I’m standing in M.’s tiny pink and yellow kitchen. His kitchen is like a galley on some really whimsical ship that has a puppet of a vulture in one corner and fabulous kitchy bird statuettes tucked into the bookshelves that don’t hold books but puppet-building supplies. We are talking about food again, and M. gives me a food challenge.
Food is one of my favorite subjects. I’m turning it into one of his, I think.
We’ve been on a kick lately of seeing what we can make out of absolutely everything. Not just the normal stuff, like leftover rice and chicken or stale bread. Things like bacon grease. You know what you can make out of bacon grease? Bacon-flavored soap. I kind of want to try it. Maybe dogs will like me better.
So M. turned to me in the frame of his pink and yellow kitchen and stretched out his strong arm towards me. His arm is the arm of a normal muscular guy that has this additional expressive muscle in his hands, so when he stretches out his palm to me there’s an extra level of funny to it. I guess that’s what happens when you are a puppeteer. Everything you do is a little funnier than a regular person.
“What can you make with THIS?” he asked me.
In his stretched out palms were balancing two or three curls of orange peel from our lunch.
“I do know something you can make with those,” I said.
And I did. Though it made me swallow hard to think about it. This was going to be a different kind of food challenge. A secret challenge. Like Proust’s horrible cookie, it took me way back to a trip I took with my ex-husband to Barcelona almost ten years ago. (more…)
