The World Has Stopped-Corona

Broadway shut down on March 12 and the rest of NYC and MA on Friday the 13th.  People began hunkering down, schools closed, colleges, businesses. Staying home in quarantine is now the new norm, and it just got extended from Easter, to April 30 to May 4. Some theaters are trying to go online-AEA is stopping some productions bc they don't know how to frame it in a contract.

Restaurants are closing or just doing takeout. Mostly closing

ALSO-Jericho Hill Forest is going to be torn down (maybe?) I'm trying to fight against it, using every trick I know how to use.  Yesterday, I sent emails to the City Counsel Members-asking if I could walk the trails with them, only one said yes. Indeed, I'm resorting to being NICE-although I can't tell you how much my blood boils when I see how they've already begun destroying things to measure it all.

Henry DThoreau was a surveyor, he felt guilty.

I've started an Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jerichohillforestwaltham/ for pictures and am posting on Twitter, Nextdoor and FB.  The ironic thing is that my town has shut down the parks and playgrounds, so these trails are the only open space left to engage with nature. The Forest should be renamed Sanity Park-for keeping everyone's sanity up.  Even the governor yesterday said it was good for people's mental health.

I can't quite describe yet, how beautiful the forest is. How it's like a cathedral, and also a cemetery.  A future cemetery, all the trees and animals about to be taken from the earth.  Its as if the trees are the souls of Waltham, the ones who have come before.  And it is my duty to keep them there, awaiting and vigilant, for the future generations (especially for the very high school students that the area is being given for-to be made into a parking lot)

How all these stories seem so far away-the rainforests of Brazil, the virus in China. And then it comes home. And it changes everything in your life.

Hospital Food and Bookmarks

This month I spent too much time in hospitals.

I wonder why the food in the cafeteria is NOT healthy. Its because most cafeterias are run as cafeterias and not as health centers. You don't want to scare anyone, and want to make sure there is a comfort food option. Who are we kidding? They are run by the cafeteria paradigm-basic food. Ideally not terrible. Put cheese on everything, this is America, dammit. The sawdust cheese, they won't even notice!

I also sketched out the idea for a children's book, called the Bookmark Lady. It is about performative moments in a hospital, and being able to overcome your own emotions by being kind to others-and handing out bookmarks as gifts. Sometimes people need to be distracted by their own simple humanity-just long enough to get out of their own heads about being scared at a hospital.

MIT Reality Hackathon and Midnight Pancakes

Attended the MIT Hackathon about XR, actually called a Reality Hack.  I crafted and scripted the narrative about Desegregation in Miami in 1957-specifically a story about Frank LeGree and how his family had picketers outside his house, threw rocks and eventually erected a cross on his front lawn-all in order to get him out of a neighborhood.

The video of the AR experience we created is here: https://youtu.be/C6w3e4wqwfk

Our team would love to do more with AR and explore this and other stories of America's growing pains further. Desegregation of schools, different neighborhoods in large cities i the 1950's. Life for a growing country and how that time period brought forth change that is still unresolved today. 

Connect that period with When They See Us-and #OscarsStillSoWhite and you will see how America still exists in black and white for so many people. The best part of the Hackathon was the idea that so many different people could come together to build a new reality. One in which the only judgments issued are on a lack of imagination.

Cultural and Culinary Adventure in Provincetown!

Having spent Thanksgiving in Provincetown, with all its associated Portuguese heritage, I noticed that there is an Annual Blessing of the Fleet and weekend-long Festival at the end of June (6/25-28/2020) More information can be found here:
https://provincetownportuguesefestival.com/

It's never to early to plan your time in this seaside town, especially bc it fills up so quickly in the summertime. See you then!!

Interviewing Paige Lipari of Archestratus

As part of the amazing Food Writing class I took with Devra Furst, we were encouraged to interview someone within the food industry.  Something that would make a good story.

As a sheer coincidence that night, Paige casually mentioned that it was the 4th anniversary of the store.  Of course I had to follow up.

So before the last class, I sat down with her for a quick chat that turned into one of those amazing conversations.  Here I was expecting her to blow my mind with recommended cookbooks-which she did. But I also got a larger conversation about life and how it can lead you in funny directions.

The gist of it all, and the thing that has stayed with me, is that she has always wanted to create a space that was about bringing people together to do their thing. To create a container. It's not that her passion is NOT cookbooks, or creating a food store, it's all that and MORE. She's facilitating a way for people to express themselves. Creating a community. The books, the cooking are a way to get there. And the best rainbow cookies in NYC don't hurt either. ;)

(Actual interview still to come!)

Collecting the Best Breakup Restaurants in Greenpoint

If you really want to get distracted by amazing fries while your Soon To Be Ex is crying into their avocado toast, check out my new series on Breakup Joints in North Brooklyn!  On the lookout for sweet & semi-romantic, with enough of an edge to these hidden gems to make the both of you laugh over your shared dessert.

PAULIE GEE’s

Take your former beloved to your once favorite pizza joint.
Nod and smile as you mentally try to deconstruct the Neffy’s Porkpie White,
with sweet Italian fennel sausage, basil and ricotta. 
You were never able to take out a whole pizza here-
something about violating the crust by putting it on cardboard.
But shrug and smile, knowing you’ll never have to listen
to your ex complaining about his Mom
and her weird obsession with always wanting to do the laundry.

You know the secret ingredient, Mike’s Hot Honey,
will fix any pizza mistakes you may make when you experiment with pizza-making at home.
Besides, PG recently opened up a slice shop for freshly single people
like you
who don’t have the time to waste on frivolous conversation.

PAULIE GEE’s

https://pauliegee.com/greenpoint/

347-987-3747

60 Greenpoint Ave @Franklin St

Brooklyn, NY 11222

Dine In Only

Paulie Gee’s Slice Joint

110 Franklin St @Noble St

Brooklyn, NY 11222

A Single Ingredient: Sugar

A summer evening festival, a blur of white skipped past me in the under the string of lights,

dressed like it was her first communion or her wedding day. 

But she was only 6 years old and so was I.

And I stopped her for the most important of reasons,

“You’ve got sugar on your face!” I said.

Stopping, she looked me and right in the eye and then said something of grave importance. 

I didn’t understand her.

Her voice was Portuguese,

familiar but just out of reach.

A lullaby language, words my mother and aunts used, but not as items I could understand.

They were just sounds, as familiar and as foreign as the Festa, or festival,

the same kind they had multiple times of year. 

There is a Christmas kind of gathering,

and one for Easter,

and one where they parade a statue,

and one where they cover the streets with flower petals,

and one where you wait in the hot sun to share soup sitting on picnic tables.

But most every festival had malassadas (“under-cooked”) also known as fried dough.

Our grandmothers wouldn’t make it at home, at least not MY Vovo.

She saved her dough for Massa Sovada, fresh every week,

for the family to eat for dessert with butter.

Grown-ups were even harder to understand than Portuguese words,

but butter seemed like an adult’s version of sugar; a coating for the basics. 

I put my hand to my cheek and then- so did she.

It was like looking into a mirror.

She brushed her cheek and said something else.

“Obrigada,” she said in Portuguese and then “Thank you,” with an accent I wished I had.

And then she skipped off, comfortable in two languages, with a little less sugar on her face.

And left me standing, alone.