Recipes for Disaster

Here's an idea, CNN. Do more cooking segments.

I don't cook; I don't really like being around food unless I'm eating it. As long as there are no amphibians, reptiles, or AKC animals in the mix, I don't care about the ingredients or how they mysteriously combine and morph into a whole that is far more appealing that the sum of its parts. I felt the same way about freshman chemistry. Even when my lab instructor gave me a remedial pipette so I could get the measurements right, I wasn't interested. Even if it meant I would never be a doctor.

So, essentially, I went to law school because I can't cook, at least in a chemistry lab. But none of this means I don't like to watch people who like to cook cook, especially when they are on television and not stinking up my kitchen.  I like the way they gaze reverently at each carefully measured ingredient (ah, to have a sous chef!)  before they toss it into the bowl. I like the way they explain the nuances of the process as they effortlessly blend colors and texture in a bowl. I like watching them breathe in the aromas, how they can tell, just by the smell, that everything is perfect. I like the sound of a wooden spoon against a ceramic bowl. I like the sound of hot pan landing on a cool trivet. I like the way the thing looks delectable every time, without the use of remedial utensils.

Even if I can't do something, I can tell when it makes sense. I'm not a politician, or a paid surrogate for a politician, and I don't really spend much time with anyone who is. During this surreal election season, though, I've had to opportunity to get to know some of them, sort of. In 24/7 coverage, they've been served up to us looking as they want themselves to look, right out of the oven. The less we know about the ingredients the better. We are left to our own devices to sort through it all, to figure out what mystery meats lurk in the stews they have concocted. As we watch the mess unfold from a chemistry experiment gone awry, we are left with only the bad taste in our mouths as a guide.

It's all right. I recognize bad taste when I see it, and I don't really need to know what went into it. All the chatter and the digging and the deconstructing can't trump (pardon the pun) a gag reflex; nor will any of it inform me. Which is why I think CNN needs to switch to cooking segments. At least, with a cooking segment, I come away learning something.

Not a perfect solution, to be sure. I did my own fact checking on an infomercial that almost had me ordering a "too good to be true" pan, almost had me thinking it would inspire me to cook. Luckily, I dodged a bullet. Still, I was mesmerized by the show, the vivid images of ingredients combining, the enticing sizzles I swore I could smell, the infectious passion of the cooks. My healthy skepticism kept my finger off the "purchase now" tab, but at least the show didn't make me want to vomit. If anything, it made me hungry, and I can fix hungry.

More cooking shows, please, or I will find a Bunsen burner, figure out how to use it, and blow up my

television.

Circle Dances

An Italian girl, the bride's sister, asked me if she was doing it right. We were holding hands, linked in an amoeba-like circle of kicking legs and oddly twisted arms as we danced the Hora. 

I was obviously one of the Jews, though certainly not because of my graceful Hebrew dancing, or even because I was reflexively mouthing the incomprehensible lyrics, as if I have a clue what they mean. Not even because it was such a small wedding we all pretty much knew to which side everyone belonged.

At the risk of perpetuating stereotypes, a stranger could have picked me out. I was wearing black. My hair, in spite of an impulsive splurge at the blow-dry bar for the special shampoo guaranteed to counteract the extra special Miami humidity in mid-August, was either plastered in sweaty chunks to my face or expanding around me in a halo of thick dust bunnies. It was painfully obvious that, even 30 years ago, I could never have pulled off one of the slinky, booty hugging, brightly colored sheaths the Italian girls wore, that my hair was never that shiny. That I was never so certain that I looked so damn good. 

It struck me as funny that this beautiful Italian girl asked me if she was doing the Hora right. No rules, I told her. No rules. As if she could look wrong doing anything.

My cousin's son's wedding was unconventional by design, plagued by its fair share of drama and minor disasters up until the last minute. The guest list was limited from the start, and Zika-phobia led to last minute cancellations. There was confusion about times and locations, and there seemed to be constant schedule changes. The driver shuttling us from our hotel to the wedding finally explained, as we moseyed down Collins Avenue at a snail's pace, that he could not quite figure out how to drive this new bus. (The traffic lights were with us the whole way, and we could only hope he at least knew how to stop when he had to.) The officiant was late. My dress narrowly avoided going up in flames -- I noticed just in time that a corner of it had draped over my chair into the mouth of the glass candle holder on the floor next to me. (Note to self: revisit the flower versus candle issue with my own soon-to-be-married daughter.) 

This morning, I can barely walk. I danced with my daughters, I danced with my cousins, and I even danced with my 85 year old mother. I danced with my cousins' inner circle of friends, women and men I had seen at so many occasions over the years, many tables over. This time, we had all traveled to a neutral destination, and we had all been thrown together. I wished we had all crossed the divide sooner. So many shared values and experiences, yet they had always seemed so foreign to me. Maybe just older. It never occurred to me we were all in the same boat -- just paddling around in different circles. 

Crazy, amoeba-like circles. 

Whatever drama preceded the weekend, whatever eleventh hour glitches kept the suspense going, all was forgotten on the dance floor. A startlingly beautiful couple, clearly in love. Two families, with only the closest friends in tow, forming an imperfect circle on the dance floor, hands joined. Nobody really knows how to dance the Hora. There's only one rule: Just dance. 

Rabid Dog Days of August

Yawn.

I flipped on the TV this morning, and there was Rudy Giuliani, foaming at the mouth. Hizzoner the mayor, the post 9/11 publicity hound and griever in chief, and rebuilder in chief, no matter what the human cost. Spewing gossipy accusations as if the former prosecutor in chief had never heard the word "hearsay."

Kate Foster. A name I had never heard before. Hers was to be the next story, as soon as they wiped Rudy's spit off the camera lenses. A gymnast with a prosthetic leg, having lost her real one to disease only a few years earlier, a teenager who competes, against all odds and without complaint, in a system rigged, I suppose, in favor of athletes with all their limbs. Shame on all of us, but shame on everyone in this surreal political season who has cried foul when it appears they might not get their way.

I watched the segment in amazement, this talented young girl who had lost one of the indispensable tools of her trade, never mind the years of debilitating treatment she had to endure, never mind the devastation and fear that we, as parents, don't want to imagine. With the help of a coach who never, for a moment, viewed the loss of a leg as a deal breaker, Kate Foster seems to live life, on the mat and off, with a grace I only wish I could approach when I drag my aging ass out of bed in the morning.

Yawn. The Kate segment ended quickly, and the pundits reappeared. At least Rudy was gone. No shortage, though, of video clips of the Oompa-Loompa in chief -- calling names, hurling insults, reading scripted endorsements as if they were written in Arabic and periodically ad libbing with the small handful of adjectives in his vocabulary -- incredible, terrific, disgraceful, crooked. 

Yawn, yes, but we cannot seem to get enough. And as much as the rational pieces of us push away the nastiness and the hate and the fear mongering, it has permeated our collective psyche and made us angry and has certainly made us forget about the things that matter.

Life isn't fair. If I hadn't known that before, I certainly grasped it in January, when a young man I had watched grow up simply died, without warning, at twenty-seven. Nobody was driving while distracted, nobody was shooting up a club with an assault rifle. His heart failed him, and this young man who traveled the world and loved life and who quietly inspired so many in his short life by working hard and doing good things and appreciating his good fortune and always, always, paying it forward was taken. Had the system been rigged, we would have expected somebody like Adam to live forever.

Had his heart problem been discovered, he might have lived, with some limitations. His activity level might have been curtailed. But, like Kate Foster, the one-legged gymnast, he would have persevered and he would have prospered and he would never have dwelt on the unfairness of it all. Even with a defective heart, Adam would have been as big hearted as ever. He would have shaken his head in disbelief at the spectacle that is American politics this year. Still, he would have believed the world is a good place.

I like to think that Kate and Adam -- and their parents -- are the rule, not the exception, and that the Oompa-Loompa's will soon fade back into fiction. Yawn. It's getting really old.