Day 44: “Native Ingredients” or How I Learned How to Cook at 22 is BTS

 

Early mornings on Saturdays are sacrosanct for a 22-year-old, too precious to be spent on overrated, grown-up things like actually waking up and getting the day started. Thus, it was a little challenging to get around my cognitive dissonance about being up and about at seven on that balmy morning in late August. I was hoping to keep the noise down while setting up the pan, ladle and cooking oil in my tiny kitchen. But, as I’ve come to learn in the past week, the acoustics of New York City walls can amplify incriminating sounds and rustlings that it was a feat to keep my roommate from catching me, in a manner of speaking, with my pans down.

In a few minutes, my mom would give me a call from Cebu City (my hometown and the oldest city in the Philippines), where it’s just past dinnertime, and dictate the recipe of pork asado (pork roast) which, if things turn out as planned, would be the first proper dish I’ve cooked in my life. This sudden affinity for the culinary arts, though, is more akin to a shotgun wedding than a long and steady courtship. Since arriving in the Big Apple two weeks prior, the shameless ubiquity of burgers, fries and salads and the realization that rice was not the staple food this side of Sex and The City left me panicked. The sight of a McDonald’s outlet, until then an insufferable yet perversely endearing blight that was the punchline of “Super Size Me”, has begun to acquire a menace that rattled the core of my well-being. Something had to be done, and fast. 

If the morning’s cooking shebang was the wedding ceremony, then the call from my mother would be the exchange of vows — or whichever part of the ceremony signifying that I was fully conscious of what I was marrying myself into but was still willing to go through it. A conversation which involves my mother telling me what to do is fodder for Chekhovian tragedies; what is otherwise a chitchat about eggplants, string beans and patola (sponge gourd) becomes a loaded setup of innuendos and lovelaced manipulations that would do the Russian master’s women proud. The list of ingredients and the steps involved in preparing pork asado are nothing remarkable but it’s a dish that my mom has put her distinctive – and sumptuous – stamp on that I couldn’t help feeling a little pressure.

I was famished and the desire to cook something the same way my mother would, a dish whose flavors were comfortable and familiar, was tempting. But I was halfway around the world from the kitchen I grew up in, so I doubt it would hurt if I put half a teaspoon more of salt and simmer a little longer than it takes for the meat to become tender, would it? The proposed variations were kept undercover and I kept my banter easy and agreeable to keep my mom off the scent. It was I, however, who could not resist the scent of the pork asado that I know – there could be only one – and as I prepared the meal amid the cacophony of clattering utensils, I ended up recalling flourishes my mom used to do in her own kitchen and got a little annoyed at myself for mimicking them, my minor culinary insurgencies all but forgotten. Half an hour later, I had my first real meal in weeks.

Bollywood Dreams, Salami Nightmares

The success of my initial attempt at pork asado (it was a bit on the salty side, but this I kept to myself) augured well for more adventures in the ktichen. While I signed up for the student meal program at NYU, breakfasting on the ham and cheese omelets that the burly Dominican server whips up as briskly and adroitly as any halal food cart attendant and lunching on pasta marinara or alfredo, my palate still had a hard time taking cold foods seriously. At one of our pre-term events in business school, various selections of cold wrap were served for lunch. My wrap was a monstrosity stuffed with lebanon bologna, proscuitto ham and feta cheese. It was a good thing that my seatmate, a genial and chatty Indian Finance major, had just embarked on a spirited account of Bollywood cinema after I casually mentioned having seen Lagaan back in Manila and liking it. 

The 400-student MBA class was divided into six blocks and, for the duration of the two week pre-term, students become acquainted with their blockmates in a series of recreational and academic activities. Within the first few days of pre-term, I found out in quick succession that I was the youngest in our batch, that I belonged to the small, wayward group of students not specializing in Finance (I was going to major in Marketing and Media and Entertainment) and that I was the only Filipino international student. Being the youngest to get into one of the top US MBA programs was a fact I must admit to being fond of, though I doubt that it would ingratiate me to the thirtysomething Type-A Wall Streeters whom I suspect would be as Darwinian in the classroom as they are on the trading floor.

By the day of the cold wrap, I had become more discriminating about which of my classmates to divulge my post-business school plans to; in my application essay, I had written that I planned to eventually return to the Philippines and launch an independent film studio with an eye on the burgeoning international markets, and one of my productions would be an adaptation of “When The Rainbow Goddess Wept”, the spellbinding WWII folklore fantasia by the West-coast-based Filipino author Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, who happened to be Cebu-born. Sanjay, the Bollywood fan, did not roll his eyes when I told him; when your national cinema consists mostly of song-and-dance extravaganzas featuring star-crossed lovers, corrupt politicians and dramatic reversals of fortune, you’d probably be diplomatic towards other people’s cinematic indulgences. 

As he held forth about Devdas, one of the last few Bollywood epics he saw before moving to the US, a romantic tragedy about a wealthy young Brahmin who is devastated after being separated from his childhood sweetheart who belonged to a lower caste and flees into the arms of a ravishing courtesan, he managed to set aside his own unfinished wrap (the narrative yarn was not helped by wolfing down on baloney and salami). It was only a matter of minutes before he changed the topic and asked whether I had tried Indian food such as naan and saag paneer.

Menu Crazy

In between reviewing statistical concepts and the law of diminishing returns during the fall semester, I was able to add three more recipes to my repertoire, all transmitted over the phone: humba (a Cebuano version of pork stew), chicken curry and beef teriyaki. By then, I had already been to or heard of Filipino restaurants both in Queens and in Manhattan, a number of them having the unglamorous, scrappy, lived-in feel of carenderias or cafeterias. They would be Marty Scorsese’s diner of choice if Elvie’s, a Filipino bistro in the East Village, was transplated to Little Italy circa 1973.  Considerably more upmarket is the SoHo-based Cendrillon, celebrated for its rich, imaginative take on Filipino dishes, blurring the edges between kalamansi-marinated adobo and haute cuisine.

I first heard about Cendrillon at a marketing seminar organized by the consumer goods company I worked for; the speaker, a Filipino advertising director who had just come back from a stint in New York City, picked out the restaurant as a subject for an activity on branding. When it first opened in the mid-1990s, Cendrillon was marketed as a Pan-Asian experiment, its blonde ambitions made apparent by its name, a reference to a French opera about Cinderella. It was a few years later that the chef incorporated more distinctly Filipino flavors into the menu, which was well-received by the critics, although the Pan-Asian attribution has become hard to shake off.

Although the self-esteem of Filipino cuisine in a city of connoisseurs had been showing promise, the offerings were either too sparse or unremarkable for Filipino restaurants to merit their own category listing in guides like New York magazine. Walking past Elvie’s, which is a stone’s throw away from two major hospitals, I kept thinking that Filipino food in New York City would have turned out differently if it had had half the tenacity of the Filipino nurses who had doggedly sneaked their way into the city’s emergency rooms and medical wards.

Kitchen Confidential

Meanwhile, the infliltration of my own kitchen cupboards was still in progress. The dishes I usually prepared on quiet Saturday afternoons alone in the apartment, a ritual that was increasingly becoming a habit with me. I was more surprised at myself than I let on about how I had warmed to the idea of cooking; after all, I could easily hop on a train on a pilgrimage for Filipino food and reach my mecca not twenty minutes later. For the longest time, I regarded domestic chores, which I considered cooking to be a part of, with little more than condescencion. My erstwhile disdain for domestication knew no bounds. My 7-year-old sense of pride unwavering in my wide eyes, I thought that the drudgery of cleaning and scrubbing was best left to the weak-minded, the help or mothers. 

At that age, I usually spent my free time reading in the school library, pretending that I can make myself invisible like making up fantastical stories, which I would either write down or narrate to my clique at recess. It didn’t take long before more characters peopled my narratives with hysterically melodramatic plot twists not unlike those in “As The World Turns”. I would write scripts all through grade school and jump at the chance of adapting them into theatrical productions in class, modifying a plot point or two to suit the current topic in Religion or Civics and History and scoring it with the soundtrack of the latest Julia Roberts movie. The trio of theater, As The World Turns and Julia Roberts did not go unnoticed and had set more than a few tongues of Parent-Teacher Association members a-wagging. Adding a flair for domestic chores to that mix would have changed my status from quirky child prodigy in an all-boys Jesuit school into something else entirely. It would have been one bit of emasculation too many. My mother did not seem to care one way or the other about my interest in household chores.

Such preoccupations seemed juvenile and distant just then as I sauteed sliced chicken in garlic, onion and tomatoes for chicken afritada (chicken cooked in tomato sauce).  For the first time, my personal experience of cooking stripped bare its attendant contexts. Or rather, the contexts informing it when I was growing up were easily supplanted by new impressions, both intriguing and diverting, in those first few months in New York City. My insatiable appetite for the sensations and sensibilities that the city had to offer triggered an epiphany recalling the Zen koan, “When the Student is ready, the Master appears.” And, boy, did the student take down a lot of notes.

My repertoire of food appreciation used to be limited to chewing and swallowing; the art of eating was little more than the art of stuffing my dinner plate with as much motley assortment of entrees from my host’s birthday banquet. The “hunting and gathering” phase of gastronomic appreciation that I was initially stuck in gave way to a more sophisticated calibration of my taste buds, savoring the subtle gradations of flavor in one dish. A taste for fine dining (more of an aspiration, really, given my student budget), wine and cheese was the logical next step.

Foodie Faux Pas

While my attempts at cooking Filipino dishes went auspiciously, my early brush with Manhattan fine dining turned out to be something of a cautionary tale. In the Spring, I went on a date that I’ve come to call “Dinner at Tiffany’s”. It was at at Per Se, an obscenely swank and snobby French-New American restaurant frequented by the likes of Donald Trump and Sarah Jessica Parker and whose elegant rooms reward with an expansive view of Central Park.

The standard chef’s tasting menu, at a prix-fixe price of $200, is nine courses, including coddled eggs tipped with black-truffle purée and lobster tails, each one poached in butter, each one painted (with saffron-vanilla sauce, red-beet essence, or vermouth) in a seductively mouth-watering way. I was still a long way from mastering the gourmet’s vernacular; entrees nestled in this, dishes embedded in that or topped with a foam of the other leave me in a state. I have, however, nailed down certain New Yorker affectations that come in handy in such places.

A great example is describing wine, an exercise in conjuring metaphors and therefore always a treat for writers. Catching a whiff of gooseberries from a Sauvignon Blanc, or red currants from a Cabernet, or horse manure from a Shiraz is inspired but literal-minded. Paradoxically, the more over-the-top taste descriptions are, the more they can appeal to the layman, who you are trying to intimidate. Thus, in a tone of voice that was sober yet vaguely patronizing, I ask the waiter about which herbs and sauces are in this or that dish, checking to see that my date did not miss a beat, and smile beatifically as a barrage of high-concept desserts (thyme-infused ice cream, cucumber sorbet, a deliciously milky chocolate soufflé) is served in succession to our table.

The dinner lasted five hours and I thought I held my own impressively over dinner, the intoxication of having just tasted seventeen types of chocolate notwithstanding. The ensuing diarrhea that plagued me in the three days that followed was less than glamorous and the episode inspired my sharp-tongued close friend from high school, the knowing country mouse to my city mouse, to retort, “You can take one’s digestive system out of Cebu, but you can never take Cebu out of one’s digestive system.” 

New York Is My Oyster

Although my affection for Filipino cuisine was undiminished, my palate began to wander in search of other geographies after some time. Temptations abounded; the ethnic diversity of New York City was such that each new turn or corner promised to unveil yet another unique ethnic group and its cuisine. In the borough of Queens alone, Astoria is a hub of Greek and Mediterranean cuisines while Jackson Heights is a buffet of Latin American offerings including Colombia, Argentina, Peru and Mexico, not to mention that it is the epicenter of Sanjay’s delicious samosas and saag paneer. French, Italian, Korean and Japanese restaurants are scattered all over Manhattan, while Chinese take-out is practically as ubiquitous as Starbucks outlets. While I couldn’t help feeling venturesome toward other national flavors, I was accosted by a faint sense of déjà vu, of revisiting a long-lost relative.

In attempting to escape the clutches of Filipino cuisine, a mélange of Malaysian, Chinese and Spanish influences, I inevitably ran into yet another of its uniquely sublime incarnations and, good-humouredly conceding the inescapability of certain things like one’s mother, I was less inclined to lament the fact that my gastronomic excursions did not take me very far from my origins. Come to think of it, New York City was a museum showcasing the various episodes in the history of Filipino cuisine in a vast, resplendent diorama.

The first panel, mounted in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn and its preponderance of Malaysian bistros, depicts our Malay neighbors arriving in Philippine soil during the pre-Hispanic era and preparing food by boiling, steaming, or roasting. This ranged from the usual livestock such as carabaos (tamaraws), chickens and pigs to seafood from different kinds of fish, shrimps, prawns, crustaceans and shellfish. Our most significant heirloom from this phase would be rice. Certain fixtures of Filipino cuisine, including toyo (soy sauce) and patis (fish sauce), as well as the method of stir-frying and making savory soup bases trace their roots back to pre-Hispanic trade with China, Japan, India, the Middle-East and the rest of Southeast Asia.

The second panel, which stretches along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens from Jackson Heights to Corona (my neighborhood). Spanish conquistadores certainly knew their spices and introduced Filipino cuisine to chili peppers, tomato sauces, corn and the method of sauteeing with garlic and onions. Local versions of Spanish dishes flourished in the national culinary idiom  such as paella into its Filipino counterpart of arroz valenciana, chorizo into its local version of longanisa (from Spanish “longaniza”), escabeche and adobo (a close cousin to the Spanish dish adobado, and even by way of Latin America and Mexico which also have adobo dishes).

The final panel, a lofty avant-garde display that only the MOMA could undertake, showcases the galaxy of Chinese diners littered all over Manhattan. During the nineteenth century, Chinese food became a staple of the panciterias or noodle shops around the country, although they were marketed with Spanish names. “Comida China” (Chinese food) includes arroz caldo (rice and chicken gruel) and morisqueta tostada (an old term for sinangag or fried rice) and chopsuey. The concept of chopseuy evokes the very essence of New York City, a smorgasbord of cultures and flavors, embracing its motley assortment of ethnic influences yet remaining distinctly its own character, a marvel of appropriation and reinvention, not unlike Filipino cuisine.

When The Mistress is Ready, The Student Appears

As the fall semester drew to a close and I was getting ready to fly back to Cebu in December of 2005, I had very clear ideas about the Christmas gift I’d ask from my mom. By then, I had reached a certain level of comfort with my cooking and was feeling confident enough to jazz up traditional recipes with my zing. First, I needed the compendium that packed all these recipes and I knew exactly where to find it. Minutes after arriving home in a cab from Mactan Airport, I raid the mini-library in my mom’s cabinet and, right beside Healing Wonders of Medicinal Plants, pull out her copy of Let’s Cook with Nora by Nora V. Daza (the Julia Child of the Philippines) which first came out in 1969. The receipt taped to the back of the front cover shows that it was bought at a Paul’s Book Store in Sanciangko St. on August 26, 1976 for Philippine Peso 48.00 – quite a fortune she divulged at the time, costing as much as a leather-bound Bible.

At first, she was adamantly opposed to the idea of parting with the cookbook, the pages of which were all faded and yellowed, the ‘60s-chic black-and-white illustrations adorned by brownish smudges in every pages of so. She eventually relented, but only after getting me to promise to dictate recipes to her over the phone “if the need arises”. I offered to teach her how to email as it would be more convenient to forward the recipes that way; she wouldn’t budge. It seems ludicrous now how neither I or my mom initially did not want to part with the 30-year-old copy of the cookbook when I could have easily gotten other cookbooks – classier ones, more comprehensive ones – but it was hers that I wanted, and we were both against the idea of photocopying the book. She had already asked that I dictate to her the recipe for Royal Bibingka on page 169 come Holy Week, something I was actually looking forward to, despite myself.

During the few weeks I was home, I knew better than to attempt to take over the kitchen but I was hanging around the kitchen more often when she was preparing a dish, quietly absorbing and remembering how she would sprinkle pepper into a pan or blend together the ingredients in a cooking pot while doing this or that recipe. It will probably be more than a year before my next trip back home so I wanted to get everything right. I wasn’t quite expecting this act of observing my mom in her element to be a kind of enlightenment.

Whether it was set off by the purring repetitions of the cooking utensils, their warm, silken surface, or my mom’s incantatory gestures, or the voluptuous contentment in holding one pose for an impossibly long time, I do not know. For a second, I saw my mom transform into one of the women in Vermeer’s silence-drenched small paintings, totally absorbed in the minutiae of their unremarkable domestic chores. This epiphany took place for a mere second, and the next thing I knew my mother told me that the dinner of beef caldereta was ready.

Day 43: Fosse’s fancy footwork is BTS

In the cabaret of Fosse masterpieces, death and eroticism are old chums that can’t keep their hands — and rhythmic heels — off each other. 

Conjure up an iconic moment from any film in Bob Fosse’s oeuvre — from the slinky gyrations and vocal bravura of Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) in the bowels of the Kit Kat Klub in “Cabaret” to the feverish exertions of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) in the back-to-back showstoppers escalating into the climax of “All That Jazz” — and you’ll be hard-pressed to miss that maniacal display of virtuosity and neediness and damn fine footwork. It’s a mix that has not only induced many a cinephile’s le petite mort but also reveals a lesser-known guise of Fosse: a pimp with a heart of darkness. 

Desire is a pimp’s stock-in-trade and, in Fosse’s case, his drug of choice as well. In “Cabaret” (1972), a musical reworking of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories which set out to juxtapose the socio-political tenor of 1931 Weimar society with the smoky, kitschy milieu of a Berlin nightspot on the eve of German Nazism, Sally Bowles is a young American performer hoping to break out of the Kit Kat Klub and make the silver screen her stage as a UFA movie star. Sally is doggedly driven by need and neediness, often blurring indistinctly into each other. It’s the hunger to both dazzle and seduce her faceless, nameless audience that sustains Sally and ultimately makes her a casualty of the Weimar-variety sex, drugs and rock n’ roll she’s become chummy with. 

What’s remarkable about Sally (as played by Minelli, so staggeringly pitch- and pathos-perfect for the role that she’s never fully recovered from it post-”Cabaret”) is the dichotomy of charming naivete and seasoned worldliness in her inevitable descent. Who else is she, really, but Holly Golightly’s enfant terrible half who’s not above choreographing her own moral collapse to realize her potential (or legitimize her self-perception) as an artist. She beatifically surveys the carnage that is herself, buttressing her tenuous grasp on sanity by ricocheting between the affections of two men as the debris continues to pile up from under her. It’s a vision both macabre and captivating: Sally and her Kit Kat cohorts chanting “Wilkommen! Bienvenus! Welcome!” and morphing into goose-stepping Nazi soldiers. When Sylvia Plath, who fashioned her own dramatic exit within years of the film’s release, penned “Every woman adores a Fascist/The boot in the face, the brute/Brute heart of a brute like you,” she couldn’t have crafted a more prescient postcard-quality bon mot. 

Sex, genius and self-destruction are again in play and transparently more so in Fosse’s thinly veiled autobiographical masterpiece celebrating his own larger-than-life persona, “All That Jazz” (1979). Film critic Peter Hemp calls Joe Gideon “not a character but a stage name”. Indeed. It is no accident that Fosse bathes his alter ego in reflected doubled images in case viewers miss the parallels. Gideon glories in his excesses — from his carnival of inamoratas to the madman’s passion for his art to more mundane types of poison — and expects the audience to drink in every abuse and be mesmerized by it. And for the most part, we do and we are. It is a testament to Fosse’s talent, which he pulls no punches in flaunting in this sensual overload of musical and choreographic delights. Quite simply, it’s all in a day’s work: Gideon works, fucks, gets high, and chainsmokes himself to death, literally. The angel of death pays Gideon a visit who, to no one’s surprise, can’t quite resist his charms. 

Fosse’s footwork might have gotten the ink — and deservedly so — in accounts of his cinematic legacy but it is his oceanographer’s investigation — and celebration — of the nether regions of the human id that need to be discovered. After all, it’s that cabaret the old chum has always invited us to.

Day 42: Seeing the 93-year-old inventor of electric guitar play live is BTS

There are exactly 988,968 words in the English language. None of them can do justice to the experience of seeing Les Paul, the 93-year-old inventor of the electric guitar, in concert (he plays at the Iridium Jazz Club with his trio on Monday nights). I was with my friend C.A., who was transfixed by Les Paul’s genius as much as by his late-night-comic schtick. A couple of out-of-towners jammed  with him onstage as they played bluegrass, folk and jazz standards as “Summertime”, “Tennessee Waltz” and “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off.” 

Day 41: Sylvie Testud in “La France” is BTS

In the cinematic pantheon of gender-bending turns, everyone must bow before Leslie Cheung, whose otherworldly talent and lethal neediness make him the gay Callas of 1940s Peking opera in “Farewell My Concubine”. Then there’s his uber-glam, big-haired distant cousin in the American indie scene, John Cameron Mitchell in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”. The women crossing the gender divide, on the other hand, eschew the pomp and diva pageantry for understated inner carnage. But, ah, these female chameleons’ strum und drang is just as al dente. Try not to be hypnotized by Hilary Swank’s heartbreaking, go-for-broke Brandon Teena in “Boys Don’t Cry”.  Forget “Transamerica” and its self-conscious androgynous gimmickry. Swank serves up the grit and grime of trailer-park America as she lays bare its spiritual anomie.

And then there’s Sylvie Testud, the double César Award-winning French actress, writer and filmmaker.  Although her most high-profile role to date (this side of the Atlantic, at least) was as Mômone, the gamine waif singing for scraps with Marion Cotillard’s Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose”, that is about to change with her turn in “La France”, a WWI war musical that’s part Romantic odyssey, part melancholic essay on loss and aimlessness, and part showcase of Beach-Boys era sunshine pop. As the Great War rages on, Camille (Testud) receives a mysterious letter from her husband at the front: Forget about me, he writes, you will never see me again. Determined to find him nevertheless, she ventures into the damp wilderness disguised as a boy and falls in with a small regiment of deserters led by a gruff but kind-hearted lieutenant (Pascal Gregory, whom I last saw in Rohmer’s “Pauline at the Beach”).  Helmed by Serge Bozon, “La France” (which I saw at the Anthology Film Archives) is a beautiful curiosity. Bozon orchestrates a sweet alchemy of discordant genres without missing a beat (literally). And Testud’s Camille is its savage conscience, the faint flicker illuminating the soldiers’ way as they plow on, mirthlessly and musically, into the forgetful night. 

Day 40: “Boeing Boeing” is BTS

I’ve tried picturing Bernard, the polyamorous architect of “Boeing Boeing”, smoking a joint with a troupe of merry Mormons, slapping each other’s backs over the delirous joys of guilt-free bed-hopping. But there’s too much of a swagger in Bernard’s gait, the suave bravado gleaming in his eye, not to make him an anomaly in a “Big Love” episode.

“Boeing Boeing”, Marc Camoletti’s ‘60s French farce about an American architect in Paris juggling his trio of air-hostess fiancées, mixes finesse and rambunctious slapstick as deftly as it does its martinis. Bernard’s is a harem to die for: the sexually frank, go-getting New Yorker, Gloria; the unabashedly romantic Italian, Gabriella; and the Teutonic dominatrix with a bust of gold, Gretchen. (Does Bernard perhaps fashion himself a postmodern Lope de Aguirre, his conquistador’s lust for Guns, Gold and Glory going for a woman’s El Dorado?) Add to this Robert, Bernard’s wide-eyed buddy from Wisconsin, and Berthe, the sourpuss housekeeper-cum-Hobbesian philosopher, and you have yourselves the perfect cocktail of erotic high jinx.

A virtuoso philanderer is only as good as his time management skills, which Bernard knows a thing or two about. He has mastered the flight schedules of his unsuspecting inamoratas, making Berthe change the decors and cuisine as one woman leaves and the next one arrives. In a rare moment of modern technology uncharacteristically frustrating one’s extracurricular affairs, a new, faster Boeing jet has been introduced, throwing Bernard’s timetable in disarray. Weather delays occur, and things get out of hand when the girls’ behavior does not match Bernard’s careful planning. Mild-mannered Robert comes to Bernard’s rescue, and not only does the apprentice wow the master with his crafty strategems and ruses, he’s managed to sample the menu as well. Meanwhile, Berthe – the poor little misanthrope! – barely manages to keep the proceedings from descending into domestic mayhem.

Mark Rylance won a Tony for his turn as Robert

The cast is electric, particularly the Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance as Robert, who dives into the role with verve and brio, keeping us on tenterhooks on what the undersexed but overly imaginative might be up to next. Then there’s Mary McCormack as Gretchen, who inhabits her like a Leni Riefenstahl reincarnated as a screwball comedy queen. While the material itself would seem dated in less sophisticated hands, but British director Matthew Warchus, whose West End dossier includes Yasmina  Reza’s “Art” and Sam Shepard’s “True West”, delightfully channels the ribaldry and slapstick spirit that made “Boeing Boeing” a phenomenon when it first came out. A laugh in “Boeing Boeing” arises from the frisson you get when titillation views with control. It’s the adult pleasure of knowing what sex is, then knowing – and enjoying – the difference between sex and romance and love. It is among the most hysterical – and most innocent – plays about the joys of sex even though it is, primarily, a sparkling abstraction. Catch it on Broadway while you can! 

Now give me Bernard and Humbert Humbert and I’ll be one happy heathen. 

Mary McCormack is no shrinking violet as Teutonic air hostess Gretchen

Day 39: The American Ballet Theatre’s “Giselle” is BTS

If somebody challenged you, in a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, to connect Tim Burton with 19^th-century French composer Adolphe Adam, go see the American Ballet Theatre’s “Giselle” next time it’s playing at the Lincoln Center.

What started out as an innocuous pastoral love story where you half-expected Bambi and Maria from “The Sound of Music” to make an apparition morphs into a live-action version of Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride”, the romance-drenched pirouettes and side leaps infused with a macabre relish. “Giselle” does a good job in weeding out squeamish dilletantes from the true romantics; if you’re grossed out by the fact that the second act dances with – literally! – necrophilia, you’re an impostor. If you passed this crucial test (as did Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze, making sweet pottery posthumously together in “Ghost”), you just might be able to appreciate a “Happily-Ever-Afterlife” ending. 

Don’t worry, though: the protagonists start out alive and breathing. In the first act, a feckless village maiden named Giselle (played wonderfully by Nina Ananiashvili who replaced Diana Vishneva who was injured) is in love with a man she knows only as Loys. In reality, the man is Albrecht (the Cuban Jose Manuel Carreño, whose footwork is about as distracting as the flexing of his butt muscles) a nobleman disguised as a peasant, who is betrothed to Bathilde, daughter of the Duke. One scene has Loys swearing to Giselle his eternal love and she takes the traditional test with a daisy – “he loves me not, he loves me not”. When it appears that the answer will be “not”, Loys surreptitously retrieves the flower and discards a petal, coming up with the answer “he loves me”. And – the fool! – she  believes him! This was the point in the ballet when I realized that Giselle could not conceivably be a New York City type, not even a Charlotte without the brain for pre-nuptial agreements. Anyway, when Giselle discovers publicly the true identity of her inamorato, she is crushed and goes mad. I have never seen the progressive deterioration of one’s mental bearings (and eventual death) choreographed so well, right down to the very last chaînés turn. Ananiashvili’s Giselle gives “graceful exit” a whole new meaning.

While the first act seemed tame and cutesy, the second act was a dizzying and dazzling spectacle. The production took on a more somber, ghoulish mien, its evocations of a massive tree with gnarl-like branches as good as any in Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow”. The scene is laid in a clearing in the forest near Giselle’s grave. The wilis – vampiric ghosts of betrothed girls who were betrayed by their lovers and died before their wedding day – are summoned by their queen, Myrta, to attend the ceremonies that will initiate Giselle into the sisterhood of the traveling ghost tutus. Their spirits are forever destined to roam the earth from midnight to dawn, vengefully trapping any male who enters their domain and forcing him to dance to his death. Albrecht arrives to leave flowers on Giselle’s grave. He too is trapped and commanded to dance until death. Giselle resolves to protect him and dances with him until the clock strikes four, at which hour the wilis lose their power.  The two pledge their love to each other and she descends back into her grave. Sadly, they will forever be separated; Giselle is now a wili – a wili doomed to look like a svelte, long-necked twentysomething forever, how sad – for the rest of eternity. I like it that way. Since “Giselle” started making audiences bewitched, balleted and bewildered in 1841, we’ve remained happy preys to her brand of witchcraft.

One question, though: I wonder what Adolphe Adam was thinking when he named these dead unrequited brides ‘wilis’. Must they still be plagued by penis envy well into their graves?!

Day 38: Ed Park’s Debut Novel “Personal Days” is BTS

Perhaps it’s the sadist in me speaking but everytime I think of a recurrent scene from Ed Park’s “Personal Days” – one where another unwitting worker bee in a Manhattan office that is the eastern outpost of an Omaha-owned company is about to get the ax – my auditory cortex hijacks the high-suspense tableau and starts playing ABBA’s “Take A Chance On Me”, their hearts lub-dub-lub-dubbing to its frothy beat:

If you change your mind,

(Take a chance, Take a chance, Take-a-Take-a-chan-chance)

I’m the first in line

(Take a chance, Take a chance, Take-a-Take-a-chan-chance)

Honey I’m still free

(Take a chance, Take a chance, Take-a-Take-a-chan-chance)

Take a chance on me

What can I say, it’s just like my imagination to transform an otherwise edge-of-your-seat Russian roulette of corporate carnage into a perversely droll game of musical chairs. Not that the characters in “Personal Days” look anything like the flower-power-channelling Swedish foursome in their heyday but I think Park is largely to blame for my musical malaprop. “Personal Days” is his sardonic take on modern-day corporate culture – from its its shared elevator rides and Googling compulsions to extra-cubicular romances and the main entrée, job-security paranoias. “The Firings” have been going on in the aforementioned office for more than a year leaving us guessing whose head rolls next in a narrative that’s the Starbucks-addicted, cheeky Gen-X grand-nephew of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None”.

“You poor things!” would have been my initial reaction to the plight of these office drones. When I realized, halfway through the novel, that their inertia in simply quitting the job had less to do with macroeconomic woes than their barely-disguised self-destructive impulses, ABBA shimmied in, the glee oozing through their Scandinavian pores. “Personal Days” is in a lot of ways an invert of Chuck Palahniuk’s equally ironic “Fight Club” but the violence Park specializes in is more catatonic and subterranean. Everyone loves a train wreck and the sequence of terminations is the closest Park’s characters come to such a treat. 

Think about it: the moments immediately preceding another employee’s firing is not much different from the heights of ecstasy one reaches in erotic asphyxiation. Those precious few seconds of breathless briss or terror where, as George Carlin put it, “you don’t know whether you’re coming or going.” (It doesn’t help that the mantra of “take-a-chance-take-a-chance” seems to have been delivered with an irregular breathing pattern. Get out of your ABBA-groupie closets, my dears!) This is the one collective fetish that these Manhattanized denizens of Dunder Mifflin seem to have cultivated (the pre-firing anxiety attacks, not the erotic asphyxiation). It’s a good thing that “Personal Days”, Park’s first novel, is actually worth holding your breath a few seconds for. 

Day 37: Franny’s Pizza in Brooklyn is not quite BTS

I would’ve loved to love Franny’s. On paper, it had everything going for it. This mecca for pizza on Flatbush Avenue had grander ambitions than being just your friendly neighborhood pizzza parlor. The vegetables, fruits, eggs, dairy, and fish are largely sourced from local or organic producers and served in the seasons during which they are grown; all the meats at Franny’s are from sustainable sources, containing no hormones or antibiotics. The space is smallish and the décor on the stylish side of scrappy, with its exposed brick and large mirror. Its debut a few years ago prompted comparisons to Grimaldi’s and Lombardi’s from pizzaphiles and critics alike. What’s not to love?

So, as I do with dates that I would looking forward to, I pictured my Franny’s experience leading up to the climax, timing my “Oohs” and “Aahs” to the exact moment of my gastronomical conversion. It was going to be this: : The crust is a delight — the killer combo of thin, chewy, and wood-flavored . The wood-fired oven is really the clincher. The pizza has a delicious smoky aroma that no coal-fired oven can match. The pizza would be on the gourmet-side, but they are all delicious.

Well, the divide between fantasy and reality just became wider. A.H. and I trekked to Flatbush Avenue and got a table in 20 minutes. For the appetizer, I ordered a crostino of house-cured pancetta with herb butter. While the appetizer fared better, getting my palate ready for the piece de resistance, the pizza that we ordered (A.H. had their Tomato, Buffalo Mozzarella and Basil and I had Clams, Chilies and Parsley) was, I feel upset to report, not all that. The complexity of flavors and its tempting aromas were upstaged by just how salty each slice was. While Franny’s has a 1,000-degree oven, I don’t think it’s an excuse for their pizza not to be lightly charred, but burned, muffling the flavors of the clams and the basil even more. A.H. and I exchanged worried glances on our faces as we nibbled our way through the pan (we had to slice the pizza ourselves on the plate), eliciting a classic zinger from Mae West, “An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.” While I’ve learned over the years to manage my expectations about dates, getting over the debacle of a well-loved pizza place would take me at least a few days.

Two BTS fiascos in a row…should I just throw in the towel now?

The Year of Trapezing Dangerously

Taking a Flying Trapeze lesson. Answering a Strictly Platonic Ad on Craigslist. Taking a helicopter tour of Manhattan. These are just three of the 20 fantastic BTS suggestions of dating gurus Em & Lo for me in New York City. Check them out and let me know what you think I should explore as I (attempt to) scale the heights of asexual ecstasy: Em & Lo’s Better Than Sex picks! 

Day 36: The BODIES Exhibit is Hardly BTS

Amygdalae Galore! Hymen Extravaganza! Medulla Oblongata Mania! Welcome to Bodies, a breathtaking display of the human anatomy that fits right in with P.T. Barnum’s carnivalesque spectacles (though its agenda is considerably more sober.) A couple of friends have raved about this exhibit at the South Street Seaport so I was pretty excited about going with A.H. – whose idea it was to check out Bodies – and deciding whether the scientific feast of the flesh was worth giving up sex for.

The exhibit is set up so that one starts at skeletal system, and more layers  (muscular, nervous, circulatory, digestive, respiratory, urinary and reproductive systems; as well as fetal development and the treated body) are added in successive rooms. Containing about twenty bodies in total, each exhibition uses real human bodies that have been preserved permanently by a process called “polymer preservation” so that they will not decay. From what A.H. and I could tell, the exhibitor did more than a decent job of preserving the specimens, who are sure to land more modeling gigs if cosmetic labels wanted to get real with their “Beauty is only skin deep” campaigns. A.H. and I noticed that the bodies were posed in Olympian-athletic stances and had facial features that looked rather Asian. (I would find out later the horrifying backstory to this.)

This might seem a bit naïve, but A.H. and I have always thought that a man’s two balls were physically connnected to each other. But there it was, each testicle hangingly forlornly from a cord, one on each side of a javelin-throwing model’s member. Alas, a man’s testicle is not his brother’s keeper. I have since found out that the cord-like structure is called the spermatic cord and is formed by the vas deferens and surrounding tissue that run from the abdomen down to each testicle. You learn something new every day, what can I say.

Also, the Bodies exhibit pulls no punches with its pro-health, anti-smoking agenda. One part of the exhibit is a display of smoking and its health risks, such as blackened lungs and emphysema. Smokers are encouraged to kick the habit right there, by dropping their cigarettes, lighters and other tobacco products into a large clear locked box. There were probably 400 packs of cigarettes, dozens of lighters and packs of matches in that box.

While I can say that the Bodies exhibit is very interesting and fascinating – particularly the intricate networks of blood vessels in the circulatory system as well as the awe-inspiring display of the human embryo and fetus in various stages of development – I’m not sure about Bodies being BTS. I wasn’t too savvy about the technical terms to fully appreciate what it was about. More than that, getting this “intimate” with the workings of the human body actually makes me want not to have sex for a few days, and I’m sure Derek Shepard’s with me on this.

If the display itself is intriguing, wait till you hear the story of how they got the bodies for the exhibit – a backstory that plays like a sick, all-too-true remake of “Invasion of the (Oriental) Body Snatchers”. In 2006, reporting from Dalian, China for the New York Times, David Barboza described “a ghastly new underground mini-industry” with “little government oversight, an abundance of cheap medical school labor and easy access to cadavers and organs.” Two months ago, the exhibition company behind Bodies posted this bone-chilling disclaimer on its website: “This exhibit displays human remains of Chinese citizens or residents which were originally received by the Chinese Bureau of Police. The Chinese Bureau of Police may receive bodies from Chinese prisons. Premier cannot independently verify that the human remains you are viewing are not those of persons who were incarcerated in Chinese prisons.” And just so you don’t miss the irony, the “History of the Human Anatomy” timeline on the same website nonchalantly announces, “1832: As the interest in anatomy grows, England passes the Anatomy Act to offer an adequate and legitimate supply of bodies and prevent body-snatching, grave-robbing, and murdering as means of providing anatomists with cadavers.” It’s the kind of remorseless coup de grace that would make even Hannibal Lecter squirm. 

When you think about it, it’s the same wisdom – or lack thereof – informing exhibits on human anatomy like Bodies and gay hookup sites. Nobody is what they appear to be if you bother reading the fine print. 

Day 35: Perfecting the “Surprise Kiss” from the 1930s is BTS

It turns out that my first New England visit a few days ago has been such a hit with A.T. that I’ve been invited for an encore. In roughly three weeks, I will be sampling lobsters in Maine and driving around in Newport, Rhode Island. I’ve mentioned in an earlier post that A.T. is a hottie, so I’ll pretty much be a moth fluttering again to the fire with this second trip. The fact that A.T. is an oenophile and that I am rather easily persuaded when intoxicated might make it hard to stick to the sacrosanct “neck-up” rule the next time, especially when I’ve been forewarned by Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a martini,


Two at the very most.


After three I’m under the table,


after four I’m under my host.

Hmmm…What to do.

At a novelty shop in Provincetown, I picked up a smallish, quaint book called “The Art of Kissing: Tips & Techniques from the 1930s” by a Pietro Ramirez, Sr. knowing that I might have some use for it some day. What I didn’t anticipate was that I would end up having use for it sooner than I thought. The plan is, to distract A.T. from pursuing more advanced modes of sexual behavior, I will have to expand my kissing repertoire and inject as much variety and novelty to it as to be sufficiently entertaining to my host. I will therefore devote the next few weeks to becoming a connosieur of the smooch the old-fashioned way. If Nancy Sinatra’s boots were made for walking, A.T. will be reminded that these lips of mine were made for smooching. Below are the more interesting kissing techniques from the booklet:

The “Vacuum” Kiss

Here you start off by first opening your mouth a trifle just after you have been resting peacefully with closed lips. Indicate to your partner, by brushing his teeth with the tip of your tongue, that you wish for him to do likewise. The moment he responds, instead of caressing his mouth, suck inward as though you were trying to draw out the innards of an orange. If he knows of this kiss variation, your  boy will act in the same way and withdraw the air from your mouth. In this fashion, in a very short while, the air will have been entirely drawn out of your mouths. Your lips will adhere so tightly that there will almost be pain instead of pleasure. But it will be the sort of pain that is highly pleasurable.

When you decide that you have had enough of it, don’t suddenly tear your mouth away. Any vacuum when suddenly opened to air gives off a loud popping noise. The procedure is simply to open first a corner of your mouth. You will hear a faint hissing sound when this is done. Immediately, you will find the pressure in your mouth lessen. The muscles will relax. And a delicious sense of torpor will creep your entire body, giving it a lassitude that is almost beatific.

The “Nip” Kiss

In the “nip-kiss”, the kisser is not supposed to open his mouth like the maw of a lion and then sink his fangs into the delicate flesh of the kissee. The procedure is the same as the ordinary kiss except that, instead of closing your lips with the kiss, you leave them slightly open and, as though you were going to nibble on a delicious tidbit, take a playful nip into either the nape of the neck, the cheek or the lips. Just a nip is enough.

The “Kiss-Tease”

The old story of the fox and the grapes which were tantalizingly dangled over his head is the foundation for the method. Simply, the procedure is this: just before lowering your lips for the kiss, instead of planting the kiss, draw your head back again. Then, hold your lips in readiness but do not kiss. Hold this position for as long as possible, all the while you smile tantalizingly into the eyes of the boy. Finally, when both you and he can stand the suspense no longer, lower your lips, slowly, as slowly as you possibly can, and imprint the seal of love onto the avid mouth of your loved one. After that, the technique calls for no specific action. Kissing, like loving, is instinctive.

The “Surprise” Kiss

A most charming manner of kissing is called the “surprise” kiss. This is performed when one of the parties has fallen asleep, on the sofa, let us say. On entering the room, when the other sees his lover asleep, he should tip-toe softly over to him. Then, lowering his head slowly, he should implant a soft, downy, feathery kiss squarely on his lips. This first kiss should be a very light one. But, thereafer, the intensity of the kisses should increase until the sleeping one has awakened and, of course, even beyond that.

The effect of such an awakening to a sleeper is almost heavenly. For, while in the midst of a dream, a pleasant one, most likely, for it will concern the other half of the couple, he feels vaguely, faintly, as though it were the touch of a butterly’s wing, a subtle kiss on his lips. Naturally, in the depths of his sleep, he imagines that it is part of his dream and the result is a pleasant sensation, indeed. Then, gradually, although still asleep, he feels the kisses continue. And the pleasantness continues. Then, as he starts to come out of his sleep, he realizes that the kisses are too real for a dream. But he is sure that he is dreaming. And so, immediately, a relapse from the happiness sets in and a twinge of sadness comes over him because he knows that, instead of being with his lover, he is only dreaming of him.

Imagine, then, his extreme gratification, when, while thinking these drab thoughts, he feels the actuality of an intense, ardent kiss on his lips. His heart flutters wildly. His pulse runs riot. Perhaps he is not asleep, he argues to himself. Then he opens his eyes. And he sees the darling face of his beloved bending over him. And he feels the sensuous touch of his lips on his. Truly, no awakening can be more pleasurable!

 

It’s time to pucker up.

The Good, The Bad and The Cuddly

Prepping for my first-ever Cuddle Party (in New Jersey!)

Like chocolate truffles after a full course meal, nothing beats cuddling after some good ol’ fashioned fudge-packing. But with sex being a no-no for me for the next 65 days, I’m gonna have to start paying more attention to the dessert menu. The only problem is, while nearly every sexual position imaginable – from the trusty missionary to more pretzel-like bodily contortions – has been documented in, say, the Kama Sutra, it’s mostly slim pickings for cuddling connoiseurs. Case in point: Between two girls and one cup, spooning was ironically the farthest thing from their, er, buffet.

Stuck in the limbo of post-coital pleasures for the longest time– down there with having a smoke and playing video games – cuddling is finally getting some well-earned props. Sometime next week, I will be joining an army of devout cuddlers in New Jersey for a cuddle party. A cuddle party is described as “an event designed with the intention of allowing people to experience non-sexual group physical intimacy through cuddling. It’s a social event that gives adults an opportunity to “give and receive welcomed affectionate touch in a no-expectation, friendly setting, according to your needs, desires, interests, and boundaries.” Is that code for “hugging orgy where you keep your PJ’s on”? I can’t wait to find out. I’m a bit worried, though: It’s a slippery slope having warm bodies rub up against you; one strange arm wrapping around the wrong body part and it can all go downhill from there (no pun intended). If it actually goes well, it just might send me into throes of tantric ecstasy. 

Cuddling is definitely an art and the cuddle party in Jersey my experiment to nail down the perfect cuddle position. Questions pop in my head: Where do I stick my other arm while spooning? What makes a good cuddling position better than a bad one – is it larger amount of skin contact, or ability to hold the position for a very long time? How do I keep a cuddling session from devolving into simply “feeling each other up”? I’ll have more than a week to think about these things. Meanwhile, here are the cuddle party rules:

WHAT TO WEAR: Pajamas – nothing too risqué. Think more comfy than sexy. (More drawstrings, less lace. No shorts.)

WHAT TO BRING: A pillow or stuffed animal if you like. Juice or sparkling cider is always welcome. Sorry, no liquor folks. Otherwise, just bring your smiling self.

STICK TO THE RULES:

Rule # 1 – Pajamas stay on the whole time.

Rule # 2 – You don’t have to cuddle anyone at a Cuddle Party, ever.

Rule # 3 – You must ask permission and receive a verbal YES before you touch anyone. (Be as specific in your request as you can.)

Rule # 4 – If you’re a Yes to a request, say YES. If you’re a No, say NO.

Rule # 5 – If you’re a Maybe, say NO.

Rule # 6 – You are encouraged to change your mind.

Rule # 7 – Respect your relationship boundaries and communicate with your partner.

Rule # 8 – Come get the Cuddle Caddy or ME if there’s a concern, problem, or should you feel unsafe or need assistance with anything today.

Rule # 9 – Tears and laughter are both welcome.

Rule # 10 – Respect people’s privacy when sharing about Cuddle Parties and do not gossip.

Rule #11 – Keep the Cuddle Space Tidy

Rule #12 – Thank you for arriving on time.

But what if something comes “up”?

Here’s what they said:

Erections. Erections. ERECTIONS. There, we said it.

Since Cuddle Parties are safe spaces for adults to explore and practice affectionate touch without sexualizing it, and since the state of arousal is natural for us human beings, it’s no surprise that erections sometimes do occur. Our goal is not to teach men how not to get erections. Instead, we want to make normal functions and needs of human beings seem, well, “normal.”

We strive not only to free people of the awkwardness surrounding arousal, but to allow them to develop some real coordination around it. At a Cuddle Party, erections become Mother Nature’s way of giving us the thumbs-up sign. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s dirty. Nothing’s suspect. And as long as you’re not dry humping anyone (Rule #7), it’s completely okay. Really.

Wow, guilt-free boners. If I don’t watch it, I might just end up becoming a cuddle whore. I’ll start by rehearsing these six spooning positions (the Post Modern being my favorite).