At Sea, post #1: Feeding Myself

The transition in my life from grad student to self-employed professional continues to be an adventure...

Being a full-time student at Dell'Arte means not having the time, energy or mental capacity to cook for yourself. So for three years, I basically ate pasta and sandwiches; granola or just bananas for breakfast; sometimes just a bunch of corn chips, a handful of whole, unpeeled carrots and a cold, pre-cooked sausage. It's turned into a rut that feels hard to escape from.

So these last two weeks, I've embarked on a campaign to get myself back into the kitchen. I bought a chicken last week and braised it; it provided five dinners. I also made a risotto — one of the most sensuous acts one can commit at the stove — with porcini mushrooms and fennel. It came out pretty good. But it is agonizing, after three years of dull simplicity, to plan and shop for these things, and it feels incredibly expensive, especially with the economy and my current state of self-unemployment. I'm really feeling the inflation of food costs. And while I'm still a committed carnivore, I'm trying to reduce my meat consumption and restrict myself to sustainably-raised, free-range meat. Michael Pollan's blog in the New York Times a couple of years ago was an eye-opener; it both alleviated my sneaking guilt at being a carnivore and made some thunderous points about the environmental impact of eating locally versus organically. I've long admired Alice Waters' local-food ethic and the Slow Food movement as worthy pursuits, both culturally and economically. So I split my shopping between the local food Co-op and the local Safeway, eschewing the WinCo that most students at my school shop at, and try not to fall into elitism about it all.

The chicken I bought last week was raised in California on a free-range farm. It weighed a little over four pounds and cost about $14 at the Co-op. If I had gotten the Free-range organic chicken, I would have paid $18. Conversely, the Premiere Brand sausages I often eat — also a NorCal product, but from conventional slaughterhouses, cost around $5 for a pack of four, and those will satisfy my desire for meat for four lunches or dinners. Was it worth nine extra dollars for the experience of chopping vegetables, separating the chicken, browning and braising it? Do those dollars cover not just the single extra meal, but the satisfaction of tasting the work of my own hands, the convenience of microwavable leftovers, and — not least — the relative comfort of the chicken while it lived?

Can any of this be expressed on a balance sheet?

Will eating well — locally, sustainably, and attentively — make sense next month? I don't know where March's rent-check is coming from...

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Last night I made polenta and tried to revive the Marinara sauce recipe that Micah Ciampa taught me years ago. I bought some Italian sausages from the co-op butcher to serve over the polenta, some tomato paste and a couple large cans of Contadina tomato purée. I chopped an onion and sautéed it gently in olive oil. I added minced garlic; I put in some paste, not noticing that it was double-concentrated. I opened the package of sausages and noticed that they were Premiere Brand, which was not how they were labeled in the display case... I opened the cans of purée and only then noticed that they were not purée but "sauce," already full of tomato concentrate, garlic and onion powder, spices... I put them in anyway (might as well use them up.) I browned the sausages, thinking I'd use half the sauce with them and freeze half for later, keeping the sauce vegetarian... but when I went to deglaze the sautée pan with some vermouth, I put in way too much, and had to pour it off, along with a bunch of the sausage grease, into the main sauce pot... Of course I completely spattered the whole stove with red-tinted grease.

It's like I don't know how to shop or cook anymore.

I'm out of practice.

The polenta was pretty good, though...

Crawdaddy and change

So, Paris is receding in memory and a new year has begun.

I spent the first two weeks of the year working on puppets, costumes, sets and props for Crawdaddy's Astounding Odditorium, a new show that debuted this past weekend and is now moving to Calgary, Alberta, for the International Festival of Animated Objects. Last spring I built a fat suit for a workshop production of the show, which then parlayed into a paying gig this month; Xstine Cook, the production designer, had to go back to Calgary to head up the festival, and left me in charge of her puppets (and everything else that had yet to be built/made for the show.) It was a great experience, working with a really talented team of painters, puppeteers and actors, many of whom are good friends from Blue Lake.

Above is a photo of me doing open-head surgery of the show's main puppet. The show as a whole both enacts and portrays an old freak show, and this puppet is one of the featured "freaks." This is actually only one of six versions of this character that appears in the show; this one is wearing a straight-jacket for a send-up of Houdini. In other parts of the show, he's fried in an electric chair, strapped to a dartboard, ripped limb from limb... he's the indestructible man! The character was designed by Xstine (pronounced "Christine") and worked onstage by David Ferney. The original production featured him only as a hand puppet, with David's arm inside his neck, but the straight-jacket, electric chair and dartboard prohibited having a hand inside. The head is made from molded latex and is both very strong and very flexible; it also didn't talk very well with just a string pulling from behind. The jaw never closed without the pressure of a hand inside, so he couldn't talk properly—he just sort of flapped his lip. So my first and biggest job was to recreate the effect of a human hand! I thought it would take a day, but it took me a week.

Latex essentially has no structure, but it has a shape. I first tried stringing elastic through the roof of his mouth, but that only pulled part of the mouth shut. I'll spare you the whole process, but tell you that the solution called for steel to overcome the latex. Ultimately, I carved a lower jaw out of wood, glued it inside the lip, and then attached a system of L-brackets and a spring to the wood. The spring pushed the mouth closed, and a cord run through the middle of the spring both pulled the mouth open and kept the spring from popping out. A steel hinge worked as a trigger on the spring. The biggest problem was that very intense glue is needed to hold all this stuff together, and the best stuff takes 24 hours to dry. So most of the components had to be assembled over the course of days, and it still felt like there was no guarantee that it would work. I'm not sure I found the best possible system, but the one I found works OK.

There were lots of other projects in this show — it may well be the most technically demanding show I've ever worked on — but this was the biggest headache. Sadly, the show no longer needs me, so I don't get to go to Calgary... though I had four months out of the country in 2008, so I'm not really complaining.


So, what's next? There may or may not be a school tour of the shadow-puppetry project Ferney and I were working on last fall, and in March, he and I will head back into writing/rehearsing his one-man show The Misunderstood Badger which I'll be directing. In May, Jerry Lee Wallace (another Dell'Arte grad) will open a self-produced clown show at the Arcata Playhouse. This show will feature the big debut of my solo clown piece, for my clown Ferdinand the Magnificent, which I then hope to tour on the streets of major west-coast cities next summer. It may also go to a festival or two back east... I'm also digging back into music, working on expanding my ragtime and bluegrass chops, and ....

I'm starting a band!

Right now it's just me and percussionist Erin Crites; our current repertoire
is pretty much just me ragging on the guitar and her on washboard. But we are also working on some New Orleans Second Line rhythms, and talking to other prospective members. The full product will involve a lot of junk percussion, and if I had to tell you what to expect, I would have to say "some kind of cross between the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Einsturzende Neubauten."

And I wouldn't be kidding...

The project for now is called "Helicopter." I'll keep you posted about new developments.