dad was an architect. He built the Fryfel Tower, for pity’s sake. The Fryfel Tower!”
It sounds like you’re defending hipsters. Are you defending hipsters because you are a hipster?
“Fuck you.”
Now you’re getting it!
But maybe you’re onto something, Reader. I mean, don’t get me wrong: we do need to retire irony before our hearts permanently crumple up into brittle slivers of burnt newsprint. And the postmodern pastiche thing that the Internet has devolved into a pile of homages of parodies of references is annoying. And it is embarrassing that the boomers are getting rich by selling cheap, low-quality cameras to our generation at Urban Outfitters for $90.
“And doing anything out of social pressure or a lack of imagination is bad news.”
Sure. But you’re right: every generation has this sort of thing. I know I prefer bicycles to corsets. And wouldn’t you take foodies over ‘luudes any day? Maybe, just maybe, if our generation’s pseudo-poor, pseudo-unique in-crowd –
“Which 1995 Microsoft Encarta says every generation has—”
Actually winds up brewing its own beer, making sustainability cool, farming, and growing beards that, in the humble opinion of my hormones, look snappin’…well, maybe we need to cut our own generation a little slack.
“Fair. Gotta say, though, it sounds like our hipsters are no Clarissas.”
You’re right, they’re not. Hell, they’re no flappers. But still, it could be worse.
“Yeah. We could be the eighties.”
Exactly. At least we’re not the eighties.
Lentils, Part 1
This is part 1 of a 4-part series.
No, you know what? Fuck lentils. Not only are they, as a friend recently described them, “small egg sacs, and the egg sacs are made of dirt,” but once lentils enter your life, they will never, ever, ever leave.
They will never leave.
Fuck lentils.
The beginning is benign. You just moved! Your new place has a fresh, empty pantry. A fresh start!
Sure, in your old place, in your old life, you subsisted on Easy Mac (which, for something that’s not, strictly speaking, food, actually packs one or two calories), but now you’re going to cook! And you’re only ever going to cook sources of lean protein that are rich in fiber. Positively bristling with fiber. And natural! Natural like from the Earth!
Then you read an article in Glamour about lean protein and fiber sources, and then you find out that George Harrison ate a bunch of them in India, and then you find a crock pot and a book called “101 Great Crock Pot Recipes!” at the Goodwill on Barker Ave. and all the recipes involve lentils.
And now you’re going to be perfect. You’re going to be a better version of yourself. You go to the store and look at the lentils. “So inexpensive!” you coo, shifting the millions of dry little nubbins around in their plastic sock. “Look at all that fiber. Look at all that protein. It’s so lean!”
Plus, they will never, ever, ever go bad.
Right there in the aisle of the bodega, you take your Moleskine out of your tote bag and make some calculations. Sure, you could do the calculations on your iPhone, but you don’t want to interrupt your ironic Beiber playlist (so bad it’s good!). And you could do the math in your head, but then the guy working at the bodega, and everyone else shopping at the bodega, won’t know you carry around a Moleskine.
According to your calculations, this one, single bag of lentils – which costs only thirty-nine cents – can provide roughly 8,958,478 meals. 8,958,475 if you’re feeling greedy and want extra-big meals. For less than forty cents! And seeing how appetizing those army-pants-colored little pimples look to your newly perfect eyes, you’re thinking you’ll be feeling mighty greedy!
“Maybe I can invite over friends to eat the lentils with me when I cook them in my crock pot!” This excites you. Your whole life is going to turn around.
And having a bag full of lentils in your pantry will be more than just heart-healthy. It will be eco-friendly. “Unbelievable,” your brain spits disdainfully. “I can’t believe I actually used to think Easy Mac was appealing.” It uses so much packaging. Plus, Kraft is actually charging you way more than you’d pay to make homemade mac-‘n’cheese.
But it’s moot. You cook (now), but you don’t cook such nonsense like mac-‘n-cheese. Mac-‘n-cheese was for the old you. The new you cooks lentils. Lentils. Lentils.
Right there in the bodega, massaging the bag of lentils, you start thinking about what it will be like when your friends come over. You won’t mention the lentils. You’ll just say, “Hey, I’m cooking some food, like I always do for supper, so you all should come over and have some.” You’ll invite them over at six, but you won’t be plugging in the crock pot until five-thirty, at least. That way, your friends will see you cooking the lentils. You’ll be that friend.
In your fantasy, they’ll bring Chilean wine – cheap Chilean wine, so you can all take about what it’s like to be eco-friendly, worldly, and poor – and watch you cook the lentils. You’ll waft the earthy steam toward your beatific face, which is attached to your head, which is nodding along to the Cat Stevens playing.
Later, as your eardrums get all warm and sexy-feeling from the red wine, you’ll ladle the cooked, soupy beanettes into the charmingly mismatched bowls resting on your placemats.
Placemats!!! You use your iPhone to locate a Pier 1 Imports so you can buy some hand-woven placemats for when you have your friends over to eat the lentils that you’ll be cooking in your crock pot.
But that’s for later. Right now, you’re still in the store, crowded between the fluid-filled fruit cocktail cans and the canned baby corns, marveling over the lentils’ cheap price. Lentils are so practical! They are a pantry essential!
Growing up, your parents always had lentils in the house. Ma and Pa were by never as good as you, and certainly not as eco-friendly (had people even heard of the environment, or for that matter, Cat Stevens, in the seventies?), but they did keep an orderly, sensible home. The water heater was always checked on time and the bills were always paid, and they said phrases and words such as “insurance premium” and “sciatica.”
And they always – always – had lentils in the pantry. Grownups who have their shit together have lentils in the pantry.
You carry the loofah-sized bag of lentils up to the man behind the counter. “One bag of lentils, please,” you say, and then you say it again in broken high-school Spanish because you’re respectful like that. There’s a ten-dollar minimum for debit, so you hand him some coins. “I have my own bag,” you say. Loudly.
You put the lentils in your tote and the tote in the backseat of your Range Rover and bring the Range Rover to Pier 1 Imports. There’s a Filene’s Basement next to the Pier 1 Imports. You buy a scarf. “Not really my typical color,” you rehearse saying to your friends who will come over to eat the lentils with you, “but I thought it was so fun.”
You skip up the stairs to your apartment, Peruvian-influenced hemp scarf a-waving behind you, unlock your door, and place the bag of lentils in your pantry. It sits there all by its proud, amiable lonesome, a bunny-sized, nubbly plastic sack reclining on the shelf, filled with nature’s most sensible of bounties. From now on, you cook all your meals. All of them. From scratch. And from lentils.
You will be George Harrison in Rihanna’s body. No, wait, no, you’ll be even more skinny and worldly than that. With these lentils, you will be George Harrison in Gandhi’s body.
To be continued.
Read Part 2.
The Lamentation of the Professional of Doors
Dear 302,
Please tell me if your unit has a dead body.
Landlording is a profession of doors. Generally I can get Sergei to open them up when it’s time to fix stuff, but the doors are ultimately my responsibility. And so’s what’s behind them. As the landlord, I can – and sometimes should – open doors.
I have a key for every door. I keep each key on a separate pushpin on the bulletin board. I keep my TV Guide schedule on the left. I fill it out with a highlighter and stab it onto the cork every Sunday. The rows of keys are on the right.
Just…just please warn me if your unit has a dead body.
Brian Chen, the weed-head? He knocked on my door first. He walked barefoot down the stairs and into the lobby and knocked on my door, then poked a thumb toward the ceiling to indicate his third-floor unit. “Right. Um. It smells like a dead body when the heat’s on?”
Listen, 302. My office is small. It smells like dust. It’s painted this off-white that looks slimy under the fluorescent tubes. My TV set is up near the corner of the ceiling and it’s got a white static stripe that floats across the screen every so often and its colors are so washed out they’re pastel. It’s crappy. (Pardon my French.)
So my day’s already crappy (pardon my French), and then Brian makes it worse by complaining, and then he clears his throat and tells me that by the way, his smoke detector broke and could I send Sergei up with a new one soon, and I said I’d look into it, but the point is, 302, that I didn’t actually believe him about the smell.
So imagine my surprise the following afternoon, when Mrs. Paluco shuffles on down at 2:47 to tell me the same thing. I reached for a pad of sticky notes and wrote it down. Then Heidi and Jo knock on my door – I knew it was them because I could hear Heidi’s bangle-type bracelets – and they join Mrs. Paluco, and while the four of us are crammed in this slimy, tiny room, they confirm that, “yeah it just smells, just, dead, like rotting meat.” I said I’d look into it, and peeled off a second sticky note so they’d know I was for real.
Then I shooed them out so I could still catch at least part of the trial segment.
Because, 302, do you know what I do every day at 2 PM? I watch Law and Order. Do you know what I do every day at 3 PM?
I watch Law and Order.
Do you know what I do the rest of the day, when I’m not doing paperwork, or getting Sergei to fix the boiler, or maintaining my coin collection? I find a channel on which Law and Order is playing, and then I watch Law and Order. Occasionally, my VHS of sports bloopers. Mostly Law and Order. And do you know what happens on Law and Order?
People find dead bodies.
They find them in motels, they find them in hotels, they find them in gyms and in clubs. They find them in garbage cans, alleys, and warehouses. They find them at nighttime places in the day and in daytime places at night.
They find dead bodies in bedrooms, in bathrooms, in drug dens, in churches. Between dumpsters, between shipping crates, between commercials for waterguns and for hamburgers. They find them in rowhouses, safe houses, townhouses, houseboats. A homeless man roots through the garbage: there’s a leg. A businesswoman gets her car from the public parking garage: there’s a child in a bag.
When you have a child, your biggest fear is it dying. I don’t have a child. So my biggest fear is finding a dead body.
I am more afraid of finding a dead body than of anything else on the planet. Being a landlord is already hard, 302. But it’s not because of my awful office, or my crummy TV set, or the cantankerous boiler, or the very old computer my niece gave me, or the missing rent, or Jamaal’s loud wet coughing on Floor Two. It’s not because this was my fall-back profession after the recruiter said I had “pancake-arches.” Ever since I started watching my Easter-colored Law and Order, it’s because, well, there are all these goddamn doors. Pardon my French.
I always said that if I had a child, I’d let it be anything it wanted. Since I started watching Law and Order, I have amended this sentiment to include the phrase “except a hotel maid.” Hotel maids, you see, find dead bodies more than anyone. On Law and Order, it’s all they do. I imagine hotel maids spend twenty percent of their time actually fluffing pillows, and eighty percent of their time at support groups for people who have happened unexpectedly upon dead bodies.
And now I have to go upstairs to the third floor. I’m not bringing the key. I will be smell-investigating, not door-opening. Just smell-investigating. And then I will put this note under your door. But please, please don’t make me find a dead body in there. Tell me if it’s there first.
Landlording, it bears repeating, is a profession of doors. And when you watch Law and Order like I do, every single door is a potential dead-body-finding-experience.
I’m not asking for a lot. Just a little heads-up. So, try and get back to me soon. I haven’t seen you around lately, so if you’re busy, that’s fine. Just stick a note on my door. If a mouse died in your wall, let me know. Or if there’s rotting food, just throw it out. It’s not such a big deal. I’m an easygoing guy. Just let me know.
Because the tenants have been complaining about this for about a month now, and you don’t seem to care. Plus, I’ve been drafting this letter all afternoon on DOS instead of watching my Law and Orders, so I’ve missed two whole episodes. Which is a little selfish of you, if you ask me.
Signed,
Franklin
A Word From Our Sponsors
INT. DINING ROOM - EVENING
The sounds of SLURPING and GNAWING as fancy ARISTOCRATS eat.
MR. TUPPER. I say, Martha, this stuffed canary gullet is most entrancing.
PLUMPTON’S NURSE (Screeching). I must admit I’m rather partial to the poached pigeon stomach myself.
MARTHA. You simply must try the blood custard. It’s cultivated from pickled pheasant lungs which are then stuffed with only the mildest goat cheese and Indian tobacco, and drizzled with a swimmingly viscous Port-and-pig lip reduction.
PLUMPTON. Mother, I’m bored! Why can’t I play Sport with the other boys?
Plumpton is a horrible, red little boy.
PLUMPTON’S NURSE (Screeching). ‘ave another biscuit, Plumpton.
PLUMPTON. I don’t want another biscuit. I want to play Sport.
MARTHA. Have some sugarmilk, Lovey. It’s still warm, and I made it with real ham, just the way you like.
MR. TUPPER. Oh, let the boy play Sport, Martha.
MARTHA. But he’s got to finish his meal!
MR. TUPPER. He should put it in this!
He holds up a TUPPERWARE container.
MR TUPPER (Cont’d). From deer teat-dollops to chicken quills filled with boysenberry-and-liver jam, all of Plumpton’s favorite meals will fit in this box.
Plumpton’s nurse holds up a string of nasty beige sausages.
PLUMPTON’S NURSE (Screeching). Will it fit goose-marrow sausage?
MR. TUPPER. Three links’ worth! And the lavender jelly, too.
He turns to the camera.
MR. TUPPER (Cont’d). Hi. My name is Sir Nigel Fernsfellow Tupper. And this is my Tupper-Ware. It fits all kinds of food.
Tupper puts the sausages in the container and spoons half-coagulated gray jelly on them.
MARTHA. What about manatee caviar in a creamy tadpole custard?
MR. TUPPER. Along with its crispy side of songbird-beak-crusted bread.
CLOSE ON: The container, into which they spoon more glop.
PLUMPTON. More gray-sauce, please!
MARTHA. He’s never said “please!”
MR. TUPPER. Add a little marzipan—
PLUMPTON. Shaped like the Blackheath Division One Sport logo!
PLUMPTON’S NURSE (Screeching). And some egg-and-boiled-offal chutney from the endangered troutbird!
Tupper adds the undercooked egg mixture.
MR. TUPPER. Why miss out on the warm food you love in your dining room when you’re out exerting yourself during a game of Sport?
Plumpton picks up the Tupperware and runs out of the room.
MARTHA. He’ll be playing for London National Division of Sport before you know it!
MR. TUPPER. Tupperware.
The aristocrats grin greasy grins at the camera.
BLACKOUT.
