Tag: cooking

The Art of Making Art

A millimeter matters

I just want to say that the luxury of owning a personal library is that not only do I feel cozy all the time, but I get to take evening tours and pick out volumes for bedtime reading. (Growing up, the O’Hara kids were about the only kids in the neighborhood with family bookcases, thanks to our mom, Lynne, having college textbooks, novels, and antique books to display and read.) Even now my number of volumes surprises some people, but I think, who wouldn’t want books around them? They are my closest friends. I saw an interview with Nora Ephron who said everyone asked of her family, “What are you doing with all these books?” (We live in a country like that now.) There’s no reason to finish a volume I peruse, or even read straight through. Sometimes I do that, but many times I just open a chapter and see what it says. If it’s not speaking to me, I flip around. Try another book. Like literary cocktails. It’s fun. This week I’ve been seriously rereading Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim’s first volume of lyrics from his shows, 1953-1981, and so far I’m sticking with it.

When Stephen Sondheim died in 2021, I felt as if I’d lost a friend. Though I wasn’t sure how I felt about his work for a long time, you must know that the key to falling in love with a theater writer or composer is seeing the work, and in a splendid production. It really changes everything. He had three principles that guided his life’s work:

“God is in the details.”

“Less is more.”

“Content dictates form.”

I love that Stephen himself admittedly didn’t always follow them, but we give ourselves a little grace; nobody is perfect. And he himself had favorite lyrics that other people don’t seem to care for. He endured his share of flops and lousy reviews. And he just kept going. Thank god.

In an interesting coincidence, though sometimes I think it’s a bit more divine than that, these associative adventures, I’m also trolling PBS (while we have it) for documentaries and happened on two short ones. First, Marguerite: From the Bauhaus to Pond Farm about master potter Marguerite Wildenhain who, along with her husband, escaped the Nazis and made her way to California to teach pottery; and second, Finding Edna Lewis, about famed chef of 1950s Café Nicholas on E. 53rd St., cookbook author, and unsung mother of the farm-to-table movement, Edna Lewis.

And you might night think that Stephen Sondheim, Marguerite Wildenhain, and Edna Lewis couldn’t have much if anything in common, but you know what? God is in the details. Buckle up.

I’m not really going to recap all their work. But those rules up there apply.

“God is in the details.” Marguerite’s great contribution to many potters was, according to one student, “teaching us how to see.” For example, she’d have each potter make ten or twelve of the exact same pitcher or vase (since potters usually mass produce their work). The student would line them up on a board, and Marguerite of Pond Farm would walk and look and say, of maybe the third one, “This is good,” and of the eighth one, “This is good.” To the student they looked identical. Then she would point out a millimeter of difference in the rim, or the handle, the difference between being beautiful and merely serviceable (I think of the human face). God is in the details. It changed everything for students. (I’m obsessed by details when I direct a show, but not so much when I write, because I’m not an artist when I write.)

“Less is more.” Chef Edna Lewis grew up in Freetown, Virginia. In the Great Migration that took her to New York, she made a living cooking for artists, and word of her home cooking spread. She became an accidental star chef when she partnered (silently, as a Black woman) with two gay men to open Café Nicholas on E. 53rd Street, creating wonderful Southern cooking for writers like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal. Lewis believed that food should be seasonal and that the ingredients should speak for themselves. Nothing should be overly prepared, overly seasoned, or fancy. You might call it simple home cooking except that her dishes were both gorgeous and delicious, prepared by someone who knew what she was about.

“Content dictates form.” In the theater, the writing and the intent dictate whether something is a play or musical; or whether it’s theater at all. In pottery, the intended use of the vessel dictates the size and shape. In cooking, the ingredients at hand dictate the kind of meal it will be. I’ve been mulling that principle over, and not to get all metaphorical or analogous, but I have to go a little political here. Content (greedy, sociopathic, ignorant bastards) dictates (!) form (evil shit show).

Speaking for myself, I wish I had the talent to be a playwright or a novelist or a poet. I haven’t done theater in years because it’s a collaborative art (it’s not like I can walk around my apartment and “direct”), and collaborating is something I never have time to figure out. But for whatever reason, ever since I was a kid and started writing, I’ve felt I had an obligation to study news events, internalize them, and interpret them for everyone. I don’t enjoy it, necessarily, and will never make a living at it, but I can’t seem to help myself. When asked in high school by the “gifted and talented” program advisor, Mrs. Hubbard, why I kept a journal, I told her I saw myself as a chronicler of my time. She snorted disdain. Years later, when I related that anecdote to my first professor at the Bread Loaf School of English (a summer master’s program designed for teachers), Prof. Cazden snorted almost identically. It was uncanny.

Somewhere in our lives, no doubt, we’ve been made to feel less than. (Both teachers (graduates of Bryn Mawr and Radcliff, respectively) told me without apology, one overtly, the other hoping I’d take her meaning, that I just wasn’t smart enough to be there, whatever that meant. It’s not like I was stupid, exactly, but it’s annoying for brilliant educators like them, I guess, to be around the merely bright when there are geniuses to teach. You know how it is. My response was to say nothing, and my revenge was, I stayed and decided to belong. I really learned a lot. And it all worked out, because as it turns out, they were wrong. Never let them tell you not to dream.)

And so it is that, to this day, I keep feeling this pull to chronicle my times, though to what end I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to solve much—my teachers weren’t wrong about me not being a genius—but you can’t do nothing, in times like these. (Chuck Schumer, is this on?) I try to chronicle what I see and still hold on to the world I want to live in, the world I want us to build. First, obviously, it involves shipping all these the MAGA Nazis from their demented reality show, White House USA, to some tropical island where they live in golden mansions and go on staged hunts with all the guns of their wet dreams and watch all the porn they want without the Covenant Eyes app to pester them. And leave all of us sweet, normal people alone. And let us raise their children.

Until that blessed day, or until I get smarter, I read and write and dream. It’s what we do.

Once more, with feeling, something we can all learn from:

“God is in the details.”

“Less is more.”

“Content dictates form.”

~ The three guiding principles of genius Stephen Sondheim

Love or something like it,

Miss O’

Spreading Salt

On snow, ways we remember, and my mom’s cooking

Making Lasagna

I was sitting here thinking of my mom, Lynne, a couple of years back, before she fell and started a slow downhill slide, which continues, tough old bird of 90 that she now is.

I think this was a year ago, we were out in the playroom, an addition to our small but sturdy house that was put on when I was in fourth grade. To access it you have to walk through the utility room from the little alcove by the kitchen. The kitchen ever was and remains comically small and impractical by HGTV standards. I watched my now 80-lb. mother determinedly making her famous lasagna in an oddly small Pyrex rectangular dish, with the intention of feeding a family of seven adults and a toddler. I don’t know if the bigger dish had broken or what; but she spent all morning at it before my brother Mike, his wife, and the newest grandchild, and our other out-of-state brother Pat arrived to visit from North Carolina and Florida for a weekend. Mom had sent my dad to the store for lasagna noodles, cheeses; they boiled and drained the noodles, cooked al dente; she painstakingly opened the various packages of cheeses, using a knife, so slowly; she had her signature tomato sauce on the stove to warm up from the freezer. The slowness of her movements just hurt to watch. I think I was the only on watching. See, no one asked for this lasagna, one of her handful of truly great dishes, but you could see she felt she should make it, perhaps for one last time, who knows, age being what it is, for her family. She didn’t look happy about it, but neither did she want my help.

When they all arrived, my mother was still putting the lasagna together. As I say, this seemed to go on for hours. She was missing the action, you know, the way mothers do, alone in kitchens. Finally, I went in and tried to get her to come out to the playroom to be with all of us, with the son and grandson and her other son, and me and Jeff, there to see her. At some point, she and my dad decided to put the lasagna in the oven, even though it was too early to eat, even for an early dinner.

The upshot is, it way overbaked, shriveled into a barely edible shadow of its former self; and it seemed to be a couple of layers lower than usual, as it was, as if she’d forgotten something. We ate it; I remember my mother’s face, her shoulders shrunk, all that work, the end without the joy and plumpness of abundance. And for some reason, just now, it came back to me, that moment, and I fell to weeping. Now I have to think about why.

Well Butters

I’ve written about this before, my invented term for people who cannot accept a story that you tell on your terms. They have to correct you. Sometimes they are correcting a story they were never part of in the first place, which is a trait my mom has. Sometimes they correct your memory of time in a certain geography, because they share that geography and don’t have the memory you do, or experience a place or event in a way different from you.

My mom, Lynne, for example, is a story corrector, a well-butter. I was telling her once about visiting a retired teacher-scientist friend who’d built a cabin in the woods on her family’s farm. Her kids were grown and gone, her husband ran the farm as usual, and she lived alone with her dog in the cabin, which she did for a year. She kept a journal, spent her days studying the ecosystem, reading Thoreau and Edward Abbey, doing experiments, and simply living. When I returned from my first visit, my mom wanted to know how she bathed. “Oh, she doesn’t. She might go for two weeks not washing at all,” and my mom admonished, “Well, but that’s a lie. Now, Lisa, don’t say things like that. Of course she bathes!” Mom left the room, a well-butter: “Well, but that’s a lie…,” and I turned to my brother Jeff: “No it’s not.” I know, he said.

Now, do I contradict my mother? No, I do not. I think about it, I reflect on it. I try to understand it. Because I’m insane, and a writer.

To take another example: if I say to a New Yorker friend, “I love New York! I love the energy, the art, the theater, the people watching,” that friend may quickly interrupt to say, “Well, but Lisa, the city is filthy, people are homeless, some can barely make rent, and who has money to see shows?” It’s Yes And. It’s both. This doesn’t have to be an argument.

And so, I do not argue with this well-butter. I say, “So where do you want to eat?”

Sometimes it’s just about differences in lived experience. The other day, I said to my friend Colleen, who has been a constant resident of two NYC boroughs since the late 1970s, that I missed snow, lost now to global warming. She looked puzzled, saying, “Well, but it’s not like New York was ever a snow city,” and I disagreed. “My whole memory of living here is that from December to April there’s snowpack,” I said, and Colleen looked at me like I had two heads. I didn’t argue, but instead asked, “Would you like some tea?”

The Snows of Memory

Now, why are our memories of snow in New York City so different, Colleen’s and mine? I’ve been reflecting, because I am insane, because I am a writer.

For one, I lived my first 39 years in Virginia, where there is maybe one big snow storm every few years, a little ice once in a while (I was a student and a teacher and lived for snow days in both iterations of my life, and we didn’t get to use that many), so that might account for some of the difference—that by comparison, any regularity of snow seems like “a lot.”

But I think another reason is more practical: Colleen has only ever rented her apartments, and so there is staff to shovel and salt (which is not to say reliably), and New York City is mad efficient at this in most places, especially Manhattan (it blew my mind when I first experienced it, how most everything still runs no matter what). By contrast, my tiny Queens co-op apartment building (since I bought in 2005) has never had a super who could be relied on to shovel snow, so (to avoid a citation) I and my upstairs neighbor Debbie used our own shovels and did it ourselves. As a board member, I ordered 12 bags of salt a year, for a solid 8 years, and we used nearly all of it every year, and I know this because I spread the salt myself. (By comparison, one or two bags of salt have held for the last three winters.)

In addition, I have muscle memory, walking the half mile to the subway every morning for 16 winters (before Covid), navigating the corner of 40th Street and 47th Avenue with great care because that building’s landlord never shoveled; and I constantly had my boots repaired at Drago Shoe Repair in Penn Station because of salt damage and puddle leaks. I felt every inch of the winters, and I also loved it, because I love winter. I am crazy about cold temperatures, battling the subzero winds, and I find snowfall a reason for rejoicing, at least when I’m not battling depression (always not wanting people to die). Colleen, by contrast, finds winter a misery, hates snow, hates cold, lives for summer heat; and I would suggest that a healthy mind like hers might slip into denial of weather you hate while you wait for the green splendors of summer. And because, in addition to all of the above, I can say with certainty that our last major snowstorm of any duration took place in 2016, and that was 8 years ago, I can also say with confidence that I am not crazy to say, I miss snow.

Back to Lasagna

So why was it so painful to remember my mom’s failed lasagna one winter ago? It’s one meal. No one else who was there may remember it at all, including the hunched shoulders, the strain of it, the sad face, all that work only to end up overcooked out of confusion, a change in routine. Like you, I’m sure, I’m starting to see her lasagna as a metaphor for a life lived, a life ending.

I have almost continuous memories of my mom making lasagna, or feel I do, because I loved it and enjoyed it so much—all the leftover noodles, the extra cheese I ate with them. But in truth, it was a dish she couldn’t have made above two or three times a year. For one, it was labor intensive, and there were four kids at home, she babysat neighbor kids, and by the time I was 15 she was back working full time (as a bookstore manager); next, it was expensive (with all her specific cheeses and special sauce—a secret), growing in size from a square Pyrex pan to a large rectangular one; and because we all loved it, there was almost none left over, and leftovers were always the Saturday night meal. So in actuality, in my 18 years under that roof, I had at most 40 large servings of lasagna. Is that enough? Never.

When I was home at Christmas, working from there for one week and on vacation for two, my mom spent a lot of time going through her recipe folder. She made her perfect macaroni and cheese for me—another agonizing effort, but she was determined. She showed me where all the important recipes were. (She also showed me where all the important sentimental things were in her dresser.) These things have to be done if we are to keep any family traditions going; I’m the only one who is interested, really, but that is only because I am the one preparing for the end. In time, my younger brothers will care, too. For now, I’m the keeper of the recipes.

No one’s memory is perfect—I’d never pretend it was. But there is a decline that is sad and scary to see: one more was my mom holding a worn, torn potholder she wouldn’t let me throw out, saying, “My mother made this.” I looked at my brother Jeff. Idiotically, I said, “No, Mom, she didn’t make that one; I have the ones she made at my house.” She stared at the generic blue potholder again. “No,” she insisted, “my mother made this.” And she gripped it so tight it brought tears to my eyes, but only later when I recalled it, because I realized, My mom needed to touch her mom again, even if she’s spent most of her life saying she hated her; they are so close to meeting again, you see; amends need to be made, memories held.

Still life with potholder and my grandma, ca. 1945. Photo by LO’H

What am I on about? Life ends in old age if we are lucky. See it for what it is. We remember what we need to remember, okay? And we can tell our own stories, thanks, and we don’t need anyone correcting us. Watch, listen. And just say, “Oh.”

Love,

Miss O’