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Eating With Strangers http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/ en-US 2009-11-17T20:52:36+00:00 Turned Tables: Dinner at Mine http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2009/11/turned-tables-dinner-at-mine.html When I first moved to New York in December 2007, the crush of the city overwhelmed me. The smell of Chinese greens stewing followed me all six flights up to the tiny walk-up I shared with a surly hipster. My...

 When I first moved to New York in December 2007, the crush of the city overwhelmed me.  The smell of Chinese greens stewing followed me all six flights up to the tiny walk-up I shared with a surly hipster.  My bedroom was so small that I couldn't be in it and not on the (single) bed.  Anyone long-legged had to sit sideways on the toilet or else their knees knocked against the wall.  When the air was particularly heavy, I could hear the asthmatic hipster wheeze his discontent through the plasterboard divider, all night long.  The chaos in the air made me neurotic and depressed, and New York in January is not a kind place.  I wanted out immediately.

I had lived in cities before—London, Brussels, Miami—but human nature revealed itself more rawly in New York, the cold, cruel facets of it as well as, occasionally, the transcendent.  What most affected me was the unrelenting crush of people living on top of each other.  The Indian matron proudly astride her stool behind the register at the bodega on Houston, surrounded by condoms, cigarettes and disposable toothbrushes.  The rich, sad and damaged ladies of the Upper East Side, so heavily made up they looked like porcelain dolls salvaged from a landfill.  The delivery boys riding kamikaze, monstrous bike chains slung across their backs.   These people, their textured, invisible lives.

I had come to New York because, like a million other people who move there with futile dreams, I wanted to be a writer.  This was not working out for me.  I got fired from the only writing job I got and nobody else wanted to publish me or even respond to my grasping, overwrought queries.  When I did get gigs, they were puerile and superficial.  I had moved to New York to write, and the only writing I was doing was teensy bits of dumb stuff I had to unattractively claw my way into.

Even though I knew tons of people in the city, making plans took a month's notice—New York had turned them into people too busy to hang, self-obsessed, stressed.  It was incredible that I could live in a city at once so dense and so lonely.  I wondered more and more about the strangers I saw everywhere.  How were their days going?  What was going through their minds?

So I started asking.  I took ten of them out to lunch one by one and wrote about it, and when I came back to New York in May 2009, I started listening to them in a more personally illustrative context: their own kitchen.  They possessed a candor and an openness that refreshed me completely. I left every meeting, without exception, glowing from the personal contact.  I had knocked on the unknown doors of strangers' lives, and what I had found made me joyful about the contents of the world.

Tonight, four of them came over for dinner at mine.  I hadn't seen any of them since I'd written the presumptuous, protracted assumptions about their lives that characterize Eating with Strangers.  The tables had turned, and now my life was open to judging.

Lara arrived first, wearing the same fresh-scrubbed face and grace she'd exhibited she she'd welcomed me in to her dorm room.  Dana followed shortly, bearing wine, even though I'd said to come empty-handed.  They chatted in my kitchen ("So, uh, what do you do?") as I went down to open the door for Pete.  Pete and I dawdled in my apartment hallway talking as he locked up his bike (he'd brought wine too), and in the meantime, Steve showed up (also with wine).

We began drinking; the room warmed up.  I had made a clear-the-cupboards hummus with chickpeas, a blistered red pepper, parsley, lemon juice, olive oil and cashews, and we scooped it up with dark, salty pretzels from the Greenmarket.  The Bo Bo poultry people at the New Amsterdam market, who raise slow-growing, dark-meat-heavy chickens sold whole, with their feet and heads attached, had given me a bird after the market, and Balthazar Bakery had pawned off an enormous loaf of sourdough, so I stuffed the chicken with breadcrumbs, parsley, onion, and lemon and roasted it for an hour.  There was kale dressed with lemon and ricotta to eat with the chicken, and conversation was lively.  Lara and Steve had read my descriptions of the other strangers; Dana and Pete hadn't.  I asked them what it had been like to read about themselves at such length.  "I didn't learn so much about myself—I mean, I was right there with you; I know what transpired," said Dana.  "Reading the piece, I learned more about you.  The things you noticed, what you chose to illustrate."

Someone has approached me about potentially televising Eating With Strangers, a project I feel torn about.  Personally, I would love to watch a show that trawls through other people's kitchens, exploring their lives through their cupboard, fridge and mannerisms.  I've long been convinced that food is a common denominator, an intuitive vehicle by which to gain insight into a person—or a culture's—politics, history and ideology.  Whether it's acting as a symbol of power, an aesthetic display, or a community ritual, it always an expression of identity, of psychology and culture.  I find all this totally fascinating, and if I could spend my life exploring these questions, I would jump at the chance.

Televising it would change a lot about Eating with Strangers.  It would change the people interested in participating ("You can count me out," said Dana), as well as, necessarily, my behavior while interacting with them.  It's no one's fault.  Having a camera around just alters things.

Plus, the vision would no longer be mine.  It would be the videographer's, the film editor's, the sound engineer's, the director's, the producers', the network's, and the advertisers'.  Filming Eating with Strangers would tilt the balance between me and the stranger, and what makes it special right now is that it's just two of us, some food and a pad of paper.

Or, like tonight: five of us, some food, no paper.  Just the mellow confluence of open souls reveling in the warmth of others.  I reflected on how different the vibe would've been tonight given any other permutation of strangers.  There was something especially empathetic about this collection.  They were really able to relate to each other, even though they presented a mélange as random as people who find themselves suddenly stuck in an elevator together.

It was a unique moment in a world made up, I suppose, of unique moments.   We kibitzed till 12:30, eating ricotta cheesecake and honey, and then all at once, as though an invisible bell had rung, they spun back off into their own worlds, into the night, leaving me to meditatively clean the kitchen.

Click here for the photostream, courtesy of Dana....

 Nathalie Jordi 2009-11-17T20:52:36+00:00 Ask Me About Free Rides To Whole Foods http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2009/08/ask-me-about-free-rides-to-whole-foods.html Pete G., Manhattan pedicab driver, accepts the following as sacraments: Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism, marijuana, West African music, cheap Chinese food, long bike rides, not having any money, and inviting total strangers over for dinner. A few weeks ago, Pete gave...

Pete G., Manhattan pedicab driver, accepts the following as sacraments: Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism, marijuana, West African music, cheap Chinese food, long bike rides, not having any money, and inviting total strangers over for dinner.

A few weeks ago, Pete gave me a free ride to Whole Foods in a pedicab that said "Ask me about free rides to Whole Foods."  I had just left the Chase bank on 2nd Ave and 10th Street and Pete was leaning against his pedicab, slurping up a take-out container of borscht from Veselka.  It was about 100 degrees outside, too hot to walk to Whole Foods, not to mention bike there, not to mention eat borscht before biking there.  I collapsed, hot and discombobulated, into the back of the pedicab, and Pete wheeled us down 2nd Ave, keeping up an enthusiastic chatter of conversation the whole time.  If his grin were any less mellow I might've suspected amphetamines.  He credited calories for his energy.  "That borscht is great."

When he called me a few weeks later to set up a date for dinner, he was on the Williamsburg Bridge, fixing someone's busted bike.  "So, I was thinking….[crunching noises]….sorry, I'm trying to fix this guy's chain—what's your name?  Abdul—sorry Abdul, I'm not a very good mechanic."

And when I met him below his Hell's Kitchen apartment a few days later, he spirited me up the few flights to his place and had me sit by the bathtub in the kitchen, apologizing.  "I just have to finish my afternoon meditation," he said.  "You don't mind, do you?  It'll only be a minute."

I squatted on the low stool near the cat's litter box, and Pete popped his ass back onto a piano stool facing a little altar propped up on an ancient piano.

"NAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYO!!!"

Pete looked at me, still chanting.  "Are you hot?" he mimed as his mouth ground and quipped and shimmied, like someone speaking in tongues.  He leapt off the stool and turned the fan on, aiming it at me, then resumed his seat, sounding syncopated dings and dongs on the prayer bells and making sure the cat was fed, all without missing a beat.  His feet tapped, his fingers danced on his knees, his voice droned sonorously.   It went up at the end of each phrase, like a little boy asking a question, then immediately returned to its monotonous, grating cadence. His cat, one of the neighborhood's genteeler denizens, wound her way around the bamboo plant colonizing the corner and slunk delicately onto the fire escape.

"NAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYO!!!"

I could see pretty much the whole apartment from my vantage point on the stool by the bathtub; rich people, probably even in Manhattan, have closets that would dwarf it.  On the east-facing side of the room was an ancient upright piano, the bamboo plant, that cat and the altar.  The southern end of the apartment boasted a tiny water closet and a little room with Pete's lofted bed, the wall scrawled with decades' worth of notes and graffiti.  One thousand CDs, books and notebooks lay scattered below, as well as some stereo equipment, out of which hemorrhaged a tangle of wires, electronic roots flowing into the floor.  On the western wall hung a picture of the Dalai Lama and a calendar, framing a hot plate and the bathtub.  And facing north were the windows and the fire escape, a microwave and the litter box, plus, between the windows, a few shelves racked with Quaker Oats, vinegar, soy sauce, paprika, Aunt Jemima syrup and baking soda.

In the middle of the room was Pete's piano bench, upon which he perched and presided, a friendly praying mantis around which orbited the world.  Out of this piano bench, which Pete dipped into liberally over the course of the evening, came strength and sustenance, i.e. Buddhist literature and marijuana.  (On the calendar he marked a little "W" every time he bought weed, to make sure he wasn't overdoing it.)  He continued the meditation, his thin body veritably quaking from the spiritual reverberations.

"NAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYONAMMYOHORENGEKYO!!!"

I could hear the neighbor moving quietly behind the apartment's paper-thin wall; I'm sure she knew every word of the meditation by heart.  With a satisfied last few percussionistic dongs of the bell, Pete closed the altar, blew out the candles, placed the prayer beads on the piano and swiveled around to face me, his lined face content.  "Thanks for your patience," he said.  "Gotta get that done."

For almost a decade, Pete has been a fervent adherent of the Soka Gakkai International USA branch of Buddhism, which is headed by the bespectacled Japanese businessman and corsaged, pearl-necklace-wearing wife that sit placidly in a picture frame on Pete's piano.  "I really love the way he explains things," said Pete, the veins on his head pronounced as scars, beating in time with his speech, punctuating his passion.  "He speaks about devotion, the mystic law of the universe, the lotus flower that blooms as it seeds.  It represents the simultaneity of cause and effect, the mysterious nature of life from moment to moment.  Do you know what I mean??  It's a magnetism that…defies logic."

What appeals to Pete about this brand of Buddhism is that it believes in the power of prayer to change destiny.  "For example," explained Pete.  "I always wanted to live in a house where I could have a piano.  Well, a couple of years ago, someone donated this piano to the Buddhist culture center, and I took it home!  So I guess I don't live in a bigger house or anything…but at least I have a piano!"

We tramped downstairs to the Chinese place around the corner to pick up dinner, a place Pete likes because he can take home five things for $5.  There were about 60 different hotel pans of food lined up side by side, sweating in bain-maries.  Some of them looked like they've been there since the dawn of time.  I filled a take-out container with penne pasta in a primavera-type sauce and piled it with syrupy tofu, fried bean sprouts, fried rice, and seaweed salad.  It doesn't look that bad in print, but it was abominable.

We took the food back to his place and reclaimed our stools.  Pete rinsed the dust off a couple of forks and glasses and opened a bottle of wine.  He perched atop the piano bench and ate with gusto.  There was a lot of empty toe space at the end of his socks, which were already covering very long feet.  He was wearing jorts cut off at the knee, a tennis shirt, and a flat-billed cycling cap that shaded a pair of extraordinarily large, bovine eyes.  He chewed in a way that was at once aggressive and thoughtful.  "You hate the food!" he said, noticing.  "I'm so sorry!!"

When Pete first moved to New York, he crashed on couches for a couple of years.  Then he lived on 2nd street near the marble cemetery, moved to Hoboken, followed that with a stint in East Flatbush and Jersey City, and finally set up twenty-two years ago in the Hell's Kitchen tenement where we sat together and compared notes on the world.  Pete remembers the neighborhood back when New York was much more of an anarchist, in-your-face place.  "There was this old bum on the corner, Winston.  He had a black-and-white TV that he rigged up to plug into the lamppost.  He lived in front of it, on this Persian rug, and had this incredible sense of entitlement.  It was like, 'Man, quit interrupting the Flintstones!'  The police were far too beleaguered to care."  The rent when Pete first moved to Hell's Kitchen in 1987 was $213 a month; now, it's $471.90.

The apartment's landlords, the family behind the century-old butcher shop on the corner, have taken Pete to eviction court three different times, but he's managed to remain ensconced.  "It bothered me that I wasn't paying rent, I guess," he said.  "But I could live with it." (At the moment, Pete estimates that he's got $150 in his bank account.)  In 2001, when Con Ed cut him off, he lived in the apartment for six months with no phone or electricity; he finally got a cell phone in 2007.  "Kind of zen, but I got tired of it," he pronounced on that time.  Pete is always praying for fiscal deliverance, and eventually—proof of the value of his faith—it comes, though unfortunately sometimes shrouded in undesirable clothing.  "Death has brought a lot of studio equipment into my life."

Pete is a musician to the core: "They stamped 'artist' on my ass when I was born," he chuckled.  He started out in a covers band, then followed a woman out to California and played to hecklers in a Mexican restaurant near the Navy base in Monterey, then spent a few years busking in the Port Authority subway station, teaching himself the violin underground.  It sounded like a particularly demeaning kind of penance.  Pete is philosophical about it.  "The humiliation process is kind of purifying," he said.  "You have to sink to the bottom before you rise to the top."  He preferred the hallways because people didn't feel as obligated to donate as they do on the platform, so he knew their appreciation was real.  "I could've played 'Danny Boy' like some kinda Johnny One-Note and made tons of money, but I was never that guy."  Once or twice a year he still takes his violin down to the subway.

Sometimes he met women there.  He has a thing for dark-skinned women, and believes he got at least one of them off the street.  "I know I was the catalyst for Nikki, anyway."

Pete, too, has done a lot of things for money.  When he first came to New York, he borrowed a bike from a guy in Brooklyn and worked as a messenger for a film processing company.  At 19 years old, he was in Jersey City playing Grateful Dead covers.  Then he worked on Wall Street for a while.  He clarified: "As a runner."  He's worked as a dispatcher for taxis, too, and as a research assistant at St. Roosevelt's Hospital.  He's busked aboveground, in Times Square.  "If you stand there long enough, you'll see everyone you've ever met."  When this involves people from high school, it can be uncomfortable, but Pete shrugs this off as an occupational hazard.  "Hey—at least I'm the king of my fate."  These days, he mixes pedicabbing with focus groups.

He hates, hates, hates getting older.  "If you're not a fiscal success, people reject you.  At my age, if you're pedicabbing, you're a bum.  But pedicabbing is a great way to control my financial reality.  I'm finally learning, with age: responsibility and freedom must be coupled.  You can't just have one."

It's rare to run across people who are genuinely, not-just-saying-it, uninterested in money, mainly because this requires the strength to be indigent.  Pete always recognizes what good fortune he has ("Buddhism helps"), and lives utterly in the present.  "My attitude has always been, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.  I'm just trying to divorce myself from…the hype indoctrination.  Yes!  The hype indoctrination!"  I wonder aloud where he got the phrase.  "What do you mean?  I just made it up."  He's remarkably lucid, peppering his speech with James Joyce and observations that are brittle and cutting without being cynical, which he's anything but.  "Whatever.  There are ways of treating this island as a physical island and not as a roiling commerce board.  My happiness derives from finding these."

Pete's way often involves his bicycle.  On days off, he meanders up Riverside Drive, napping on the grassy knolls, drowsily listening to the laughter of Mexican kids playing in the water.  It was on another bike ride, right before we'd fixed the date for our dinner, that he met Abdul, whose chain he was adjusting when we'd spoken on the phone.  Once Pete had restored the bike, they rode for a while together.  "I think Abdul was really feeling a lack of dialogue, a lack of discussion."  They talked about Buddhism.  "He came from another faith, but we were really on the same page.  Hey—you know what you should do instead of Eating With Strangers?  Biking with Weirdos!"  He guffawed irrepressibly, folding his long, lean, body in half, heartily slapping his sinewy thigh.

By this time, the lights were low, the night's coolness had set in, and we were listening to music on Pete's stereo system.  We'd groove happily to roots music or Pete's own synthesizer compositions for a while, and then he'd spring up abruptly, like an exaggeratedly tall and fervent Jack-in-the-Box, having changed his mind about the soundtrack, and switched it to something a pole apart.  The volume was set loud enough for Pete's aggrieved neighbor, were she so inclined, to shout along to any lyrics, but every time he switched CDs, he'd turn the sound down gradually, "as a respect to the music."  He kicked a Haruki Murakami novel out of the way, picked up a Marisa Monte CD, reconsidered, and slipped in Mali Music, a collaboration between West African musicians and Damon Albarn, from Blur.  "This, my friend, is music on a sacred level."

Sometimes you really wish you had a goddamn tape recorder because everything coming out of someone's mouth is interesting and worthwhile and you can't take notes fast enough and notes are crap at capturing ambience anyway, especially once you get stoned with your subject.  My four hours with Pete were like that.  If reading this piece makes him out to be a caricature, let me be unequivocal: what emanated from him was excessively human, so much so that sometimes, it broke my heart.  The absolute honesty of his voice and absence of posturing rendered his character utterly transparent.  It made everything he said valuable, because it was the truth.

Pete thinks of himself as an artist, but I see him as a poet.  He views the world in his own skewed way, and refuses to soften his angular, ragged edges to fit into its round holes.  He's a prism, a craggy, gaunt, rangy one at that, and so he will steadfastly remain till the world makes holes his size.  Or doesn't.

So what?  It takes all kinds of people to make a world, and the world is a better place for having Pete in it; I hope he finds the redemption he seeks.  "In Nichiren Daishonen Buddhism, praying hard enough gets you what you want," Pete said shortly after his recitation.  Perhaps one of the things Buddhism is best at is lulling people into believing that stasis is a means to an end, or an end in itself.  I'm constitutionally allergic to this kind of thought, but I'm not sure it makes me a better person, or a happier one.

At the end of a very long night, Pete showed me out like a gentleman and handed me my Styrofoam container of unctuous, gelling Chinese food.  I begged off.  "You hated the food!  I knew it.  You're going home to make a soufflé now, aren't you?  You are!  You are!!"
 Nathalie Jordi 2009-08-24T09:55:13+01:00 Rainy Nights in Washington Heights http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2009/07/rainy-nights-in-washington-heights.html There was nothing but a muffled thump of music when I knocked on Cara's door for the third time, but the door was unlocked, so hesitantly, I let myself in. "Cara?" I ventured. No response. (Really going to get myself...
 There was nothing but a muffled thump of music when I knocked on Cara's door for the third time, but the door was unlocked, so hesitantly, I let myself in.  "Cara?" I ventured.  No response.  (Really going to get myself killed one of these days.)  Then the black and yellow-striped ballet flats in the hallway caught my eye.  I was washing my hands in the kitchen sink when Cara walked in.  "Oh, you found it!" she said jubilantly.  "I was on the street looking for you."

I met Cara at the Bee Ball a few weeks ago, where I was selling honeyed popsicles for a gala fundraiser meant to support the legalization of beekeeping in New York City.  I'm writing an article about beekeeping in New York City, so I've been going to lots of bee-related events; plus, it was an opportunity to sell popsicles and to support a nonprofit I like.  Cara, in the adorable bee costume above, came up for a popsicle, wearing the distinctive homespun shoes that allowed me to recognize her apartment when I trespassed there a few weeks later.  I watched her from behind my booth as she danced all night.  She was irresistible, flowing from moue to caprice to shimmy with ease.  She was having a blast out there.

Given my article, it seemed legit to probe into her reasons for becoming a beekeeper.  They spilled out like marbles from a pitcher, slow at first and then a flood, and before I knew it, I'd been invited to dinner.

Cara lives in Washington Heights, an hour's worth of sweaty, uphill bike ride away.  Until she got laid off few months ago, she worked as an English teacher in the Bronx.  Beekeeping came knocking at her door.  "Opportunity and whim collided," she remarked poetically.  That's how she talks, bon mots slipping off the tongue (she writes that way too).  The other part of her speech is hyper-colloquial, peppered with slang and cussin'.  She has a really easy way with words.

To learn beekeeping, she read a few books, went to a couple of meetings, and set up a hive at her parents' house in Connecticut.  She had a lot of spare time in the months she was jobless, and indulged her interests thoroughly, though she was often bored and frustrated.

Proving that life really is made of mysterious magic, right after she unloaded her story on me, she met a guy on the dance floor who hired her to work for the rest of the summer at Added Value, an urban teaching farm in Red Hook that generates an incredible amount of produce from a couple of inches of soil dumped on top of an old concrete basketball court.

Cara loves this job.  "I don't inspire fear in teenagers," she said, referring to her failings in the Bronx.  At Added Value, she, a few gardeners and local kids grow vegetables and sell them on a farmers market.  Cara spearheads the educational component to the kids' involvement, a grand way of saying that she gardens with them.  She's much more suited to encouragement than criticism, and loves messing around with the kids.

It's ironic that Cara's come around to education, given that she was kicked out of four high schools in one year, including public school.  After the last time, she was sent to reform school in Maine.  She escaped, roughed it south, sleeping outside, and was apprehended by the cops a few days later in Springfield, Massachusetts, "a shithole if I ever saw one."  The state sent her to Idaho, where she and a few other kids with attitude problems were bundled into a van, blindfolded, and driven several hours out into the wilderness.  "One of those tough love camps?" I asked.  "Uh, tougher," she responded.  "It was more like a here's-a-tarp-and-some-string, let's-see-which-one-of-you-shitheads-is-smirking-now type of a thing."

The school or treatment or whatever you want to call it cost $40,000, some of which was subsidized by the state if you weren't, like Cara, "from Connecticut."  She told this story between rips off the hugest bong I'd ever seen.  It looked like a spare part off a Transformer.

Eventually, Cara was diagnosed as manic-depressive.  It was a relief, finally having an explanation for her behavior and feelings.  Now she's taking Wellbutrin (bupropion), along with 20 million other Americans, which still makes it only the fourth-most prescribed antidepressant in the US.  She's also on Abilify (aripiprazole), an antipsychotic often used to control bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and manic-depression, Lexapro (escitalopran), a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor approved for the treatment of panic attacks and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and occasionally, Klonopin (clonazepam), for anxiety.

"Let's start cooking!" she said brightly.  She'd brought home a number of dirt-caked vegetables off the farm and started washing them, leaf by leaf, and chopping them slowly.  The cucumbers she cut roughly and dressed with garlic, basil and yogurt; the kale and one rogue broccoli leaf she chiffonaded broadly and rubbed with lemon juice, then let marinate.  She wilted collard greens in oil and garlic and topped them with black-eyed peas, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper.  Once the kale had been tenderized by the lemon juice ("cevichéd," Cara called it), she napped it with tahini, honey and lemon, and sprinkled the top with sunflower seeds.

The storm that had been looming all afternoon broke, thunderously.  "You know what you should do?" said Cara.  "Go sit in the red chair.  Trust me."  There was a studded ruby leather armchair next to an open window in the living room, and I settled into it.  The rain slapped the pavement in crumbling, shattering sheets.  Spray off the windowsill misted the leather.  Miserable people scampered past the fuzzy light off the corner bodega, their umbrellas blasted inside-out; pillows of rain foamed and puffed under the cast shed by that light.

James Baldwin lay among the bee books, a drum kit in the corner.  The room was cluttered and lived-in and comfortable, overstuffed with overstuffed armchairs, only some of which matched.  On the walls and tables were framed pictures of Cara goofing with her sisters, her best friends, her kind-smiling, rugby-playing, be-dreadlocked boyfriend, who tolerates both her manic and depressive episodes with an even-keeled patience and constant love that never cease to amaze her.  There was a collection of glass jars of various sizes and pottery hand-thrown by her sister.  The smell of humidity and cooking greens suffused the space and there was the tinny sound, laid over thunder and splattering rain, of Cara's iPod tinkling through the kitchen walls, sounding that most honest of playlists, shuffle.  It toggled between Billy Joel, sonatas and indie rock with an unemotional equanimity matched by Cara's matter-of-factness.  "I'm not ashamed of liking dorky music," she said.

She wafted in, laden with plates of food held by her sister's pottery, the iPod and holster dripping off her arm.  The rain persisted, and we ate quietly the warm, wet, earthy vegetables she'd prepared.  Flip-flops dangled off her dirty feet, and the strap of her salmon-colored tank top fell ingenuously off her brown shoulder.  We munched.  I studied her face.  Her teeth looked expensive, or lucky.  Her face was totally lucky, the cute snub nose and beautiful bone structure half hidden under a grubby Fidel cap.

She has a difficult relationship with medication.  It screws with her metabolism, ballooning her weight, and she hates feeling numb, so she's always tweaking the dosage, though underdoing it can lead to meltdown time. For a while she nixed the medication altogether: "I was so sick of being overanalyzed."  At the moment she's made her tenuous peace with it.

For dessert we had Ronnybrook chocolate milk in elegant wine glasses etched with the family monogram.  Cara's boyfriend Frank had come home in the meantime and we sipped the rich sweet milk, listening still to the whiplashing winds and water outside.  Cara reminisced about childhood in New Jersey and being a teenager in Connecticut, smiling sweetly at memories of hotboxing the underside of the fruit stand at which she worked with her best friend, occasionally dipping into the till for a $50 lark, the two of them entitled and insouciant, living in the moment as teenagers do.  Her honesty and brusqueness was disarming; Cara just tells things like they are.

Listening to her reminded me of a book I'd recently read, an excellent anthology of essays about every state in the union written by people from each place.  The New Jersey piece was a flippant fuck-off to the state hilariously narrated by Anthony Bourdain; the one on Connecticut, a moving story by a tangibly scarred Rick Moody, written in a state of tightly wound-up, sublimely controlled rage.  The last sentence related to a childhood neighbor he runs into as an adult.  September 11th has just happened and she's agitated and erratic.  "But no matter what she said what she seemed to mean was that she'd never gotten over Connecticut."  I thought about that phrase all 200 blocks home.
 Nathalie Jordi 2009-07-29T06:32:22+01:00 http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2009/07/everyone-complains-about-the-gentrifiers-even-the-gentrifiers-they-swan-in-raising-rents-they-call-the-cops-when-the.html Everyone complains about The Gentrifiers (even the Gentrifiers). They swan in, raising rents. They call the cops when the "atmosphere" that once made the neighborhood so appealing gets too loud. Eventually, they push the locals out to pastures farther away...
 Everyone complains about The Gentrifiers (even the Gentrifiers).  They swan in, raising rents.  They call the cops when the "atmosphere" that once made the neighborhood so appealing gets too loud.  Eventually, they push the locals out to pastures farther away and much less hip.  And Starbucks moves in.

People complain about The Corporations, too.  Soulless and bloodletting, they cut corners, screw their staff, extort their suppliers, destroy the environment, all in the name of profit.

And then there's The Government.  Stupid rules devoid of any common sense, insensitive officials, mired in bureaucracy.  Corrupt.  Disinterested.  Stagnant.

Thing is, the argument breaks down when you're confronted with one of the actual people in these groups.  Frustratingly, they're often really nice.  Well-intentioned.  Un-evil.  Ultimately, difficult to dismiss in such simplistic ways.

And I'm not just saying this because I'm a Gentrifier.

Steve is a Gentrifier, too.  The earthy brick wall of his studio apartment on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood once synonymous with destitution and squalor, was hung with contemporary photography; Brian Finke pieces of creepy cheerleaders, Roni Horn's face-making niece.  He had Pandora playing on the laptop, having ordered the Flaming Lips; it plaintively pursed out The Shins.  The fridge had word poetry stuck to the front and those round magnetic spice containers (I've had them too) hanging off the side.  Santa Maria Novella soaps (my favorite) and wind chimes from the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island adorned the bathroom.  In the corner was a clothes rack lined with perfectly ironed shirts, the sleeves of various button-downs pre-rolled to mid-forearm.  There was a platter of cheese and crackers laid out on the wooden nesting tables in the living room, and a bouquet of chrysanthemums on the side table.  The apartment was what the love child borne of a raucous threesome between Crate & Barrel, Ikea and Moss would look like, after a wild night at a wine bar.

Steve was sweating.  I had, to his great misfortune, arrived more or less on time, and although preparations for dinner were well underway, there was still a lot left to accomplish.  He had carefully planned an elaborate Italian menu that would involve a number of the ingredients with which he'd recently returned from Italy: oil from Volpetti, in the "Brooklyn" of Rome; pasta di semola di grano duro, extruded through bronze dies and dried slowly at a low temperature; six bottles of Chianti; and his prize tub of truffle salt, so aromatic that he had to quarantine it in Tupperware lest its odors contaminate the food beside.  He bought so much food on his trip to Italy that he had to pit-stop in the Rome post office and ship things home.  The box was so unwieldy it had to be repackaged in Jersey City.  Steve knows a good thing when he sees one, and wasn't about to waste his chances in Italy.

So much the better for me.  As I kicked off my flip-flops and sprawled out on the plushy blue couch, Steve, whipped up in a culinary lather, prepared for a feast: a ring of toasted bread seasoned with oil, Parmesan and truffle salt, asparagus with polenta, Taleggio and truffle salt, pasta with porcini, onions, butter, sage, and truffle salt, and Danish Ebelskiver, which will later be explained.

"I'm not very good at multitasking," he apologized.  He was a great cook, but paying attention to the process and carrying on a conversation were slightly beyond his capabilities, and talking to me was really stressing him out.  His coping strategy was to ask me questions in order to buy time during which he could baste, taste or season, as I babbled on to an audience of one (myself).  He was trying so hard to put a good meal on that this was actually rather endearing.  I was so comfortable on his couch anyway, drinking wine and nibbling at the cheese, that I would have been happy enough talking to myself all night.

He anointed the bread with oil, Parmesan and truffle salt, and slid it tenderly into the broiler under the stove.  Mere seconds later, a smell of burning suffused the room.  "Oh, shit," Steve said.  The far end of the bread had erupted into tiny flames. Most of it was salvageable, and in fact, really delicious; moist and toasty, with the excellent pure flavors of good oil, great cheese and that subtle stink of truffle.

 Steve barely ate any bread; he was busy preparing the next course, adding Taleggio and truffle salt to the polenta.  He poured in some Ronnybrook milk to finish the dish.  "Oh, shit," he said again.  "I think it's gone sour.  Smell this."  It had, but only mildly.  That, too, was delicious.  He served it, beautifully plated, alongside grilled asparagus and pasta with porcini in a butter-sage sauce.

Wiping his brow, Steve finally sat down.  In an apartment in which such attention had been paid to detail, we were eating on the couch with our plates on our knees, drinking Pellegrino out of coffee mugs.  This in no way affected the ambiance, which was totally refined.  Our stance defused tension; the couch was comfortable and we luxuriated in our plates.  The food really was terrific.

Seated, Steve finally relaxed.  He asked me a lot of questions, some of which I'd already answered while he was furiously cooking.  But I know Steve is a good listener.  When I asked him where in the neighborhood he liked to eat, he named a few places and then mentioned the Dumpling House on Eldridge Street.  "Remember when we met for, like, three minutes, in 2007?" he said.  "You told me about that place."  He was considerate and interested, thoughtful and well-read.  He had a finger on the pulse, too, and I'm not just saying that because he'd just attended a Michael Jackson-themed wine tasting at Astor Wines.
Steve came to New York in 2001, after a childhood spent in the 'burbs of Philly and college (a fiction major) outside Chicago (his parents now live in an over-55 community next to Jon Stewart's parents).  Upon graduating, he bagged an internship at Frommer's, the guidebook company, and has since worked his way up to an editorship; today, he works on the Napa and San Francisco Day-By-Day guides, as well as Frommer's Tokyo, India and Florida.  "A good guidebook contains the stuff you tell your friends," he says.  "A good guidebook offers a point of view."  He loves what he does and the perks his job offers, mainly travel beyond Hoboken, where Frommer's is located.  He speaks intelligently and forthrightly, his serious black glasses a counterpoint to rosy cheeks and a baby face.

"For dessert, I'm making Edelskivers," said Steve. Edelskivers are round Danish pancakes, kind of like puffy baked dumplings, and Steve had recently gotten an Edelskiver-maker as a present from Williams-Sonoma.  It looks like a frying pan crossbred with an escargot dish; in other words, a round nonstick surface pocked with eight divots that serve as batter molds.  "I'm inspired by Shopsin's postmodern pancakes, made with bits of old pancake, and the desserts at the Momofuku Milk Bar.  So I'm going to make a couple with Nutella, some with a ricotta-lemon-vanilla filling, and some stuffed with bits of frozen red velvet Magnolia cupcakes."

I ran downstairs to the corner store and bought more milk to replace the soured Ronnybrook.  There was a movie being shot on Ludlow St., and clusters of the self-important crowded the streets.  When I got back upstairs, Steve had blended powdered Ebelskiver mix (also from Williams-Sonoma) with butter, egg yolks and wasted no time in adding the milk I'd brought.  He handed me a few egg whites in a bowl and one of those wandlike handheld latte milk frothers that you suspect is used more often as a sex toy than a milk frother.  Still, it was surprisingly effective at foaming the egg whites, which Steve added to the mix.  He poured a tablespoon of batter into each of the divots in the hot Ebelskiver pan, where they set almost immediately.  He then placed the various toppings he'd prepared on top, and covered them in more batter.  To flip the pancakes, Steve used a pair of curvy wooden Ebelskiver tongs, like anemic but elegant salad servers.  "I don't really need these, it turns out," he said.  "On the instructional video, they just used chopsticks and it worked fine."  The Ebelskiver were wonderful, hot and airy, like a stuffed cake donut hole.  I was so full I could barely finish.

When I left Steve's apartment, the movie shoot downstairs was still rolling and brilliant artificial lights flooded Ludlow Street.  The Jews, the Poles, the Italians, the Chinese, the ghosts of inhabitants past; they were nowhere to be seen.  I unlocked my bike and rode over to Clinton, across Houston Street.  Made a right on 4th, crossed Avenue C, and unlocked the door to my own gentrification.
 Nathalie Jordi 2009-07-14T22:55:13+01:00 Inspector Collector http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2009/07/inspector-collector.html My mother thinks I'm the biggest pack rat in the universe, and she hates it. I can't really blame her. My peripatetic existence ensures the accumulation of crap from all over the world, and whenever I move, I ship anything...
My mother thinks I'm the biggest pack rat in the universe, and she hates it.  I can't really blame her.  My peripatetic existence ensures the accumulation of crap from all over the world, and whenever I move, I ship anything I can't carry in a suitcase to Miami, where it piles up in my childhood bedroom, and, increasingly, into other parts of the house.  Maman is always threatening a massive purge, even though she knows my soul might actually implode if she went through with this.

What do I collect?  Sunglasses.  Playing cards I find on the street.  Dolls from different countries; soaps labeled in foreign languages.  Coins, in particular pennies from every year of my life.  Antique postcards.  Airplane boarding cards and train tickets.  Menus.  Over four hundred cookbooks, particularly on the following subjects: the Savoie, Appalachia and the wider South, self-published cookbooks, community cookbooks, books on English cooking, and domestic economy manuals.  I need a spreadsheet to manage them; they live in caches in France, New York and Miami.  And then there are my Crap Boxes.  Every year, memorabilia I can't bear to throw out gets stuffed into big boxes labeled Crap Box 1, 2, 3, etc.  My mother really hates those, especially when they start to smell. What can I say?  These things matter.

Harley was waiting outside in the rain for me as I gingerly crossed a puddle-spattered sidewalk in Queens.  He wasn't waiting, really.  He was scrutinizing the peach tree above his head, which this year has about two buds on it.  "Last year, we got hundreds of peaches," he said, shaking his head sorrowfully as big gloppy raindrops fell on our upturned cheeks.  "Well, come on in."

The foyer to his studio-workspace, a slightly grandiose description of the hallway, was plastered with maps, shoes and umbrellas.  Upstairs was an airy space decorated with a comfortable disarray of books, baby toys and artwork.  Harley's wife Micki, an artist who teaches design at Parsons, was bathing their baby Hiro, the most beautiful, wise-looking nine-month old I'd ever seen.  Micki's pretty, petite with a broad smile and capable hands.  There was a large sign leaned up against a desk advertising five-dollar fortunes with on it a clumsily drawn picture of a gypsy, and, against the wall, a sculpture, made with books, of a building; some of Micki's other sculpture/book works reside in the Brooklyn Public Library and can actually be checked out.

When we'd emailed about dinner, Harley had written, "I have created a couple of 'Chinese' dishes, including duck liver with yellow chive, and shrimp Jim Beam."  Interesting, I thought.  I read on.  "I know a handful of authentic recipes from Ding Hey, a small island in the Zhoushan archipelago.  I also have been experimenting with "bagel dumplings" – Chinese style dumplings with cream cheese and lox filling."

Who was this guy??

Harley had decided, in the end, to make John Pin's stewed chicken wings.  "John Pin is our kitchen god," he said.  "Literally.  See his picture on top of the stove?"  There's a blurry black-and-white picture of a man tending a barbecue.  Harley went to summer camp with his kids, one of whom calls later that night.  "But I couldn't get chicken wings, so I bought thighs." Harley's not a man who flusters easily.  Recipes are for chumps, as far as he's concerned.

He'd bought the makings of dinner at a Chinese market nearby, which serves the local Italian, Irish, Chinese and Hispanic community.  "The Chinese guys all speak Spanish," said Harley.  "Kinda surreal."  His ingredients were attractively and meticulously laid out on the table, mostly prepped already, in bowls: chicken thighs, rice, taro root, nubby 'grey' zucchini, a bunch of glistening watercress, a mound of bean sprouts, a few scapes left over from a last-week jaunt to the Greenmarket, chorizo-like Chinese dried sausages, corn kernels scraped off the cob, carrots, even a few peapods from the garden, and Fu Yi (fermented tofu) in a tub.  "When I got here, those vegetable piles on the street [in Chinatown] were a mystery to me," said Harley.  "Now I know every one of them.  I can say half of them in Chinese.  I've cooked them all."

Jocular, with a halo of frizzy gray hair that bobbed when he laughed, which was often, Harley popped open a few beers before he touched the food.  He started by peeling taro root and dicing it, then popped the cubes into a rice cooker and poured rice and water on top.  "My mother was a Brooklyn Jew, and Sunday-night Chinese food and a movie was a standby growing up.  Chow mein and a movie, what a classic."  When he moved to New York, however, he began to frequent Chinatown, the easiest route to good, cheap food and a full stomach, and has gone back several times a week for twenty-five years.  Now, everyone there knows him. ("Haw-lee!  Haaaw-lee!!")

Harley snipped watercress with scissors and peeled ginger with a spoon.  He chopped garlic and sliced spring onions and mashed Fu Yi, the fermented bean curd, in a bowl.  I was so absorbed by what he was saying that I barely paid attention to his motions.  Until he picked up a pot lid by the champagne cork he'd wedged under its handle, so it was manageable even when hot.  It was a brilliant kitchen trick I'd never seen before.  "Oh, Marcella Hazan taught us that," said Harley.  "When she came to town, she wanted Chinese food, so Bill Grimes called and asked me to take her around."  Seriously?  "She scrutinized the dumplings.  I mean, dough is essentially pasta, right?"

In 1981, Harley, who grew up in Buffalo, moved to New York City to work at the Jewish Museum.  His starting salary was $9,200, but one of the perks was a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side, which for several decades housed his accumulation of odd things, the number of which has since climbed to a precipitous 80 or so individual collections.  "Wow!"  I said.  "You should be in the New Yorker!"

"Oh, he is," said Micki.  I was beginning to see why.

Harley's collections include—follow me closely now—mutilated money, beer bottle caps from beers he's drunk since the age of twenty, and stickers that come off fruit. The "Heavy" tags put by airlines on overweight suitcases, and the labels you find in your suitcase when some government inspects it.  140 pieces of used professional hockey equipment. Sugar packets from the 1950-70s.  Collectible football cards, particularly from players with funny names.  Pencils, paperclips, thumbtacks.  Safety caps, like the ones that seal milk cartons.  Fortune-teller hand bills.  New York City Metrocards and tokens. Information about water, crabs, mustard and hair.  8,000 graffiti stickers, including one from Justin Pulitzer ("Most graffiti artists are white dudes").  Toy boats and tape.  Matchbooks with maps on them. Rubber bands and chewing gum.  Toothpicks and keychain bottle openers.  Yarmulkes (46), seeds from unusual fruit (12), and salt.  "Not too many people are salt nerds," Harley said.  Then he gave me a bag of salt from Saltville, Virginia, to take home.

There's more.  Over 300 pieces of Mr. T memorabilia, including a picture of Harley and Mr. T on the Jimmy Kimmel show.  Hundreds of crappy scissors, the kind that hurt your hinds, including one with nine blades for shredding ("I don't usually spend more than $1 on a crappy scissors, and that one cost $8, but if you calculate by blade, it's a good deal.  Though it doesn't cut.").  2000 shopping lists found in supermarkets.  6,000 keys.  Straws.  Autographs.  Spoons, especially white plastic ones; that collection was once featured in the Smithsonian, next to a Tiffany sterling silver ice cream saw, used for Baked Alaskas.  (Incidentally, a bookstore at which I used to work once also featured Harley's plastic spoon collection in their window, too, though that has nothing to do with how I met him).

And then there's Harley's Chinese menu collection, the most famous of them all, which has grown to over 10,000. The collection, all forty linear feet of it, has gotten him on Geraldo, CNN Headline News, and into the New York Times eight times, as well as, obviously, into the Guinness Book of World Records.  "I once went to Caracas to integrate the menus into the Chinese collection of the art museum there," he remembers.  "I matched them with colors—blue menus with Ming vases, green ones with the jade."  He's got menus from all fifty states, as well as 3 linear feet of menus from other countries.  He also collects the "No Menu" signs that people put on their door to keep the junk mail out.  His favorite says "No Menus – No Nothing – No No No!" Another claims that leaving menus will result in an "Official $50 Fine."

In essence, Harley's collections are portable histories, time capsules.  Take his record player tone arm collection.  When Walkmans came into use, New Yorkers threw their record players out.  Harley couldn't fit too many whole record players into his 280-square-foot apartment, stuffed as it already was with the rest of his collections, so he simply started accumulating tone arms.  "Somewhere in New York, someone who collects record players off the street is really pissed at me."

 Maybe one man's trash is another man's treasure, but honestly?  Tone arms?  What's the point of accumulating trash?  Well, there is one.  Harley's collections are a diary of his life and a short, focused look at particular families of objects, the more specific, the better: football player collectible cards, but only those with funny names (D'Brickashaw Ferguson, Darnell Bing, Plaxico Burres); matchbooks, but only those with maps on them; spoons, if white and made of plastic.  "You're like a whole Dewey Decimal System," a friend said once about Harley.  Of his exhibit of Chinese menus at the Franklin Furnace, the New Yorker, in a 1991 'Talk of the Town' wrote, "'A Million Menus' may actually shed more light on [Harley's] unusual energies than on the history of Chinese food in America."

One wonders where this relentless drive to hoard comes from.  In kindergarten, Harley's teacher once wrote home, "We always enjoy what Harley brings for Show and Tell."  Harley's turned his obsession into a career, but ultimately, it's about more than the menus.  "It's not about your stuff," he said.  "It's what you KNOW about your stuff.  I do not love the menus proper.  There are some that I have not even read thoroughly.  I continue to save menus because they connect me with people. That's the heart of the matter."

Micki collects nothing, but she's really funny.  Of the taste of the ducks that hang in Chinatown restaurant windows, she said, "They taste like walking across the Manhattan Bridge."  Oddly, she's right.  There's an electricity between them that I love to see, middle-aged people really hot for each other.  They're kissy, they touch comfortably, and they look at each other with a fondness that could melt steel.  "He's the sensitive part of this couple," she clarifies wryly.

At about ten o'clock, we ate.  As I'd been scribbling and drinking beer, Harley, chatting casually all the while, had managed to churn out a stunning smorgasbord of small, glistening plates: spicy gray zucchini, Brussels sprouts and garlic in peanut oil, watercress soaked in Fu Yi, a bean sprout stir-fry with scapes, sausage, corn, mushrooms, peapods and hot pepper, rice cooked with softened taro root, stir-fried beef with tomatoes, tossed in Harley's seasoned, twenty-year-old wok, and the pièce de resistance, John Pin's stewed chicken wings, made with ginger, star anise, peanut oil, Yeo's hot chili sauce, oyster sauce, and drumsticks.  This dish rocked.  Micki packed me leftovers in little plastic containers, which I ate the next day; they were even better cold.  For dessert, Harley whipped out an apple corer and clove two apples.  They were crisp and refreshing after the syrupy, spicy meal.

After dinner, Harley took me downstairs to the Museum of Choking Hazards, where his collections live.  Given their scope, they take up a surprisingly small amount of space, organized and laid away in Container Store boxes.  He foraged for the nine-bladed scissors and the picture of him with Mr. T.  He showed me the graffiti stickers and the toy boats and the paperclips.  But the room left a muted, dusty memory.  The collections had been most alive to me when Harley had been talking impassionedly about them upstairs, elbow-deep in Chinese pickles.

"I haven't really 'made it,'" he said, and that's when he looked sad.  "My career hasn't taken off in any meaningful way."  But I looked around at his quirky apartment, his boxes of memorabilia, his cool wife, his beautiful child, the laugh lines around his eyes, and I didn't really believe him.
 Nathalie Jordi 2009-07-09T00:38:20+01:00 Miss Dance Michigan 2005 http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2009/06/miss-dance-michigan-2005.html The Fordham University dorm on 60th Street and 10th Avenue, a tall, beige brick building with a beveled façade, is known, by those on an inside track, as the cheapest hotel in New York City. Fordham, a Jesuit school, requires...
 The Fordham University dorm on 60th Street and 10th Avenue, a tall, beige brick building with a beveled façade, is known, by those on an inside track, as the cheapest hotel in New York City.  Fordham, a Jesuit school, requires visitors to sign in when they arrive, and guests of the opposite sex must leave their host or hostess by 3 o'clock in the morning.  Flouting this conscription incurs a $15 fee—which apparently fazes very few people.

When I arrived, which was way before 3 a.m., the security guard was giving a pizza delivery boy a hard time.  "Can't go up," he said, iguana-faced, imperturbable.  "She must come down.  Call her."  As the pizza boy rooted around for the number, the security guard sniffed his blue insulated satchel, on the desk.  "What kind of pizza, that?" he asked.  "Personal," said the pizza boy.  The security guard reached in and opened the box.    A tiny cheese pizza lay inside, cooling rapidly.  "I want one of those," he said, his nose up close, nostrils cocked, sniffing instinctually.  "Get me one of those paaarcel pizzas."  He sat back, hands clasped on belly, and cracked a small reptilian smile.

When Lara tripped out of the elevator to meet me, his smile turned into a beam and his eyes turned beady.  "Hel-looo," he said, his voice a different register.  He made an elaborate show of screening my driver's license and getting Lara to write my details down.  His eyes followed her all the way back to the elevator.

What is it about dancers that makes them so immediately recognizable, so easy to peg?  They walk like tall people, even when they're not.  Their chin line, never less than perpendicular to their neck, acts as a fo'c'sle to which their face is the figurehead.  They veritably sail through life, led by that figurehead, the rest of their bodies streamlined, responding to stimuli by moving like the flaps on the wings of aeroplanes.

So it was with Lara.  Compact, purring, powerful, she was a little Porsche embodied, revving and smooth.  Looking at our reflection in the elevator door made me feel like a Toyota Previa.  From the '90s.  Like the kind my mom drove, but with more bumper stickers in the back and maybe some fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror.

Lara, a newly graduated dance major from a suburb of Detroit, lives with Sarah, an aspiring forensic anthropologist, and Ariane, who studies graphic design and TV.  The door to their dorm apartment had handmade paper cutouts of their names pasted on it.  That was it, as far as flair.  The apartment, a temporary living situation, was otherwise marked by an almost total absence of character.  There was a television on as background music, and a few pieces of basic living-room furniture that I recognized as standard dorm fare, built with rounded edges to better protect the heads of falling-down-drunk post-adolescents.  The fabric on the sofa was the color of stains, to better hide them.  So was the color of the carpet.  Everything about it reminded me of my own time in college; the stale-beer-and-doctor's-office smell of the hallway, the big void of the future, terrifying in its infinite capacity, and slouching on the couch, wearing sweatpants rolled at the waist.

Lara, pulling her hair back into a perky, utilitarian ponytail, perched on one of the short-bus chairs and consulted the internet.  "I'm going to make a herbed summer squash and potato torte," she declared.  She took a potato and cut the eyes out with a blunt knife, carefully.  Then she cut it into slices, one by one by one.  She sliced a squash, too, and then pirouetted into the kitchen and came back out with a cake tin.  She layered the potato and squash onto the nonstick surface and sprinkled chopped spring onion and thyme leaves, carefully picked off the sprig, on top.  Even though she was using real food, it sort of felt like play-acting.  I think it's because she's a dancer.  The food was just another tool for movement.  The scent off the spring onions was incredibly strong.

She popped open a Bluepoint Blueberry Ale and swigged, then mixed flour with grated pecorino from a tub.  She scattered this over the cake tin and drizzled it with oil, then fanned potatoes and squash on top.  Sarah, her face illuminated by the purple Mac on her lap, texted away on her phone, absently watching the flickering television.

Students on a Fordham meal plan often "shop" in the cafeteria, Lara explained.  The points on their swipe card net them chicken breasts or pints of milk, which they then transform in their dormitory kitchens.  A few months ago, Lara even made yogurt in her dorm room, under a lamp with a hot bulb, using old yogurt.  She was a vegetarian for a year, but has switched back.  Why?  In a word: "Thanksgiving."

She had a comfortable sense of hygge, a word I came across in Denmark that refers to the creation of a cozy, warm and stress-free environment (similar to the German Gemütlichkeit).  Instead of turning on the soul-sucking fluorescent light in the common room, she went into her room and fetched a three-headed lamp with warm yellow light that she angled strategically, to everyone's advantage.  I like when people make that kind of effort.  "I'm serving you a small piece," she said as she cut the torte, "but you can have more if you want."  We all did.  The potatoes, yielding softly, were perfectly cooked, and the grated cheese offered a piquant contrast.

Lara, a dance major and women's studies minor with a predilection for math, recently presented her senior thesis, a 30-minute choreographed piece on hysteria that involved ten dancers in unisex, institutional-looking costumes, spoken verse, and music from a 19th-century female composer as well as a guy from the University of Michigan.  The promotional postcard, beautifully typographed, had on it an Antonin Artaud quote and an etched image from the archives of the Salpetrière, a notorious Parisian hospital/asylum through which thousands of hysterics streamed at the height of the craze.  "Women weren't allowed to express themselves in the 19th century, when hysteria was at its peak," Lara explained.  "The advent of modern dance coincided with the drop-off in hysteria, and I wanted to explore the potential connection."  The background on her laptop was a close-up of a buxom pin-up, and she wove past it into Facebook to show me a clip of the piece, performed in a huge open studio on 55th and 9th, with offices and apartment windows visible behind the dancers.  To consult the computer, she bent at the waist, a first position cambré, instead of slouching.

 She stayed in the same position, bent at a 90° angle as if this was the most natural thing in the world, while she drew me a map of the contemporary dance world.  I could see the map take shape in her brain as she scribbled it into my notebook with a decisive, neat hand.  Concert on one side, commercial on the other, with subcategories like "contemporary/avant-garde/emerging" and "music videos" branching out underneath.

"I came to New York because I wanted to"—her eyes narrowed—"make it?"  Most of Lara's sentences end with a question mark.   This summer, she's working in a yoga studio and for a dance company in exchange for classes.  She'll be living at the dorm, where she's an R.A. and has, for New York, lots of space.  But she knows where she wants to be and what she needs to do to get there.

Miss Dance Michigan 2005 looks innocent, but she seemed to me rather wise beyond her years.  Her insouciance is just a mannerism; underlaid with a depth that's subtle, calm and elegant.  She popped ice cubes out of a tray and dropped them in some water.  It was then that she was at her loveliest.
 Nathalie Jordi 2009-06-24T06:36:28+01:00 Hep You Help Me http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2009/05/hep-you-help-me.html It's been said that everything in the world exists at least once in New York City. And as any resourceful New Yorker knows, those looking for the world will find it on Craigslist. So after an extremely dispiriting first day...
 It's been said that everything in the world exists at least once in New York City.  And as any resourceful New Yorker knows, those looking for the world will find it on Craigslist.  So after an extremely dispiriting first day in the city, during which I scoured bike shops from the Upper West to the Lower East and found nothing decent for less than $600, I knew what to do.  Within hours, a sketchball from New Jersey showed up at my door with a perfectly functional twelve-gear drop-bar black Raleigh and sold it to me for $200 cash.  He told me I was pretty and threw a padlock into the deal.  That's it, I thought.  I'm never doing any other kind of shopping.

What else is on Craigslist?  Well, this week, a posting for a missing Siberian Husky, a job offer directed at Laundromat attendants, an ad for a $25 poker table and a Joana Leunis Latin Dance DVD, someone willing to trade an Australian lobster farm for property in Florida, someone else seeking Goth models, a man interested in meeting lactating women, and 40 million other titillating propositions.

And last week, the following:

Hep you help me

Life has been nothing but surviving the big city - 10 hours a day 9-to-5 job and Chinese takeouts.

It is good, but certainly nothing I would have said, "this is what I want to be when I grow up" when I was 10.

So, here I am, trying to see if there is anything I can do for this world.

I don't have special skills or much time, but I'd like to see if there is anything I can help - one good deed a week.

Please drop me a note if you have anything needed a hand.  I will do my best if I can help.

I'd like to be part of the solutio and hope this will also make a difference to my own life.

Location: manhattan
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

I liked the unaffectedness of the language and the whimsy and optimism of the writer.  So I invited myself to dinner.  "Call me when you get out of there," ordered my sister.  "They caught the latest Craigslist killer, but who knows?"

"I don't cook much," said Dana, the tiny Taiwanese woman who opened the door to a one-bedroom on Lexington and 65th lined with small homemade abstract paintings and a six-foot television.  Despite this statement, she'd planned on making pork dumplings from scratch.  She opened the spice cupboard and the door came off the hinge with a crack.  "Whoops.  See?"   She pulled a chair into the hallway off the tiny galley and I sat on it, blocking the front door.  I watched her coarsely chop cabbage, which she then fed into a small food processor and spun until it was the size of pencil shavings.  She used a plastic knife to scoop it out.

A tomato-red rice cooker perched on top of the fridge, which was plastered with a postcard from the Costa Brava, magnets representing Pittsburgh, Montana and southern California, and a letter from an Ecuadorian kid Dana sponsors thanking her for a recent donation.  On the counter were grapes, reduced-fat Pringles and Tostitos Chunky Salsa; on the wall, a Kandinsky calendar.  I caught a glimpse of a few cookbooks behind a cupboard door: one from the Sivanada Yoga Vedanta Center, InStyle Parties, Betty Crocker's Good and Easy, and Rachael Ray's 30 Minute Meals 2.

Dumplings are one of the only things that Dana knows to make.  Every Chinese New Year, her 99-year-old grandmother gathers her six children and their families around to make dumplings into silver dollar shapes all night in Taipei.   Dumplings, then, are the one dish for which Dana needs no recipe.  Otherwise, well…"Let's just say my takeout menus used to be organized by nationality."

She'd gone down to Chinatown on her lunch break for supplies. Usually, pork dumplings, the fairly involved dish she had decided to cook, require Napa cabbage, but in the interest of time, Dana grabbed the first cabbage she saw.  Before and after lunch, she works in information technology at Crédit Suisse in midtown.  Before the job at Crédit Suisse, Dana worked at IBM, lived in upstate New York, Pittsburgh and Taipei, where she studied English literature.  "Big cities are home to me," she said. "I grew up in one.  But I don't like the person I become when I go back to Taiwan.  I like myself better in New York City."

New York allows Dana to be herself: inquisitive, creative, independent.  The day I met her, she was wearing head-to-toe denim and a braided leather belt.  No jewelry, other than a silver watch, her mesmerizing hands and a really honest expression on her face.  It said: "A complete stranger, over to dinner?  Well, why not?!"

We talked about her Craigslist posting as she eviscerated the cabbage.  The first person to respond thanked her for it and said they'd be in touch when they next needed a favor.  The second person to write was me.  The third asked for sex.  The fourth asked for money.  The fifth wanted a job…and a Social Security number.

Craigslist has treated Dana better in the past.  She met a study buddy at Starbucks for over two years; he pored over medical textbooks while she caught up on novels and biographies. "I love to read, but I never make the time," she said.  She's thinking about posting for a subway buddy, someone with whom to ride on the subway and read.  She's also had a tea buddy, a drinking buddy, a walking buddy, various email buddies, and a buddy who exposed himself to her soon after they met.  They didn't meet again. "I'm not crazy!" she said.  But she generally believes in people's good nature, the infinite possibilities of the world-at-large to provide her with amusement, and counts some of the people she's met as real friends.
Soon afterwards, Dana's real friend Vickie arrived.  Vickie's even tinier than Dana, also Taiwanese, and works in risk assessment for American Express.

Dana salted the shredded cabbage and piled it high on a tea-towel, then balled up the towel and wrung it to squeeze out excess liquid.  Meanwhile, Vickie whizzed ginger very finely, until it was the size of sawdust, and strained it of liquid too.  Then she chopped a few spring onions.  The ground pork went into a Teflon pan, the biggest receptacle in the kitchen, and Dana poured soy sauce, sesame oil, and, once the sesame oil ran out, olive oil on top.  She stirred the pork with chopsticks.  "You do it 200 times until the meat gets stringy," she said.  "I put black pepper in there too.  It's not traditional, but even my parents do it."

Her mother's a primary school teacher and her father manages a textile factory, or rather, a factory that produces thread.  "So for them, life's fairly black and white."  Her parents are purists when it comes to dumplings.  Her father always microwaves a chunk of the meat mixture to test the seasoning before the dumplings are formed, and there's no question of adding raw egg to the raw pork, as Vickie does; the two are separately cooked.

For Dana, nothing's black and white about life.   She seeks, she hopes, she doubts and seeks further.  She asked me as many questions as I asked her.  She walks around, she volunteers.  Once a week she heads to Brooklyn to walk homeless dogs, and on Tuesdays she spends time at a computer center helping senior citizens with new technology.  When she bought the colossal television overwhelming her living room, she threw a Come-See-My-Big-Ass-TV-Party and the seniors all came over to play on the Wii.  For someone so fascinated by things and people, New York is a limitless playground.  Living in a city has plenty of downsides, but Dana maximizes her use of its resources, makes its infinity fun.   It's easy to mistake her unfazeable smileyness as naïveté, but Dana's curiosity about the world's warts is underpinned by a willingness to accept them.  And she is always thinking.

The ginger, spring onions and cabbage went in with the ground meat and we carried the Teflon pan into the living room to make the dumplings.   Vickie dumped a spoonful of flour into a fingerbowl of water.  "What are you doing?" Dana said, incredulous.  "My parents always add flour to the water," Vickie said.  "I have no idea why."  We mounded little piles of meat onto Twin Marquis dumpling wrappers ("We should've made the dough from scratch, it has a better texture that way, but if you're going to buy wrappers, I recommend Twin Marquis"), dipped our fingers into the fingerbowl, and traced a wet circle around the edges of the wrapper.  At this point their skillful fingers left me in the dust as they pinched and crimped and expertly folded the dumplings into little purses that sat upright in a self-contented dusting of flour and taut sides.  I made one dumpling to their every four and mine looked like excess wet drywall ornamented by unappetizing boogers of raw pork.

Dana boiled water while Vickie, the faster of the two, finished forming the last forty dumplings in the length of time it took to heat the water.  Once it bubbled, Dana added dumplings in vast handfuls.  Dana's hands were amazing—expressive, gentle, vibrating with warmth and capability.  I couldn't stop watching them move.  Her mouth, too, was irrepressible and charming.  She waited until the water came back up to the boil and added a cupful in cold water.  "Once the water's boiled three times, the dumplings are cooked," she said.

Dana piled the steaming dumplings into a bowl and sat it in the middle of the dining room table.  We each had two bowls before us, one for the dumpling and a smaller one for dipping sauce, which we each made by mixing soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil and a slightly hot Chinese barbecue sauce.  Slippery skin yielded to tender, well-seasoned pork moist with boiling liquid.  With this we drank cava the color (and flavor) of pink lemonade.

I ate about thirty dumplings, even though my dubious sleight of hand with chopsticks made it difficult not to wear the dipping sauce.  Once cooked, it was hard to tell which had been the pretty ones, but I suspect the ones that exploded in the pot had been mine.  "Don't worry," said Dana.  "They still taste good."

Later, when the cava had mostly been drunk, Dana disappeared back into the kitchen.  She came out a few minutes later with bowls of the dumpling boiling liquid, to which two sachets of Knorr hot and sour soup mixes had been added.  She'd also cracked in two raw beaten eggs, which dissolved immediately into Silly String.  I couldn't finish my soup.  The dumplings I had eaten had reassembled into one Giant Dumpling in my stomach, which refused to allow the penetration of anything else.

I headed home on my Craigslist bike, dodging potholes as the Major Dumpling sloshed around, thinking about how honest and easy conversation had been.  Cities are funny.  People value their private space, and boy do I understand that, but over a year of my living in a rural place renowned for friendliness hadn't managed to pierce a veneer that shattered as soon as I walked into Dana's apartment my first week back in the city.

Next I want to try the dish that Vickie brings to office potlucks, the one with chicken wings, soy sauce, sugar, hot chilli and Classic Coke.  I'm not a stranger anymore, right?

 Nathalie Jordi 2009-05-28T19:09:37+01:00 Late Nights in Hell's Kitchen http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2008/03/late-nights-in.html New York's world of night owls is dark and habitually drunken. From Battery Park to Harlem, from Bed-Stuy to Hell's Kitchen, those who dock their togs after two a.m. or later don't have bed on the mind, at least not...

New York's world of night owls is dark and habitually drunken. From Battery Park to Harlem, from Bed-Stuy to Hell's Kitchen, those who dock their togs after two a.m. or later don't have bed on the mind, at least not immediately. It's not our fault that the B train stops running at nine o'clock, and if that's how the MTA's going to be, well, why not just stop for a nightcap on the way home?

If midtown Manhattan is one of the world's power centers, the Time Warner Center is surely one of its most commanding foci. Yes, it's a mall. Get over it already. Betwixt Hugo Boss and Barnes & Noble live three of the best restaurants in the world. Southampton Sarah mans the line at one of them.

On a night when we both clock out reasonably early, just after midnight, I meet her at a bar in upper midtown. She's already enjoying her second Stella with an international posse of equally battle-battered colleagues, who are busy vehemently drinking their own pints. The restaurant staff where Sarah works is probably as global as its business clientele—the line hears snatches of French, German, British, Hebrew and that funny Swiss accent, at once clipped and barbaric; the plongeurs mostly speak Spanish. The waiters, as they are all over New York, are from small towns in Ohio, military towns in Virginia, farm towns in east Washington State—places where having moved to New York means having made it, no matter what you end up doing there.

Sarah was actually born in Yorkshire, but spent most of her life in Southampton, Salisbury, Titchfield, Winchester, and "two and a half years getting completely wasted in London." This understates her undertakings in all of those other places; until fairly recently, wherever Sarah went, she usually spent her time completely wasted. Her dad died when she was thirteen, and she dropped out at sixteen to work at a burger joint in Salisbury. Counting forward, she reckons she was "in a haze" for about ten years. "Hey, it made me the person I am today. And most of my jobs let me get away with it." Even if showing up an hour late at the Whykam arms in Winchester wasn't a huge issue, Sarah's modus operandi didn't always fly. At the Kingsway Hall Hotel, a five-star in London, Sarah "didn't get on" with the chef. "He bawled me out after I did seven straight days for him, in front of all the staff." She puts on a vulgar yawp: "I never want to see your fucking face again!" At the Cheshire Cheese on Fleet St., she also "fell out with" the manager. "I probably won't tell you why."

 "Your brain's gonna fall out when you're forty," I tell her, jokingly. "It already has!" she laughs, endearingly irrepressible and ebullient. "I'm completely fruit looped."

 Drugs are funny. "Funny" is a word a conscientious writer might avoid using to describe drugs—personally, I prefer "fun"—but I say that because my life has never devolved into serious teetering on any actual brink. Something about Sarah's melancholy grip on the bottle, though, makes me think of a Believer story that recently moved me to tears on the subway, about this fucked-up guy recounting his fucked-up childhood. "It was just like Warhol's factory in New York," he said of a crackhouse he used to live in, "except it was on the North Side of Chicago, the drugs were cheaper, and nobody was ever going to be famous." Drugs, in the long term, are only really fun if you end up Andy Warhol—or get over them.

 After Fleet Street, Sarah went to Dubai, to work as chef de partie at the Royal Meridien. Why not? It was there, and different. But she was the only girl in the kitchen, "and it wasn't very nice. The other cooks would hide my equipment—they didn't think women were supposed to be in the kitchen. It's competitive in there." There's a reason it's called a brigade; kitchens like that are regimented as armies. With help from the "odd little bit" of Gray Goose in the mornings, though, Sarah made it through. "I will never work there again."

 When the big-bosomed, world-weary, sandpaper-voiced woman tending our bar wipes the taps with a final wet swish, we graduate to another, seedier bar down the street. "You left a tip, right?" Sarah asks as we leave. She needn't have. There's an understanding among those in hospitality that leaving less than 20% is criminal, bad karma, not done. That chefs don't share the tip pool has always struck me as unfair—they work far longer hours for far less pay. Not that it matters—show me one chef who's ever switched to the other side, and I'll call you a liar. Roles rarely reverse, especially not in that direction. Chefs and servers, possessors of opposing psyches, inhabit completely different worlds. Except when they fuck each other, which happens a lot.

 En route to the seedier bar Sarah picks up a slice of congealing pizza from Bread Factory, the crust brittle as shale. That she works at one of the world's top restaurants doesn't stop me from suspecting that most of her calorific intake is similarly shitty. The whole haute cuisine jag works for now, but eventually she hopes to open a little sandwich shop that maybe turns into a bar at night. "In my trade, I need to decide whether I'm going to be working nights or days. I need to decide whether I want kids or a husband. And I need to decide by the time I'm thirty."

 At this moment, a small eruption at the door turns our heads—two chefs we both know stumbling into the saloon, grizzly bears shaking snow off their shoulders. One heads for the jukebox, one for the bar. Another round! Effectively, this ends my discussion with Sarah, who gives me one last literary gem of a story before my handwriting goes completely underwater.

 "I was going home with a friend, and realized at my doorstep that my keys were lost. 'The good news is,' I told her, 'I've got a pocketful of change. The bad news: we're locked out.' So we went to the bar down the block and ordered a couple of tequilas. It was karaoke night, so we went up and requested help: 'Does anyone have a bloody ladder?' Some guys in the front said 'yes, yes!'"
 "Did they have one?" I asked.
 "No," said Sarah, on the verge of hysterics. "They were crack dealers!"

 Our laughter, nearly maniacal, pierces the fraught, stale air of the bar. Dave, who cuts fish for a living, tells us a story about being in an airport with Richard Simmons, asking to take a picture of him to show his mother, Richard Simmons acquiescing, and suddenly, shockingly, shaving Dave's head. A stale baseball match plays itself out on six TVs. Everyone else at the bar is alone, hunched over, nursing with both hands what they're probably telling themselves is the last one of the night.

 Outside, New York's underworld is stirring: the bums, the garbagemen, the bodega owners. They're guarded, hooded, a little hellish; the night at this time has a particular pall. A deathly calm pervades. Everything's glazed with the day's dust, and now the night's.
 Nathalie Jordi 2008-03-27T06:55:00+00:00 Autobiogeography http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2008/03/autobiogeograph.html Now that I'm in Ireland with nothing but time and inborn nerdiness on my hands, I've made up my AUTO-BIO-GEOGRAPHY: a Google Maps mashup of the restaurants, cheese shops and bookstores I've visited and loved over the years. Now, whenever...

Now that I'm in Ireland with nothing but time and inborn nerdiness on my hands, I've made up my AUTO-BIO-GEOGRAPHY: a Google Maps mashup of the restaurants, cheese shops and bookstores I've visited and loved over the years.

Now, whenever anyone asks me where to find the best taco in El Paso, a comfortable hotel in the Hindu Kush, or antique postcards on the west coast of Wales, I can point them to my map.

Would love to hear what you think?

p.s. Welcome New York Times readers!  Thanks for visiting Eating With Strangers!!
 Nathalie Jordi 2008-03-19T14:58:00+00:00 New York the Chimeric http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2008/03/new-york-the-ch.html New York, we'll agree, is one of the world's great cities with the least amount of obvious ties to its physical past—holding company with, say, Dubai and Nagasaki. Who'd ever have guessed that the word Manhattan might once have meant...

New York, we'll agree, is one of the world's great cities with the least amount of obvious ties to its physical past—holding company with, say, Dubai and Nagasaki. Who'd ever have guessed that the word Manhattan might once have meant "island of hills"?

Look around at the soaring buildings. The gothic spire of 40 Wall Street, a seventy-story skyscraper completed in 1930 that was very briefly the tallest building in the world, now belongs to Donald Trump, who bought it in 1995 for a mere $8 million. Consider 23 Wall Street, for years the headquarters for JP Morgan, bombed to bits in 1920 by a horse-drawn carriage filled with 500 pounds of dynamite. It's currently under construction by Philippe Starck, who plans on turning its roof into a garden and pool accessible to inhabitants of the new Downtown by Philippe Starck buildings right next door, themselves equipped with a basketball court, bowling alley and ballet studio. Or how about the Deutsche Bank building? It was condemned after the 9/11 attacks tore a twenty-four-story gash in the façade. Inside, human remains from the attack are still being recovered, along with asbestos, dioxin, lead, silica, quartz, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chromium, manganese, and other toxins directly related to the attack. Next year, who knows? I'm hedging my bets over its conversion into a new Balazs palace or hotel.

Looking at Lower-Lower Manhattan means staring change right in the face, but it takes real imagination to rewind. The birth of New York City took place at the juncture of the East and North Rivers with the construction of Fort Amsterdam in 1625 and the smelting of the cannons at Battery Park. Today, looking upwards at the vertiginous gray arrows spearing the sky, and across the water at the jagged skyline of smokestacks and blocky buildings limning Staten Island and New Jersey, those days seem more than a measly 350 years of constant evolution away. It takes a real squint of the eyes to imagine the fort changing times eight hands in battle, including the comically named "Battle of Long Island," during which volleys were exchanged between the fort and British emplacements on Governor's Island. (Can you imagine?)

I haven't even finished apologizing for my lateness before Robert Lavalva launches into the history of lower Manhattan. Did I know that Peck Slip, where we're having lunch, didn't exist before ballast discharged by arriving ships filled the water in with land? I did not. In fact, I realize, I know nothing about the history of lower Manhattan.

Robert does. A jack-of-all-trades who worked for eight years as the director of composting for the City of New York and for two on the city's subways, he quit in favor of creating Slow Food's first American raw-milk cheese presidium. Robert now has a far more massive project over which to wring his hands: growing a regional, sustainable public food market in one of the South Street Seaport's historic buildings.

 Quiet and pale, with long, expressive fingers and a poet's melancholic eyes, Robert speaks in a way that's at once measured and impassioned. He chooses his words deliberately, but a gentle sense of humor keeps him on the pleasant side of gravity. "At first I wanted to open an all-local, sustainable food shop, but it was really just a pleasant daydream," he explains. "I've learned that I'm just not at all a shopkeeper." So he came up with the idea of the market. His background in city work, along with his partner Jill's experience as an urban planner, fed their ambition, and they worked for several months to develop the mission statement available for perusal on their website. "It needed to take that much time," said Robert. "Writing that was the way we figured out what it was we were doing." The project began in earnest in September, and Robert is giving himself a year to see if he can seriously get it off the ground.

 Why a public market serviced by purveyors, rather than the current system of farmers under the aegis of the Greenmarket? The value of this historic form of public-private partnership, Robert says, "allows cities to create self-perpetuating, self-enforcing standards having wide influence on the quality of food, its fairest price, and the manner in which it is bought and sold." While this thought is pretty much irrelevant in today's global marketplace, where big-box retailers control the price and availability and nearly every other condition of commerce, the idea is more than valid. As Robert points out, even supermarkets specializing in natural or whole foods are components of the industrial food system. "Their efforts remain at best a simulacrum," he says, nodding at the bread pre-baked in an industrial kitchen and the "butchers" unpacking and slicing pre-cut meat sections that arrive from distributors all over the world. True purveyors, on the other hand, are "both producer and consumer, and by necessity speak the languages of both and attend to both their needs. [They] are deeply knowledgeable about what they sell, personally familiar with how and where it is produced, and able to advise their customers on what to purchase and how best to prepare it, depending on their needs and tastes." His hands flutter for emphasis; his voice is mellifluous and convincing. I'm sold.

 But why the South Street Seaport? "This is where New York City began its history as an international trading center," Robert emphasizes. The Fulton Market was first established in 1763 and included 88 butcher's stalls, 50 stalls for poultry, vegetables and fruit, and even four sausage stands. Smacks, or fishing vessels with an interior tank designed to keep the catch alive as long as the boat stayed in the water, moored themselves at the Fulton Market slip and kept the fish in the East River's brackish waters until they were sold. The neighborhood was so popular that rails were built for horse-drawn carriages that transported people on a loop from the Upper West Side down to the Broadway and Fulton Markets, where they would hang out in the oyster bars "for dates and what-have-you." By 1860, due to migration uptown, the market had been mostly taken over by wholesale vendors, and remained a wholesale fish market until the entire thing was moved to the Bronx in 2005. Ever since, the barren, cavernous space has lain fallow behind metal grates.

 The neighborhood beyond the Fulton Fish Market has, of course, evolved. Compared to the buzz on Wall Street, the area below it remained relatively stagnant, with the exception of a nonprofit maritime museum that received some visitors, but whose costs kept its survival hanging in limbo for years. Constantly threatened by bankruptcy, the museum contacted the Rouse Company, a developer specializing in renewing blighted urban areas, responsible for, among other projects, the smashing success of the revitalization of Faneuil Hall in Boston, which drew 10 million people in its first year. The Rouse Company proposed reconstructing Piers 17 and 18 as glass-enclosed buildings containing shopping pavilions, what an MSU professor's paper gloomily titled "Failed Promise" calls "approximately 250,000 square feet of leasable retail space in a contiguous commercial-cultural-entertainment complex." After brief period of success that saw masses of loose-tie stockbrokers gravitating to the seaport for cocktails after work (in 1991, the South Street Seaport edged Central Park as the most popular tourist destination in New York), the novelty wore off, and the mall has devolved to a point where all its independent retailers sell the same stock from the same wretched mass-market souvenir distributor.

 Our reedy, seven-foot waitress brings out plates of garganelli with a bolognese ragù and ravioli with spinach and walnuts. The ravioli lack salt, but with the sun streaming in through gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows, blushing the pale wood and exposed brick, nothing feels askew. All of the new restaurants in this area look like the faces of women who've just inconspicuously re-applied discreet matte makeup that makes them look effortlessly pretty. This was not an aesthetic in evidence in this area even two years ago.

 "It's gentrifying like mad," remarks Robert. According to a Time Out magazine article clamoring about "signs of the district's new bunnylike real-estate fecundity," where there were 13,000 inhabitants south of Chambers Street in 2000, the number shot up to 21,000 in 2006 and is expected to climb to 26,000 by next year. Because today's corporations prefer inhabiting one massive floor of a squat building to dispersing employees over several different floors of a skinny building, many of the older commercial spaces are being turned into residential zones.

 But creating a public market will take time. Lots of it. Not only is the seaport a historical neighborhood, it's also a mix of public and private property that makes for incredibly complicated zoning—seven different maps are required. And then there are the people to deal with: community boards, the city, senators, borough presidents, community coalitions, the developers, conservation leagues. So far, so good—Big Apple bigwigs like Mario Batali, Marion Nestle, Dan Barber, and Greenmarket co-founders Barry Benepe and Robert Lewis, have professed support. But because the Fulton Fish Market building lease belongs to developers who will only give some of the space up if the city allows them to build condo towers, negotiations are far from over.

 Today, the mall and market building leases are owned by General Growth Properties, who bought all the Rouse holdings, about 350,000 square feet, once they knew the Fulton Fish Market would finally move in 2005. The city still owns the buildings, but GGP holds the lease until approximately 2050.

 These are the unromantic parts to the tale. But Robert, having no doubt honed his story-telling at Slow Food, has romance in droves. Historically, New Netherlands, a trading post settled by the first European settlers to hit Manhattan in the 1600s, was composed of a 400-mile circle stretching from Montreal to Virginia. "I'm interested that the region was defined once," says Robert. "I'd rather look at history or natural boundaries than state lines." This is the region he'd like to see provisioning the New Amsterdam Public Market: farmhouse cheese from Poughkeepsie; maple syrup from New Hampshire; foie gras from the Hudson Valley. Despite its high concentration of inhabitants, the region is willingly fecund.

 Many, many years after Stuyvesant and the other Dutch fellows whose legacy is manifest only on the street signs of New York (Beekman, Van Brunt, Gansevoort), Ayn Rand wrote, agape: "Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window…I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

 A brilliant public market the likes of which Robert envisions would do New York City buckets of good, as anyone who's seen a market in Barcelona, Chichicastenango, Paris, Hanoi, Tokyo, or Otavalo knows the Greenmarket to be great but insufficient. Imagine surfacing from the warren of grimy tunnels at Fulton St. to peer upwards at the steel shot arrows lunging at the sky and down again to stare a head of cabbage, blisteringly red beef steak, or freshly-picked bouquet of Hudson Valley herbs right in the face. Seekers of the postmodern sublime, welcome to the New New York City.
 Nathalie Jordi 2008-03-15T05:21:00+00:00 Peter Pan, Unhinged and Hungover http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2008/02/peter-pan-unhin.html I've had a cappuccino and a half by the time Phil Oh, forty minutes late, finally locates my favorite little brunch joint in a labyrinth of alleys on the Lower East Side, but his level of energy still kicks the...

I've had a cappuccino and a half by the time Phil Oh, forty minutes late, finally locates my favorite little brunch joint in a labyrinth of alleys on the Lower East Side, but his level of energy still kicks the shit out of mine. Rosy-cheeked, with a tousle of precisely mussed hair, a gravelly layer of party-boy stubble, and slick geek-chic glasses, he explodes into the restaurant, sheds layers of beautifully made, artistic clothes that anyone less confident would look like a total arse wearing, and apologizes profusely. Don't sweat it, I tell him; I'm perpetually late, and rather needed to bond with my cappuccini.

"I just got back from Fashion Week in Paris," he breathes, breathlessly. "And Berlin. It was crazy. This was the first time I had a press pass, too, so I didn't have to be all" (here he slits his eyes, preens his voice, and hams it up) "Ah, hel-lo! I am ah-ssistant to fehmous Japanese phot-hoh-grapher! We leave pass at hoh-tel! Ai-yah!"

The man has clearly resorted to such tricks before, and has his schtick down. I like him already.

Originally from Chicago, Phil dreamed, at the age of six, of morphing into a Wall Street tycoon. "I never dreamt I'd end up a muckraking journalist," he says. "I played the Trump board game, you know? I was so on my way to becoming a corporate raider." On the way, he studied history at NYU ("It was the only place I got in," he says, merrily. "My essay really blew"). His first business consisted of selling Beanie Babies out of his freshman dorm room. It was the height of the late-nineties Beanie Baby craze, and leaving a Broadway show one night (Ragtime), he noticed a series of Beanie Babies sold exclusively on Broadway. On a whim, he bought sixty, went home, and traded them online for more valuable Babies owned by people unable to acquire the elusive, sought-after Broadway variety. "It became a little embarrassing," he remembers ruefully. "I knew them all. I even went to conventions. I could go and be like, 'That's a third-generation coral fish, not a second!' Or, 'That Bronty's a fake!'" He blushes charmingly, and his hands flutter towards the coffee.

 Phil, fortunately, exited the Beanie Baby business before its 1999 crash, when moony-eyed adults all over the country found themselves in baffling possession of hundreds of worthless pellet-filled animal toys. Today, if you visit the Beanie Baby website, you'll still find founder Ty Warner answering questions from fans, like the latest, submitted by 'fairylady.' "What's your favorite flavor of jelly bean?" she wonders. "I like all flavors of jelly beans," answers Ty. "But if I had to pick just one…licorice!"

 At least Phil came out in the black on that one. But then there was a failed Internet startup, of which Phil says, grimly, "I'm still bitter. Don't want to talk about it." He waited tables to make ends meet, compiling a restaurant CV—Spice Market, 66, Park, Ruby Foo's, Jewel Bako—long enough to make any lifer nod in appreciation. The monologue is so blistering it makes my head whirl. "Sunday was gay night at Park. I worked the penthouse, serving cosmos to the boys in the hot tubs. God, I made a shitload of money. Man, do I feel bad for the bus boys who had to clean it all up." He was fired or quit every job in rapid succession. "I got canned at Ruby Foo's the day after the blackout. Drinking on the job. And then I got fired from Jewel Bako for what they call 'not knowing the finer points of sushi service.' Um, hello? Isn't that what training is fucking for??"

 I ask him about apartments. "Wow. I think I've lived in more apartments than I've worked in restaurants." I put the pen down; there's no point in letting my eggs go cold. There's one abode of note, though, besides a nine-room revolving door of fauxhawks and Phil nostalgically deems the Hipster Hotel. That would be the model dorm.

 "My friend was a booking agent for models," Phil reminisces. "The girls arrive fresh off the boat from Ukraine or Argentina or whatever, and they get placed in these dorms all over towns, where they live with other models while they're looking for work." In between apartments, Phil ended up crashing at the model dorm for about a year. He's just published a book about the experience, called Secrets of the Model Dorm. The book came out right when a Brazilian model died of anorexia. There was a flurry of press—Seventeen, OK, the San Francisco Chronicle—that died down relatively quickly. Phil and the booking-agent friend no longer talk.

"How's my fashion sense?" I ask Phil, half-joking. The curl in his lip makes me regret the question. "Urgh," he utters faintly. I return to my baked eggs, chastened.

 At this moment, we are interrupted by a friend who has come by to pick up her pocketbook. In one of those serendipities that reduces the world to an appealingly human level, she'd left the pocketbook in a cab the night before, only for Phil (who apparently hailed it next) to find it. The engage in the following otherworldly exchange:

 "I can't tell you how relieved I was when you called, it's so hard to find a pocketbook that fits a passport these days."
 "Well, the pocketbook is pretty fabulous, but I was more intrigued by everything inside. The receipt for the razor clams? The recipe for vinaigrette?"
 "It's a great vinaigrette recipe. I don't know what I'd do without it."
 "And what's the $600 of Citarella cheese for?"
 "I love cheese."

Wholly in line with the lifestyle that depends on who you know and what they wear, Phil's new project is a global style blog called StreetPeeper. His book advance allowed him to hire a Portland design firm (the one Flavorpill employs) that uses a 'hip' Internet language known as Ruby on Rails. "Hopefully StreetPeeper will work out," says Phil, "otherwise I'll have to move on to Plan D. I'm getting to the point where my peers are kind of taking off, and I feel bad fucking around." He admits to still writing 'student' on immigration forms. "What else would I put? 'Web entrepreneur?' Kill me."

 Currently Phil lives in East Williamsburg (Bushwick) with his boyfriend. His parties are incontestably legendary. A campy Warrior-themed Halloween party for which he booked Afrikaa Bambaataa and expected 500 people received 4000 RSVPs and a priceless shout-out in Gawker, arbitrator of cool. He admits, however, to going out much less than he used to. "Getting fucked up isn't such badge of honor any more," he says, glumly. "It's kind of embarrassing."

 Phil's story resonates with me in a way that few of the other strangers' has: his future feels at once boundless and, claustrophobically, like it's closing in. He exhibits the malaise when it comes to aging that afflicts those of us who balk at sacrificing the perks of self-involvement for the sake of maturity.

 I wish him luck in the next endeavors. As long as he keeps the campy Japanese accent and cute blush at hand, I think he'll do just fine.
 Nathalie Jordi 2008-02-11T06:39:00+00:00 Don Quijote's Windmills Were Prescient http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2007/12/don-quijotes-wi.html image courtesy of wikiality.com. Colin Beavan looks nothing like he does in this game-show picture taken from his appearance on the Colbert Report. He actually looks more like a melancholic, broody Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, but I forgot...

image courtesy of wikiality.com. Colin Beavan looks nothing like he does in this game-show picture taken from his appearance on the Colbert Report. He actually looks more like a melancholic, broody Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, but I forgot to bring my camera the day we spoke.

The rain today shot down like gun pellets all the way from the subway at West 4th to the Dean & Deluca on University St, a light and airy room with an extraordinarily baroque scalloped and beribboned plaster ceiling. Before I bought my cup of tea, Colin Beavan was not sitting on one of the high stools set against the north-facing wall, but when I came around the corner, there he was, perched upon it like an albatross. He was wearing sneakers (Nike? I don't remember), jeans, and assorted jackets and hoodies layered one on top of the another, and held in his perpetually moving hands a strand of worry beads, which he fingered one by one, pausing only to shake my hand.

Colin Beavan is known in some circles as the No Impact Man, which is also how he's listed in my cell phone, making calls from him feel like a superhero's on the other line. He and his wife Michelle (plus their two-year-old, Isabella, and dog Frankie), have plucked a year out of their lives to live in a "no-impact way," which involves giving up trash, transportation, and, in the next few weeks, electricity. They live in what is by all accounts—if the New York Times, which recently wrote him up, is anything to be trusted—a chicly furnished prewar apartment on Lower Fifth Avenue.

Think about what is circumscribed within the above list of what many would consider necessities. Dishwasher. Elevator. Dunkin' Donuts. Espresso. Toothpaste. Toilet paper. None of those are coming anywhere close to the Beavans this year. It is their experiment in the art of gracious living à la mode de 2007.

"We inherit a lot of customs from our previous lives and the generations that come before us," intones Colin so quietly that I draw my head close to hear. "We have shucked our lives of all these things we've inherited. It's…a complete life redesign."

 Michelle is a senior writer for Business Week. Colin, after eleven years in Liverpool as an engineering PhD student and then as the head of his own public relations firm, moved back his father's spare room in Stuyvesant Town, having decided on an epic ten-week journey across the southwestern US., to write books. The first, called Fingerprints, was a history book about the origins of the use of fingerprints in crime solving. The second, Jedburgh: D-Day and America's First Shadow War, bubbled up from Colin's interest in his grandfather, chief of special operations for the OSS during World War II.

 He calls these books an apprenticeship. "I liked writing them, but I wasn't writing about something that was actually important. Now I am." In an op-ed for the New York Times that he recently wrote, Colin discusses the tipping point that prompted his drastic experiment. Liberals, he says, believe in collective action, while conservatives believe in individual action. Despite all this, he writes, "for all our liberal ideology, people like me volunteer their time no more than conservatives, and we actually donate 30 percent less to charity. We even give less blood."

 The point isn't asceticism, Colin delineates. Rather, the family's goal is to tread lightly on the earth, taking only what's on offer, making their time alive more visit than pillage. "There's a Buddhist precept from my school of meditation," relates Colin, "that exhorts people not to take that which is not freely given. We just want people to look at their lives and see and think about how they're living them."

 Critics have chastised Colin and co. for their…extreme extremism. How, they ask, can anyone wishing make changes but still live in the real world look to the Beavans as examples? Don't they undermine the sustainable-living movement's push towards accessibility by suddenly turning into self-composting feral hippie "reduce, re-use, re-psychos?" Calm down, says Colin. The radicalism is only an experiment; two-year-old Isabella will work a lightbulb someday. (It'll probably be a CFL though.)

 A few days after I interview Colin I read a blog posting by a chef whose work I greatly admire. He and his partner have self-published one of the single best cookbooks we sell, filled with nothing but the photographs and names of dishes they've come up with, and it's some of the most platitude-pushing, fun-thinking, good-looking food I've seen in ages, kicking to shit a lot of the trendiest menus en defilé in New York right now.

Here's what strikes my eye:

Several days ago I read a post by Seth Godin. The synopsis is that if you have nothing wonderful to offer, wait until you can create something great and then produce, publish, and sell it. Last night we returned from more travels, this time Montana, and I was planning on writing about what we were doing, seeing, etc. Yet, after airport delays and frustrations my voice was more apt to write "back from Montana." Look, that would have been fine, but that is not me. Well, actually at times it can be or has been me, but readers don't always need to experience it with me.

So, back to the blank page. Imagine a tasting menu where you are dining and everything is progressing well and then, for your next course, you get a blank plate. It is empty, just white in front of you. It gives you something to think about, although not necessarily what you were expecting. After some time a waiter clears the dish and the menu continues. Look, that does not happen in real life, I know. What if it did? What if people were willing to edit themselves down to nothing when, at certain times, nothing produces a better result? I understand this is a far fetched concept, though I believe the idea and the process of the examination of self and creativity are woven into the blank page concept.

One more point, even though you are serving up a blank page, that does not mean that it is the only thing you have to offer. In the wings there can be pages of ideas, plans to be refined, dishes to be polished so that soon that blank page will be full, it will morph into something that is as creative and polished as you want it to be.

For some reason, reading this makes me think of Colin Beavan; he and Alex T share an impracticable purism, a fantasy about the rare and beautiful (and elusive). He reminds me of Howard Roark, too, if more outward-looking (this project is ultimately meant for others, not one's own private glory)

Colin's quixotic mission is more message than medium, more about subtle, meaningful ends than it is about the extreme means currently scandalizing everyone. It's less about a lack of Fritos or Swiffer or Tide than about simply a lessening of…things. But mistranslation occurs. Everyone who hears the words "No Impact Man" immediately responds, "Oh! The guy on Fifth Avenue going a year without toilet paper!"

Yes, that man is Colin Beavan, whom Gawker called "the man gently shat on by the NYT." He is the man who sat across Stephen Colbert as an empty microwave ran for the duration of the interview (Colbert: "It's like Gilligan's Island, only completely implausible!"). But he is also a man who has looked his principles in the eyes and decided to side with them absolutely. What did you do today?
 Nathalie Jordi 2007-12-02T17:23:00+00:00 Salt-Tipped Hero of the Revolution http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2007/11/salt-tipped-her.html Damn it, I still can't figure out how to turn these pictures ninety degrees. Does anyone know? Not to humiliate an extremely responsible, respectable, humane, dedicated husband and father who spends the daylight being an important human-rights activist, but the...

Damn it, I still can't figure out how to turn these pictures ninety degrees. Does anyone know?

Not to humiliate an extremely responsible, respectable, humane, dedicated husband and father who spends the daylight being an important human-rights activist, but the first time I met Graeme was his birthday, and he was unutterably drunk. "Shooollmeetyouflunch," he said, which, roughly translated, was "Sure, I'll meet you for lunch." Thankfully, at the time I was speaking the same language.

It didn't stop our first meeting from getting canceled. Graeme, mysteriously, was under quarantine for smallpox. It was such an improbable excuse that I believed it—how could anyone ever get away with making that up? Happily, he never succumbed, and we met, finally, at a tavern on Wall Street that's supposedly existed since 1656. It looked like what the interior decorator of Cheesecake Factory would come up with, given a snifter of brandy and a bottle of Valium: damask banquettes, a plaster ceiling meant to simulate pressed tin, and a plastified menu offering Maryland crab cakes, Cuban sandwiches, penne pomodoro, and tuna melts. The service was straight Cheesecake: a big glass of ice water, ridged for easy stacking, arrived immediately and never went empty. The table of suits lunching at the next table was having a spirited discussion about immigration. From one particularly eloquent fatass: "I'm thinking about crossing Mexico and coming back illegal so that I can collect checks too."

Graeme showed up, the color of metal. He wore a lucent white cambric shirt with a flat, Nehru-style collar, close-cropped curls colored pepper with a hint of salt, a plain, flat silver men's watch and a wedding ring. Even his face had a hint of silver to it, like salmon skin.

 Graeme grew up in pre-apartheid South Africa, where steel insides came in handy. His parents were Lithuanian Jews, bookkeepers, whose parents came to South Africa to flee the pogroms. The original family name has been lost. "I tell my son it was Sumsonovabitch," he grins. He speaks with the funny flatness of Afrikaans, the linguistic love-child you'd expect from cr0ss-breeding an Aussie and a German.

 "I was a small, unconfident child," remembers Graeme. "Intimidated. I was writing poetry while my mates were carving notches in their belts." His father, an "armchair commie," counterbalanced his mother, a nurturer. They sent him to a racially integrated high school, an extraordinary thing in those days, where Graeme was the president of the student body. "Instead of organizing proms, we were fund-raising to rebuild black staff quarters."

 He graduated in 1976, "the year of fire and ash," when legions of black students were killed for throwing stones at the military. In those days, there were sixteen colors to South Africa: Black, White, Indian, Coloured, and sub-groups of these. It wasn't just the Lithuanians that lost their family names—bureaucrats translated "Kwokomoko Satchme" into the likes of "Donald."

 All white South African men were commandeered into the military at the age of sixteen, but Graeme was determined to flout the draft. He tried to legally amend his color; when that didn't work, he sought refuge in academia, heading to London for a PhD when things became desperate. "South Africa didn't invent racism; we perfected it," says Graeme, his words deliberate and his eyes direct. "We classified people according to myopic minutiae. It was the most banal form of evil, a seismic way to control lives." He's read his Franz Fanon.

 The phase of life in which one is angry at the government, shakes one's fist at rallies, and has sex with inappropriate people lasted over ten years for Graeme, except that it in South Africa these things weren't funny or fun. He spent three years working with trade unionists and women's organizations on a grassroots level. He lived in black townships, a self-described "exercise in racial suicide." Before marrying, he fell in love with an Asian woman from a Muslim family; the woman who ended up as his wife was involved with a leading black activist. He walked holding banners down hot dusty streets as blistering clouds of teargas rained down. When his wife was thrown into solitary confinement and didn't emerge for months, Graeme and a friend drove their car as close as they dared to her window and blasted her favorite songs. His deskmate Stanza Bopape, with whom he ate rotisserie chicken and maizemeal grits every day, became one of the most high-profile "disappearances" of the resistance movement.

Finally, Graeme ran out of time, space and patience. "I quit two years before the peace came," he says. "I had no idea. I didn't see the change coming."

 Graeme talks in sound bites, measured, like a man doing a voiceover in the documentary of his own life. His über-precise phrasing, intense eye contact, and the controlled contours and stripes of his narrative reveal the redoubtable Marxist student leader he must once have been; few traces of the unconfident child remain other than an agreeable, mild manner. His words pearlesce together, forming sentences that course through the restaurant's muddy air like a brightly colored kite. Amidst the rollercoastering roar of conversation, it feels like the two of us are alone, sitting on a small planet in Cheesecake Factoryland. The restaurant has been totally emasculated.

 By the time he left South Africa, the nonviolence organization Graeme started had grown to encompass eighty-five people, but we barely talk about it; our conversation takes place entirely in the past. "You want to know where I come from?" he thunders. "You're asking me about my indignant days. But all these things are still alive in my present. My work is living memory." I envision Graeme swelling up, Violet Beauregard-like, until his body becomes too large for the Stone Street Tavern, and explodes the roof off. Peeling skyscrapers apart as if they were bananas with over-brittle skin, his giant fingers would pluck offenders out of their overstuffed office chairs, and toss them into the harbor. "That takes care of Somsunovabitch," he'd say, grinning wider than the sun.

 His work is living memory. In 2001, after decades of patiently explaining violence to his countrymen, Graeme became the object of his subject. From behind his kitchen window, numbly pounding on the panic button that equips all South African homes, Graeme watched a group of masked men steal his car, shoot his desperate, baby-clutching wife, and on their way out—because fortune has an acute sense of irony—snatch a Tupperware of chicken soup from the hands of his bewildered mother. Graeme has two things to say about this: "What came with political peace was a redistribution of patterns of violence," and "I'm still in therapy."

 So Graeme, his wife and their bad-ass baby moved to New York. Recently, they watched a South African movie called Tsotsi, in which a central scene involves the hijacking of a car inconveniently equipped with a baby. Graeme's wife wept through the whole thing. Mainly, though, what moved her was not the trauma recalled but a throbbing longing for home: the size of the sky there, its incomparable color. "It's such a contradiction," puzzles Graeme. "The ache for the motherland is so much stronger when living there was a struggle."

 These days, Graeme's son plays baseball in Prospect Park. "He's a sout piel," says Graeme. "It means salty penis; he's got one foot in Africa, one in America, and his dick dangles in between." His laugh is wry, his face satisfied. Peace becomes him.
 Nathalie Jordi 2007-11-11T03:54:00+00:00 Between Ribs: Living at the Heart of New York City http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2007/10/between-ribs-li.html If this were possible, if you possessed some infernal apparatus that could somehow X-ray the vital stats of someone's present—minus the backstory, mind—if it could spirograph the hypotrochoids of someone's life in pink and blue ballpoint neatly onto graph paper,...

If this were possible, if you possessed some infernal apparatus that could somehow X-ray the vital stats of someone's present—minus the backstory, mind—if it could spirograph the hypotrochoids of someone's life in pink and blue ballpoint neatly onto graph paper, if such a thing materialized, well, Smokey and Sally's chart would read Yuppie Arrivistes, for sure.

Let's look at the facts, shall we? They live in a vast, exposed-brick-and-sanded-parquet apartment in the lower East Village. They open Sunday mornings with champagne mimosas and goat-cheese omelettes. They're documentary film-makers who shop at the Union Square Greenmarket. The sprightly rose nosegay that serves as the centerpiece of their wooden breakfast table comes from a young and pretty "flower artisan" that sells her tussie-mussies at Brooklyn street fairs. They go to jazz concerts on Y rooftops. The reading material in the bathroom includes Wired magazine and The Adventures of Sindbad, by fin-de-siècle Hungarian sensualist Gyula Krúdy.

Listen here, my friend. Your machine would be dead wrong. In lacking a Context Button, it erroneates on paper what in 3-D takes a whole different shape. If you rewind back and add that essential fourth dimension, time, the nebulous contours of a story far more quintessential to New York than the hipster or yuppie narrative will appear, velvety as a brass rubbing. It's the story of millions, and it begins in a small town in the middle of the country, winding its way—by instinct, smell, luck or fate—to the big city.

For his part, Smokey was born in Corpus Christi, Texas and given his father's and grandfather's names, Oscar and Franklin, both of which have now been legally changed on his passport, driver's license and social security. "Your name is what people call you," is all he has to say about it.

 Smokey recently found out that he has a brother, Buddy, a son of his mother's from an earlier marriage whom he'd always assumed was a cousin. On the same occasion, Smokey also learned that she'd married five times instead of once: to the actor who fathered Buddy, to a rich man who then adopted him, to an airforceman who crashed and died, to the rich man again, and finally to Smokey's dad, who was ten years younger. He still has never discussed any of this with his parents. "They had fifty years to tell me, and they didn't," he says. "Why bring it up now?"

 Despite his ignorance of the warp and sticky weft of his family web, it doesn't sound like pre-cable-TV Corpus Christi was difficult to put behind. "I was really happy to leave Texas," Smokey remembers. "Sally says it reminds her of New York in that everyone feels special and entitled." After college in Connecticut, Smokey packed everything into his car and drove to San Francisco. "I was twenty-three and living in Sausalito. Every day I drank a coffee on the ferry to work and a cocktail on the way back. I loved it."

 In 1980, Smokey came to New York.

 Sally, for her part, hails from Rochester. Her brother and sister, having sublimated after her father's suicide, eventually deposited, like hoarfrost, in Naples and Iowa City. Sally arrived in 1969. She lived first in Washington Heights, in a tiny apartment with a boyfriend, two Great Danes, and the litter of puppies they consequently generated. Smokey, ever the assistant, fetches an aged color photocopy of Sally with one of the Danes. A collared shirt reveals the curve of a young, smooth throat and, though the image is fuzzy, her smile, caught mid-laugh, is beguiling. The dog nearly looks bigger than she.

 It may be cruelly reductive to point to Sally's ability to navigate New York real estate as her most salient attribute, but her talent for doing is rare as something like winning on straight bets at Harrah's roulette table night after night (the Village Voice, too, marveled at this ability). At a time when her peers were moving to Vermont to farm or live on communes, people wondered what Sally was doing in New York. "Growing up," she says.

 Having subsequently breezed through an apartment on 70th and Central Park West ($125 a month), another on 11th and 2nd (for $53), a studio space in Union Square ($80), and a 2500-square-foot, eighteen-window former tent factory on Bleecker and Elizabeth ($167), Sally and some friends applied to join the Urban Homesteaders program and, given the go-ahead by the city, commandeered a building on 1st and 1st. It was an old tenement building, stripped bald by copper-hunting junkies, each floor composed of four tiny dwelling spaces. Each homesteading couple requisitioned a story and tore down the interior walls. All of a sudden, Sally had an apartment with eight chimneys that she'd paid $330 to own. The eighty empty crack vials strewn about the floor came as a free bonus.

 The apartment took decades to fix up, along with an estimated $75,000 of renovation costs, but given the apartment's size, prime location, and structure, Sally is now sitting on what one could conservatively call a fucking gold mine. All of the original owners but for one, who's since died, still live in the apartments they homesteaded in 1983. The question of when, to whom, and at price to sell looms over every coop member's head, ever complicated by the fact that building-wide consensus must be reached before the sale of any unit takes place. Twenty-six years have passed since the disagreements began, but hey, everyone's survived. Both of the strangers I passed on my way upstairs saluted me, and when was the last time that happened in your building?

 The passage of twenty-six years has turned this apartment into something pretty fantastic. When Smokey pops the cork on the champagne, it sails so far that its parabolic arc is already on the downswing by the time it hits an exposed-brick surface and bounces off the rubbed parquet. I'm reminded of my first month in New York, when I was living in a Chinatown bedroom so small that one couldn't be in the room and not on the (single) bed. I went to a party in an apartment just one block away, and it was so big that tennis balls we hurled for the benefit of the house St. Bernard weren't even hitting walls by the time gravity took over. Some people are lucky in love, looks or cards, others in real estate. In New York, the latter are blessedest.

 Sally and Smokey's apartment has the kind of collage-y aesthetic upscale marketers of ersatz (Pottery Barn, Anthropologie) emulate, a gently rummaged look, like bed-head on someone with good hair. Theirs is the kind of home in which every object has a story, where the walls are lined with dog-eared books whose frontispieces are doubtlessly inscribed with dedications poignant and tender. The candle wicks are black from actual use, not that pallid, waxy white; the cast-iron pans hanging from the ceiling are slick from dutiful seasoning. Mantels lining the room exhibit an orderly chaos of kitsch, memorabilia, and objets d'art: a mini grandfather clock, beaded zebra, crystal ashtray, three chestnuts, a painted plate, a small, slightly crumpled black-and-white photo of a boy who might be Indonesian, a ballpoint etching of a cat. Despite the casual carelessness of the arrangement, however, the floors are so clean that I keenly feel my sandpapery street-feet sully its smoothness. Our reclaimed rustic wooden chairs wear protective felt pads, and twelve pairs of shoes stand at attention on an aquamarine mat by the door. Only really clean people have light-colored doormats.

 It's when she talks about apartments that Sally unexpectedly morphs from sylph-like snowflake to capable, sinewy urban farmwife. All of a sudden, her speech is peppered with words like "shim" and "pine sub-flooring" and "rebar"; you notice her hands, and remember the old saw that women's hands never lie. My grandmother's, pink and wrinkled, testify to a lifetime spent in soapy water; my mother's, short-nailed and smooth, evince the advent of the dishwasher. Even Upper East Side ladies with faces smooth as tissue paper can't hide their hands, veiny as Roquefort. Sally's are beautifully strong; her fingers are tensile, her palms, prehensile. Two starfish for hands.

 Sally hasn't been drinking mimosas, and as such is neither pink-nosed as Smokey nor cross-eyed as I. I watch him watch her, plainly enraptured, even at stories he's surely heard many times before. Her face, clear as moonshine, and silver aureole of hair, illuminate the room. That's it—our first bottle of champers, kicked.

 After having read, in a now-defunct "homemade" women's magazine called Up From Under, a classic story about a turn-of-the-century Iowa farmwife struggling to hide the fact that she's murdered her husband, Sally made a movie called A Jury of Her Peers. (In an aside, Smokey notes that it was nominated for an Oscar.) This, too, was twenty-six years ago. Since then, Sally has been working on one other movie, finished just last month, about her father's suicide. "What have you done in the meantime?" I ask. A long silence follows. A long silence follows that one. "It's good having boyfriends with inexpensive apartments," Sally jokes. One night, too stoned to write, I pop in the DVD Smokey slipped into my bag. The Oscar-nominated short is a lead-footed, melancholic Ibsen rip-off, but there's a four-minute animation that has me so entranced that I watch it again and again, noting new nuances with each viewing.

 Smokey has hauled. As a documentary producer he's—follow me, now, or rather, follow Smokey—filmed giant Indonesian lingams on a world tour; produced a pilot about eating around New York with Cavin Trillin; sailed up South Asian rivers behind IBM reps paddling to logging camps to clean printer ribbons; drove a movie across America, stopping to show it at 150 science museums; followed Paul Simon on a world tour to Guangxi, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bahia, and Johannesburg; shot Itzhak Perlman discovering klezmer in Poland; and, most recently, spent eighteen months scouting locations from Costa Rica to Baffin Island for a movie on Native Americans ("I'd introduce myself to park rangers as Smokey Forester, and then ask them where I might find a tall white pine by itself in a prairie somewhere. They thought I was nuts.")

 Smokey likes to cook. When he was a kid, cable TV didn't stretch to Corpus Christi, so a local woman filmed a daily 30-minute cooking show, never recorded, just released into the aether. Ten-year-old Smokey went on it a few times to help her with chess pie. Now he shops at the Union Square Greenmarket, the Essex Street Market, and Chinatown, and makes coquilles St. Jacques and soufflés out of Alma Lach's "Hows and Whys of French Cooking." He goes from simple (spread a thin coat of mayo on a flat piece of fish and throw it under the broiler for five minutes) to spectacular in no time flat: "I get monkfish liver at the Greenmarket [from Blue Moon Fish, naturally], wrap it in foil till it's the shape of a salami, and simmer it in water for seven to eight minutes." Voila! Ballotine de foie gras de mer. Yum.

 When Smokey talks to me from the kitchen, where he's donned science-professor glasses to make three meticulous, lacy omelets (shrugging them briskly onto heated plates and transferring them to a barely-warm oven), he brandishes the whisk like a wand and his feet, involuntarily, fall into the primary ballet positions. He pops the cork on the champagne bottle from third position. His sock feet slide into second to pour orange juice into the margarita glasses. As the omelet cooks, he holds onto the counter like a barre, facing me, his feet in first position, his arm curbed around a stainless-steel bowl.

 When we eat, cupping the side of a wooden table, everything on the plate tastes delicious. "What a beautiful color this omelet has," admires Sally. What she means is that the omelet is eggy and yawning with goat's cheese, the home fries have an appetizing oniony crunch, and the toast is perfectly burnished on both sides. Even the butter is superlative, and when people enjoy superlative butter, that means they're good people. That's all we eat, and it's perfect.

 As the morning unfurls into afternoon, we reflect and digest. Sally and Smokey aren't Key West Parrotheads nor do they fit with the virulently self-righteous denizens of Bolinas; lacking a specific taxonomy for these things, let's just say they swing—generationally, aspirationally, philosophically and behaviorally—in a post-hippie hammock vaguely connected to both. Neither has ever been married, and their conversation is casually peppered with romantic wreckage: old lovers, old lies, old lives. Sally's amorous trajectory has led her from a communist to a shade-tree mechanic (literal and figurative) to a man who warms the plates before he serves the omelet. Hey, things change, time passes. Re-jiggering one's life habitually enough to keep individual liberty at the crux of one's cross-hairs is a sure-fire route to turbulence, but for those who believe, it's better than the lobotomy others call commitment. Despite it all, I find them remarkably unscathed for New Yorkers (even if the qualifier still wants citing). Neither comes off as overly neurotic, and they seem genuinely to enjoy the other's company, appreciating the day-to-day.

 "We were the vanguard," Sally reminisces about the past, about the days when the East Village was just immigrants, crackheads and a few forward-looking middle-class refugees. Now, she bemoans the contemporary corporatizing of the city: "New York is a concentration camp you don't even know you're in." But neither Sally nor Smokey ever considers leaving. On lovely Saturday afternoons, they sometimes spread a subway map out on the floor, throw a dime at it, and wherever it lands, they go. Nothing is really far from 1st and 1st, Manhattan's modern-day heart. Giving up that apartment before the city's pulse migrates elsewhere would be pure folly, and they know it.
 Nathalie Jordi 2007-10-29T07:25:00+00:00 Sounds Like A New Yorker http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2007/09/sounds-like-a-n.html * The man who's looking at me circumspectly from under a black 'Subway Q&A' baseball cap has, it seems, lived in every single apartment in New York City. "I moved to the YMCA in 1989," he remembers, touching the tips...
 *

The man who's looking at me circumspectly from under a black 'Subway Q&A' baseball cap has, it seems, lived in every single apartment in New York City. "I moved to the YMCA in 1989," he remembers, touching the tips of his fingers together. "I lived there for a few weeks. Then I lived on—" and here he starts to enumerate, using his fingers to count—"15th Street, 16th Street, 2nd Avenue in a huuuge place, West Broadway, Avenue A, I was paying less than $500 a month then, and two different apartments on Mott Street. Every time I heard about a better apartment, I'd move. Then I found a place on Perry Street. I've been there for years now, it's got two fireplaces and I look south across the city." He smiles. "But I'm thinking about moving to Park Slope."

I know how Todd feels. In the six months I've been here, my suitcases have worn themselves out migrating from Carroll Gardens to Chinatown and the Upper West Side to Red Hook. Because New York looks different from every angle, it actually feels like I've lived in four different cities. "No matter how big a city," Todd corroborates, "you only live in a small part of it. You make your own small town."

New York has been letting him down lately, though—according to Todd, the Big Apple ain't as good as it used to be. "When young people can't afford to move to an area…" he grumbles. I kind of agree. Pathetic as it makes me sound, I came here looking for la vie bohème, and unless it's really hiding, its closest relations are Williamsburg hipsters, which are in fact not close relations at all.

When he first moved to New York from Chicago (to which he'd moved from a part of Louisville that's "like a Jewish Westchester with a Southern drawl"), Todd worked as an outreach worker with the junkies on Bowery. "Bowery was the last stop," he says. "By that time, they'd cut all ties, they lived in flop houses in beds separated only by chicken wire. My efforts mostly failed. Junkies are self-absorbed and selfish; that's the nature of addiction." The Bowery wore him out, so he studied international affairs at NYU and did archival research on architects, artists and designer furniture. He worked as a stockbroker for a while, then wrote for men's magazines about cool things like free shit, survivors of tiger shark attacks, absinthe, Funkmaster Flex, and what happens when you go to New Jersey and put plastic explosives inside a pair of hiking boots. In short, he was a real New Yorker. "I like going to buffets," he says. "Eating a little of this, a little of that." But it was the advent of September 11th, the retelling of which still makes him tear up, that really turned him into a New Yorker. It galvanized him into becoming a paramedic.

Todd would rather I not write about that, so I won't, except to say that I learned three things from our conversation: 1.) Starbucks locations in New York are tremendous junkie hotspots, due to the individual bathrooms; 2.) there actually is a drug out there that can turn you instantaneously sober if you're extremely fucked up—where was that when I was in college?—and 3.) damn, I promised not to write about it. Oh yeah, here's one: 3.) "skell" is another word for bum.

There are so many things that Todd says and then retracts ("I'd appreciate it if you could keep that off the record,") that by the end of our conversation, more of my notes are crossed out than not. My theory about this, like most of my other theories on Todd, attributes it to his being a New Yorker; being so short on personal space makes us gluttons for it. Here are conversations that actually happened:

 Todd: "So there's this unconscious guy on the floor with a fucking hypo in his arm, his girlfriend is frantic, we're giving him CPR, I'm with these medics I'll call Janie and Jack**. Oh shit [pause]. Those are their real names. Uh. Can you keep those off the record?"

 Todd: "So I belong to a skeptics group that meets on a regular basis."
 Nathalie: "Really? So…you sit around and doubt together?"
 Todd: "No. [withering look.] But I'd rather not talk about it. The world is a little too small these days."

 Todd: "So I have a political blog, an art collecting blog, and a skepticism blog."
 Nathalie [very interested]: "Really? Where can I find them?"
 Todd: "I'd rather not say. All good blogs are anonymous, I hate the whole cult-of-personality thing. I like that the Internet divorces people from their opinions. Besides, by remaining unidentified you avoid the whole Theo Van Gogh situation."

 The man is moved to tears by a personal story he shares at one point, but he thinks giving me his web address makes him a candidate for assassination? "Sounds like a New Yorker," a friend of mine confirmed.

 The admission of skepticism intrigued me. Unbeknownst to me, one among the Internet's abundance of highly developed microcosms is an active skeptics community, which, besides Todd's secret blog, is populated with the likes of 95% Of You Are Morons (Seriously. Here's Why), The Conspiracy Factory, Denialism.com, Everything Is Pointless, and God is For Suckers, which is actually more of an atheist blog. "You don't have to be an atheist to be a skeptic," says Todd. "But it helps."

 Here's another thing about Todd: he's crazy for collecting. Glass, ephemera, boxes, and especially books. "My apartment is stuffed," he says, satisfiedly. "There are no more gaps in the walls." He scrawls a diagram into my notebook showing his divergent book collecting interests: first editions, aesthetics books, fine press books (where an effort has been made in the book's design), and artist books (where an artist contributes to the book's production, like Matisse illustrating Ulysses). And with this I'm led down another rabbit hole, a micro-world of layers that spiral, onionlike, ever more tightly.

 Why do people collect? The Internet is a fount of speculation. "A collection gives the collector a sense of mastery of a given subject—specifications, dates, serial numbers, relative rarity, value. Furthermore, people who collect may find that their self-concept becomes sturdier; their passionate interest helps coalesce their sense of who they are and they feel a part of a community of similar-minded people," says John Sweeney, who collects cars, Tiffany studio lamps, vintage motorcycles, antique wrist watches, and mechanical ice-cream scoops. George Willard Benson, collector of antique crosses, believes rather bombastically that "The collector has the true sportsman's spirit—the thrill, the confident anticipation and the uncertain realization of the fisherman." On a kids' collectors website, youngster Sara Morgenthaler expounds: "I think it's cool to collect things because it's like a way to express yourself without damaging your body." And psychologist Alexandra Helper weighs in Psychiatric Times: "Developmental scholars postulate that the collector may have been burdened during the anal phase of development, with difficulty in knowing when to hold on and when to let go."

 As a kid, Todd collected coins, covering the whole floor with them until he'd made a mosaic. "It's not about being covetous," he says. "It's that the whole is more than the sum of its parts." Perhaps we're back to Todd just being a New Yorker: the tension of urban living fuels an acute need for a personally tailored sanctuary. Maybe I'm saying this because I can attest keenly to it myself; couch-surfing in New York City is far more exhausting than couch-surfing anywhere else, after a few weeks one practically cries for four walls of one's own.

 So maybe it's this being a New Yorker now that underlies my five-hour-stint on an ephemera collectors' site (or maybe I'm just anal). I wish-list books on Amazon like it's going out of business: "Orange Crate Art," "Some Early American Lottery Tickets," "Old Sheet Music: A Pictorial History," "Visiting Cards and Cases," and "Collecting Playing Cards." Every passion, according to essayist Walter Benjamin, borders on chaos—but the passion of the collector borders on the chaos of memory. Bad genes and pot smoke shot my memory dead; maybe this spurs my urge to collect, too.

 Collecting is about accretion, ingestion; Benjamin writes that it's not that the collector's possessions come alive in him, it's that he lives in them—which is why object divorce is so hard for Todd, who refers to the recent gifting of a decorative box to his father as "breaking up with my box." There are collectors and dealers, and never the twain shall meet. Once, Todd bought a $7 Chagall book from an artist moving to Germany. He sold it for $4500, but despite the 600-fold return, it's an action he regrets so deeply that the story comes up several times in the conversation. "Hey, there's a history to every object in my apartment. Selling a piece is like cutting off a fucking finger," says Todd grimly. Even worse is selling lithographs or chapters out of books. "I'm Jewish. We don't cut books up."

 Todd's Holy Grail—and that of countless other book hunters—is a forty-page, paper-bound book, "Tamarlane and Other Poems," whose author is listed only as "A Bostonian." It's Edgar Allen Poe's first published work, and the print run is estimated to have been between 40 and 200. Only 12 copies officially exist anymore (allegedly, Poe himself didn't even keep a copy), but tabs on them are kept pretty tightly, and for good reason; in 1988, a private collector paid Sotheby's $198,000 for a copy. Todd hopes that if he keeps trawling through thrift stores, consignment houses, or Craigslist, he might some day strike gold.

 Now that I know, I'm might start looking...

* Does anyone know how to make a MacBook turn this picture 90 degrees to the right? I used to be able to! And now I can't anymore. John? Help, please?
** Those are no longer their real names, obviously.
 Nathalie Jordi 2007-09-13T08:19:00+01:00 Bon Chic Bon Genre Bleeds All Over http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2007/08/bon-chic-bon-ge.html When I meet the artist known formally as ninerevolutions, it is in the butt of a darkened bar on one of the first warmish evenings of this year's hard-begotten spring. We have a friend in common, one of those effortlessly...

When I meet the artist known formally as ninerevolutions, it is in the butt of a darkened bar on one of the first warmish evenings of this year's hard-begotten spring. We have a friend in common, one of those effortlessly beautiful sprites living in an art-filled apartment in an edgy part of town, the type whose acquaintance makes me, for no justifiable reason, feel hip by association. Offhand references to an Argentine mum, Italian dad, Indian nanny, and Bahraini childhood ensconce nine rather suitably within the spritely creature's crowd. What in dogs makes a mutt ends up being quite the pedigree for a person.

She's droll and relaxed, in her element, amongst her peers. They are all finely bred, globally marketable products created by an assortment of influential families, elite boarding schools and multinational corporations. Understand: they are not twats, I like them, but when a thought is difficult to express in English, it comes out in French, or Arabic, and everyone understands. Plates are insouciantly ordered from the kitchen, dabbed at with forks, then pushed vaguely away. Cell phones thin as five business cards are flicked open and shut, trilled into in Spanish. Their mild, staccatoed accents are hybrids, instantly recognizable to those familiar with the inflection—from nowhere in particular, they are nevertheless telltale and revealing. 'I come from everywhere,' they say.

Another day and age would have seen our witty repartee over brandy and cigars and under a fantastic pair of antlers (or tusks, perhaps), but it's 2007, so we are in a dim East Village dive vehemently drinking Stella, and eventually I have to head west, but not before I hand nine a card, explain the project, and invite her to lunch the next day.

O the distrust then! O the paranoia!

Let's be clear, I say. I'm not hitting on you; I'm not a muckracking journalist. You seem interesting and you like to talk, right? If you're up for it, call me tomorrow.

She calls me a few minutes later, up for it. "It's not like I'll ever read it or anything."

In a coffee shop on Bleecker Street the next day, we sit down for tea. She looks different in the light of day, but not as different as she thinks she does. Even though this time I'm holding a pen instead of a pint glass, I still have trouble untangling the lines of the story. They flow out of nine's mouth biologically rather than chronologically, and my notebook becomes a failed mess of a family tree. There's a mother forced to flee Argentina for political reasons, taking refuge first in Peru and then in finishing school. There's a "crazy fuck" for a father who taught himself six languages and helped found a major Middle Eastern Airline, then fled Bahrain in the middle of the night, after being a non-Arab wheeler-dealer there got a tad too hot and being friends with the King ceased to help. She describes him as "intellectual and heady;" her mother as "tactile and warm." Both had multiple love affairs: Mom, with a French dentist whom nine bribed into not filling cavities (a Scandinavian was later recruited do the dirty job); Dad, with too many women to count. nine also thinks she might be Jewish. "Ovarian cancer runs in the family. That's a Jewish thing, isn't it?"

 A lifetime spent centrifuging around the globe has splattered the family across it; nine's older sister now lives in London, mom's in Buenos Aires, and dad's in D.C. Well, shit has Gone Down. nine's family has a flair for dramatics and a talent for disorder.

 When she was very young, nine and her sister were playing with fireworks in the backyard, and a magnesium flare burnt nearly half her body off. She spent three months in Paris in a burn unit, and although her skin, with the help of multiple grafts, has finally healed into a ribbed patchwork of flesh, much of whatever else got burnt still hasn't. Her mom, for instance, became an alcoholic. Her father, never very affectionate, became even more absent. This enraged her mother even more. When he finally did visit the hospital, her mother threw a bedpan at him. "Maricón de mierda!" she shrieked. At the Sacré Coeur in Paris, she held a shouting match with Jesus, and a priest had to usher her out. "Like a Latino soap opera," says nine, shaking her head.

 "I disassociated myself from gender in the hospital," says nine. And then, in art college in London, she fell in love with a girl. "She had the most beautiful collarbones. This vegetarian with absolutely crazy hair." Her fluted voice fairly sings with the recollection. "We collaborated on this art project that was a book we'd pass back and forth to each other, and I fell in love with her through her words. One day there was a page that said 'I am an elephant. What would you think of that? I was born in Morocco. What would you think of that?' And then it said, 'I'm terribly in love with you. What would you think of that?'"

 That was that. nine's grandmother, whom she adores, told her "Your biggest downfall will be women, just like your father." She may be onto something. After leaving the bar at which we'd met the night before, nine texted her girlfriend. "Will you be my wife?"

She's a woman of dark passions, nine. "I love melancholy," she admits. "Sometimes it's so heavy it hurts. The measure of love…is loss." She gets away with statements like these because her eyes are so dark, because her clenched fists are so tight, because her whole body fairly vibrates with sentiment. And at the same time she is so measuredly spoken, so academic and psychoanalytic, so self-admittedly non-existential, all of it in that damned lilting patrician cadence, the voice of a tilted foreign pinky finger. She has, I can tell, dissected herself with others besides me, to the point almost of having reified herself into whomever she described. She is both her father and mother: intellectual, heady, tactile and warm.

 nine's art reflects her global outlook and postmodern, fuck-it demeanor; flat, collage-y aesthetics, scorched colors, stylized fonts, industrial iconography, snippets of powerfully naked faces, an overall post-apocalyptic feel. Her website opens with a Borges quote and a loop of swingy ambient music, like the kind London's hippest boutique hotels pipe into their lobbies. She makes me think of another Borges quote: "All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

 Language is something we talk about for a very long time; she anthropomorphizes it, gives it character to the point of personality. Spanish she associates with children's talk, but it also communicates anger; Italian possesses elegance, a 'fastidious kind of beauty.' "In English I'm a condescending fuck," she says. But English transmits information effectively, and also carries humor. "France reminds me of the hospital," she says. "Doucement…le bassin, s'il vous plait. J'ai soif, merci. But it also does arrogance and discontent so well."

 Never far from language, however, is emotion, and we teeter back into its depths when nine describes a vision so grisly all I write is "I can't write," and all I remember is the image of a cheese grater grating skin into a stainless steel tub. "The burn ward is the worst place in a hospital," she says. At once private and public, she refuses to reveal her middle name, then calls me after we part to tell me not to use her first name either. But much else of what we speak is intimate. "It sucks to date me," she admits. "I'm fun, I'm a child, but my angst—" She laughs. "It's being Argentinean. What do you expect of the people who invented the tango?"
 Nathalie Jordi 2007-08-23T04:56:00+01:00 Expectations http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2007/07/expectations.html Look, I promise I can explain why I ended up alone at the bar in the St. Regis Hotel at one o'clock on Tuesday morning My computer had experienced that night the kind of contagious meltdown that incites a parallel...

Look, I promise I can explain why I ended up alone at the bar in the St. Regis Hotel at one o'clock on Tuesday morning My computer had experienced that night the kind of contagious meltdown that incites a parallel electrical fire to the brain and, after bidding the comatose plastic carcass adieu at the 24-hour Apple store on Fifth Avenue, a drink was in order. A big one.

 The last time I'd been at the St. Regis, two blocks away, was the day I'd bought that laptop. It seemed only fitting to grieve it with a colossal Manhattan. So I did. Joan Didion's After Henry and my crispy bowl of wasabi peanuts were plenty company, but the older man nursing a glass of Bordeaux to my right started talking, and the only polite thing to do was put the book down and listen.

Kenny seemed like he'd been waiting all evening for somebody at whom to speak. For the first half of my cocktail, he'd manhandled three ultra-tan Teutonic blonds who dressed their English with cute krautie accents. "Ach, Kenny," they giggled. "You ah so silly! Ach, du lieber mann." Their cleavage was pneumatic. They wore shoes so spikily unstable that when they finally strutted away, gold-chained handbags slung over shoulders, pinning down their blow-dried platinum hair, they walked like foals, knock-kneed and tentative.

 He took a few sips of wine, staring glumly at the Maxwell Parrish painting of Old King Cole that makes the bar so famous. He sighed. He sagged. I kept reading. The silence was painful. At this point, we were nearly the only ones left in the bar. We could only blame the vagaries of space and fate that had placed us on neighboring barstools.

 "Crazy German girls, huh?" Kenny'd been up to Calgary and back since the morning. He owns a luxury mall up there, and others, elsewhere. Canada, apparently, has more oil than anywhere else, and Calgary, apparently, is the center of the money the oil mints. This was news to me, but the facts check out. A Canadian journalist describes Kenny's mall as a "bank of po-mo, stucco storefronts, jutting up from the blacktopped prairie, bathed in halogen backlight." He describes Kenny as "Saskatchewan-born, California-based." It was easy to find him online. I googled "Ken, mall, Calgary, luxury." 122,000 results popped up. 122,001 now.

 Kenny has about six homes, five degrees, and has taught at Harvard and Yale. Or so he says. He was recently on a private plane with Oscar de la Renta and "the Dolce & Gabbana people." Or so he says. He refers to Bill Clinton as "Bill," as in, "When Bill and I last did business," and to Al Gore as "an idiot," insisting that George W. has an IQ one point higher than Al Gore. I look this up later. Al Gore's IQ shakes out at 133. No data is available on George W.'s IQ. But maybe Kenny knows something I don't. He implies as much. "Name-dropper," I taunt him. A defensive volley erupts.

 We are getting increasingly drunk, and increasingly candid. At one point I actually ask if he likes being rich. "Sure," he says. "It's pretty nice. But there's a lot of responsibility. You're in charge of a lot, and a lot of people besides. There are a lot of expectations." He sags ever so slightly more. Is the suit what makes him sag, or has the suit just evolved to sag along? He coughs, an eruption of phlegm. "There's a lot of horseshit. A lot. Of horseshit."

 The bar closes, and we get up to leave. "I'm staying at the Ritz," he says. "You're welcome to come. It's nice up there. No expectations."
 Nathalie Jordi 2007-07-10T07:23:00+01:00 Sometimes Living in New York Is Like Taking Part In A Massive Art Installation http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2007/06/sometimes-livin.html Amy J. makes me feel antediluvian. Petite, nattily dressed, hysterically blond and strictly business, she's come from college in Cincinnati to New York on a three-month internship at a Union Square design firm. Somehow she manages to cover both ends...

Amy J. makes me feel antediluvian. Petite, nattily dressed, hysterically blond and strictly business, she's come from college in Cincinnati to New York on a three-month internship at a Union Square design firm. Somehow she manages to cover both ends of the spectrum of reactions I receive when I ask strangers to lunch; she's at once the most delighted and the most scared. But that's the thing about Amy J.: she covers the ends of nearly every spectrum with which she engages. I've never seen anyone spread themselves so thinly. In Amy's world, this is both the safest and most daring way to be.

"I'm kinda into everything," she says in a voice that sounds like a machine gun shooting out rapid-fire piccolo notes, with shades of Joan Cusack. "I don't ever want to be one thing. I never want to be branded in just one way." She speaks in tongues that way, peppers her speech with as many grown-up words (Networking, Holistic, Niche, Watchword, Product-Driven) as she does teenage ones, especially Awesome!, the exclamation mark evoked aloud at every utterance. She is eager to please in an almost frantic way.

After living for two months in one of the vest-pocket rooms of a Canal Street art gallery, Amy has moved into a doorman apartment on Avenue B that she shares with three cute Southern boys, including a Goldman Sachs banker. The rent is the same, but in this apartment, she can actually stand up straight in her bedroom without hitting the ceiling with her head. "The other place had a bunch of French kids living there and a bunch of bad installation art, but it had no kitchen and you had to step over a homeless guy in the stairwell," she reminisces. My own rent in Brooklyn costs about a third less, but I get the discount available to New Yorkers who acquiesce to being unhip. Were Amy and the French kids part of the installation? I wonder aloud. "Maybe," she says uncertainly. "I thought that for a while." Either way, it was pretty cool. "It's like, I'm 21, I'm living in the city, everything's a little craaazy! No, it was cool!"

Amy's internship takes place at a cutting-edge design firm for whom she considers herself very lucky to be working. They specialize in what the industry has termed the next frontier: 'experience' design. "I'm really into it," enthuses Amy.

 So, what defines 'experience' design? According to Amy, it's conceiving of, say, laundry as an event rather than as clothes spinning in a centrifuge. "The solution to the laundry problem should be more than a product. Laundry's about ergonomics. It's about the chemicals. It's about keeping the socks from falling when you transfer them over to the dryer." It's about how you feel while you're folding. It's about the memories of laundry you had as youth. I am not being sardonic; it really is about those things. Do we agree?

 What Amy's company does, she explains, is redefine brands as all-encompassing experiences. Hotels hire Amy's colleagues to determine the lighting, the carpet, the coffee, the staff uniforms, the materials subject to a customer's touch, the perks they receive according to varying degrees of fidelity, the message suggested by the font of the monogrammed towels. Baudrillard illuminated the volumes that even elevator music and one's choice of bar snacks can speak; Amy's work makes a science out of manipulating signs like these to allure, to signify status and desirability. Doing so translates into money for everyone involved.
 The trick is to do it without overdoing it. Overbranding is antithetical to successful design. Why? Because, of course, it makes the process too transparent; people notice that they're being marketed to. And that's not good for business.

 "We look at rituals," Amy explains. "What's the ritual when you go to a restaurant? You give the hostess your name. She takes you to a table. She hands you a menu. Someone brings you water. Right? Well, we refine the rituals into an 'experience'." She's got the knack some people do for making manifest their punctuation; the quotation marks hook themselves around 'experience' without her needing to do the finger thing less facially expressive folk resort to. I'm looking confused, so she tries again. "Okay, look. Some people design coffee cups. But we think design should be holistic. So we ask, 'How does your coffee cup interact with the whole space?'"

 One technique currently rocking design research is the one trade journals call ethnography. Consultants visit, say, ten Starbucks shops in ten different parts of town and order a cup of coffee. They sit down and drink it. They look at the other people buying and drinking coffee. "I hate Starbucks, first of all," says Amy, making that face smart people do when they imagine getting caught tucking into a Big Mac coming out from the drive-thru. Amy's company specializes in taking on design projects from clients who are looking to "deepen their niche," in other words, multi-unit corporations who can charge more by appearing smaller. Like Coke requesting a design for a gazillion bottles that look good enough to suggest that only a limited number, like half a gazillion, were made.

 Here's another word the industry's loving: sustainable. Have you noticed it, too? Everyone's talking about sustainability. "That's the new watchword," confirms Amy. "And there sure is something to be said for green design and elements of sustainability. I'm totally into it." She's never heard of LEED, the US benchmark for green building design, but building vocabularies is a lifelong project.

 Our waitress interrupts with steaming panini. Amy eats distractedly, focused more on conversation than nutrition. She belongs to a new generation of midwestern women: taught the rules of fastidious propriety, but taught also to question them. This makes her ballsy and hesitant both. Corn-fed and wiry. On one hand she wears the silver signet ring she's had for years; on the other, a ludicrously large, fake pink stone, a party favor her colleague brought back from Paper Magazine's Oscar bash over the weekend.

 Amy has the chops to succeed in the modern world of New York City design, because she understands what it requires: distinct personal style (a non-overbranded brand), and a boatload of determination. The latter she has in spades; of her modus operandi regarding schoolwork she says, "You've got to calculate how you're going to get to that place where people are going to hate you." Of the former—well, she's working on it. She admires designers like Philippe Starck, Marc Newson, and Karim Rashid, all of whom are known for having formed a distinctly personal style, or as Amy calls it, "their own schtick." Of these we speak of Rashid the longest. "You have to give him respect," says Amy. "His style is so intensely him. Yeah, sometimes it's ridiculously tacky, but at least you know it's him." A few pointed web searches reveal Rashid a full member of the new school of holistic design about which Amy and I have been talking. Having already designed 2,000 products ranging from the Trump Towers to Lacoste sportswear to a Dirt Devil Hand Vac, Rashid has just written a book called Design Your Self: Rethinking the Way You Live, Love, Work, and Play, which explains how to optimize all areas of life—aesthetic and spiritual—including wardrobe, office space, love life, and diet. "Design is about the betterment of our lives," writes Rashid in his Karimanifesto. "Poetically, aesthetically, experientially, sensorially, and emotionally."

 Poetic design is based on a plethora of complex criteria: human experience, social behaviors, global, economic and political issues, physical and mental interaction, form, vision, and a rigorous understanding and desire for contemporary culture. Manufacturing is based on another collective group of criteria: capital investment, market share, production ease, dissemination, growth, distribution, maintenance, service, performance, quality, ecological issues and sustainability (there it is again!). The combination of these factors shape our objects, inform our forms, our physical space, visual culture, and our contemporary human experience. These quantitative constructs shape business, identity, brand and value. This is the business of beauty.

 In Rashid and Amy's world, fashioning sofas is packaging hard drives is prototyping silicone Yahoo! watches is designing the Limited Edition Hyundai Black Master Card for Korea. Vacuum cleaners and lamps notwithstanding, Rashid's business is image design, parsing and re-packaging identites from Brazil to Montenegro. It's this that he calls the business of beauty.

 Amy is learning the talk. "What's my visual language?" she asks aloud. "How can I develop my own brand?" She describes an idea she developed while working at Ford at her last internship. "I wanted a car that was me-driven in ways that go beyond color. Imagine a car geared to Girls on the Go, or a car for Gamers. You'd have different customizable options that you'd choose according to your personality." Perhaps what'll define Amy's personal style will be allowing others to express their own, made manifest by the patterns of their upholstery and the addition—or resolute absence—of an espresso machine in their glove compartment, as I once witnessed on Pimp Your Ride.

 I suspect that the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed version of Amy J. with whom I spoke will streamline seamlessly into the hard-hitting businesswoman she hopes to become, although when she articulates what that woman might resemble, she uses artist's terms. Amy's intelligence is patent and her savvy especially modern, of a post-MTV-generation kind. I would posit that, were it cut open and examined, her brain would mirror the Internet more than it would lateral, limited, flat, oh-so-'90s television. Those who make careers out of envisioning and shaping the future—designers, for example—are now sketching designs that consider the three-dimensional or even infinite universe. Amy, busy internalizing every experience New York offers her, is training herself to grow this kind of brain.

 If this makes her sound like a bit of an android, let me rephrase. She is excruciatingly human in a number of endearing ways. A sentence that begins uppitily with "Material is very important," is inevitably dashed to bits by the declaration that wood is fricking awesome.

 At the ripe old age of 21, Amy J. is more directed, focused and put-together than I may ever be. I take it back—she doesn't make me feel old. Just old-fashioned.
 Nathalie Jordi 2007-06-08T21:07:00+01:00 Pluralities of Reyad Farraj http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2007/02/post.html Given that I'd seen him around, I was expecting Reyad Farraj to look about thirty years old and slightly gangsta, with a shuffling step punctuated by the clip of gigantic Timberlands and shoulders steeled under a heavy parka. I'd noticed...

Given that I'd seen him around, I was expecting Reyad Farraj to look about thirty years old and slightly gangsta, with a shuffling step punctuated by the clip of gigantic Timberlands and shoulders steeled under a heavy parka. I'd noticed him on the stoop of John and Judy's apartment, smoking a cigarette as he mulled a plumbing problem with a tenant over in his mind.

The Reyad Farraj who showed up for breakfast wore a navy blue cable-knit sweater. He's thirty-six and gently jowly with fluffy coiffed hair, soft kind eyes and a lot more common sense than the boy described above. Reyad remembered meeting me too, except I had glasses then. I don't wear glasses, so this is unusual, but, you know, maybe he met my niece or something. Stranger things have happened in New York City.

We met at the Carroll Gardens Classic Diner, which looks, both inside and out, like it was built long before the fever of gentrification now whipping up both its Smith Street flanks. A waitress handed us twelve-page laminated menus that telescoped vertiginously from the simple to complex: first fried eggs, then fried eggs with bacon, then fried eggs with a bonanza of bacon, links and country ham; pancakes with maple syrup; then blueberry pancakes with fruit compote; then chocolate-chip pancakes with yogurt, walnuts and summer fruit. Both of us ordered something mid-level: Rey a Greek frittata, I a waffle with yogurt and blueberries. A platoon of Mexicans with very short forearms refilled our coffees as soon as they fell below half full. This they communicated via an elaborate system of hand signals. Behind us, the television blared Dr. Chipper infomercials. It was a very sunny day.

"The producer is the guy nobody knows," Reyad tells me. "Currently my role is limited to that, but I hope to expand my company so it encompasses finance, production, management, and distribution." After his transactional law business folded, for reasons described below and to which he refers in verbalized capital letters as The Eleventh, Rey began producing independent films. "I was repping writers and directors pro bono, and going to these film festivals, and I met this gentleman by the name of Mad Mathews," he recalls, "who, by the way, has just been named one of the top 25 to watch by Filmmaker magazine. He did, oh, he did Groupie, Lush Life, Planet Brooklyn—formerly Men Without Jobs—and we worked together on Jellysmoke, an urban drama, which just won the L.A. film festival!" This last fact makes him very happy, and his lips curl slightly upon hearing it aloud.

Rey is a classic American businessman in the mold of a Frank Sinatra song, only more of a lateral thinker and buoyant about what potential the future holds. The son of Palestinians who ran two clothing stores in Brazil for fifteen years until the country's economic collapse in the fifties, he was born and bred in Brooklyn, a word he expels from the back of his throat as "Bruh-k-lyn." Rey's parents settled on Flatbush Ave in the early 60s, and Rey spent his prepubescence fist-fighting the ten-year-olds who grew up in Carroll Gardens households that blamed the neighborhood's Arab-Americans for any ills committed by men with moustaches: Iran-Contra, the Pope being shot by Turkish Muslims. "Nothing actually bad ever happened," he reminisces. "It was just, oh, ok, we're gonna have to fight today. What's the big deal? Things were nice. And then the Eleventh happened."

Oh, we'll get to it, okay? Calm down.

Rey started with a premed degree at NYU, and then studied political science. He followed this with a master's in molecular biology, and, noting emerging opportunities in licensing law, finished with law school in Long Island. "I've always been interested in intellectual property," he tells me, his hands at folded rest on the Formica, his gaze earnest and composed. "Do you know what that is?" I nod; he follows: "I became an international business transaction attorney. We'd take the biotech firm technologies and license them out to Saudi and Gulf companies. You know—power systems, petrochemicals, circuit breaker factories, sand blasters." He was an American who spoke Arabic and at the same time an Arab fully fluent in American, capable of easy straddles. "The foreign market, that's where the money is." He had an office in Abu Dhabi and another on Broadway and Broome. ("You know Silicon Alley?" he says. "Alley, not Valley.")

Nearly the whole sentient world has a September 11th story. Mine's not very exciting; it takes place in Providence, overhearing scandalized librarians at the checkout desk of the science library, and huddled around televisions with friends, frozen, for much of the week. But one of the startling things about moving to New York, even five years into the aftermath, is noticing how fresh wounds still are, how much was lost even by New Yorkers unconnected to dead people. My roommate, for instance, lost his girlfriend to the September-11th-prompted realization that she wanted to be with someone else. Restaurants folded; weddings were canceled; hotels stayed empty for months.

Rey's business effectively imploded. Oil and gas continued trading, but all other deals were stuck in a holding pattern. The Saudis started doing business with Malaysians and Indonesians instead. "They still call on the holidays," he says, grinning wanly.

The 'tudinal waitress who's made the same loud wisecracks to every table in the room brings us our food, which is much better than I'd expected, having prematurely judged the coffee. Rey's frittata is meaty in the middle and lacy on the edges, and the fruit on my waffle is surprisingly ripe for February, crackling with flavor. The waffle is seared crunchy on the outside and captures the maple syrup in limpid pools that sink in at an imperceptible pace.

So Rey removed his intellectual-property expertise from industry and applied it to show-biz. He now says things like "Mary Harran, just iconic to the New York independent film scene. You know her?" and harrumphs, a cigar and potbelly about four years away, about what "a wonderful, wonderful woman" she is.

"I'll stay in Brooklyn for ever and ever," he says at one point. "There's tolerance and diversity here you don't see anywhere else." This is a surprising statement coming from someone who got beaten up on the way to school every day, but he's an optimistic guy and the conversation's on an upswing.

Reyad, who (in his spare time, evidently) is currently advising a foundation helping to form a dual-language Arab-English academy named after Khalil Gibran, hopes to run for Brooklyn Borough President one day. I tell him I'd vote for him, and I would—his intelligence veritably crackles and he talks to people in a level, mellow, Bill Clinton kind of way. "You can trust me," say his eyes. Clumsily, I spill coffee all over my crotch, and it burns briefly, then makes me feel like I both need to and have just peed my pants.

On our way back to his apartment, the snow crunches and glints under our feet and he tells me landlord horror stories about appalling tenants, like the ones who didn't pay for a year and still refused to leave. The spilt coffee is now frozen and makes me feel I'm walking around in a parka top and wet bikini bottom. "Being a New York landlord, well, it's a wonderful asset class to have, but it means you meet a lot of weird people," Rey says, shaking his head. One might expect a writer who interviews strangers to meet a lot of weird people too.

Sometimes, though, they're just normal and nice. Back at John's I wonder aloud whether the guy we see smoking on their stoop is Reyad Farraj. No, John says, that's his nephew, then after a beat, follows: Oooh, but he'd make a great interview!

 Nathalie Jordi 2007-02-21T11:00:04+00:00 What Happens When You Cross Nancy Drew With Dita von Teese? http://www.eatingwithstrangers.com/2007/02/what_happens_wh.html Polly Patria (I still don't know her last name) entered my life late one night, inserting first one leg, then the other, and finally the rest of her long body, bent in paper-clip fashion, through my friend Lincoln's fifth-floor window....
 Polly Patria (I still don't know her last name) entered my life late one night, inserting first one leg, then the other, and finally the rest of her long body, bent in paper-clip fashion, through my friend Lincoln's fifth-floor window. She surveyed us levelly, the perfect arch of her eyebrows unperturbed, parked her designer-denimed ass down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette with long, elegant fingers. It must have been three o'clock in the morning.

I was at standing at the stove, having decided to make pancakes. A raid on Lincoln's shelves had uncovered, besides pancake mix, some wasabi, chard, honey, onion, and a bag of crunchy-chewy Honduran fried peanuts the likes of which none of us had ever seen before. The intrepid combination of ingredients tasted surprisingly good, possibly more attributable to our blitzed states than my cooking.

Lincoln went to bed, and Wilson and I stayed up watching Patria wrap her fuchsia scarf around her head, fashioning a sort of swollen headband that bandaged back her explosion of bleached-blond hair. This condensed her peaked, thin features so they seemed to radiate from the inside out, framed by her hot-pink punk's gloriole. And over the course of a great many more cigarettes, which she kept close to her face at all times, drawing in little breaths, her motions birdlike, she told us a story whose veracity we spent some time deliberating once she left, so implausible it seemed.

I met her again a few weeks later, for brunch, and asked her to tell it again. She did, and it matched. I now believe her.

-------------------

It begins, unlike most of ours, in Wyoming and Alaska, the two American states with the lowest population densities. (Wyoming plays host to an average of 5.25 people per mile, Alaska to 1.16—New Jersey, the most densely populated state, squeezes in 1,175 bodies per mile.) Polly's dad wore a carpenter's hat in Wyoming and a crab fisherman's in Alaska. "It's the world's most dangerous profession," she tells me, chewing on her lower lip. "Everybody does a bunch of speed and pulls up these ice-encrusted crab pots that are liable to flip the boats. They've done whole shows on it for the Discovery Channel." Polly's mom floats around the world on Peace Corps projects; Mauritania, Morocco, Ukraine. They divorced shortly after Polly moved to Seattle, the day she turned seventeen.

Life had already interrupted, had started interrupting several years before, when she went to Quito as an exchange student. The 'wrong crowd' had something to do with it. "We were doing coke between classes and stuff. Chalk powder would make me start fiending. It was kind of extreme." The school kicked her out, but no one seemed to care, so she and new boyfriend Ivan ("quite the cokehead") spent their weekdays in the Mushroom Valley, where Quechuas led them to hallucinogenics. "We'd have to take a bus for half an hour, hitchhike another half hour, and walk for an hour, but still we went three, four times a week." Eventually, they headed north to Calí and snuck across the Colombian border. "I wasn't in very good touch with my family then," she says, tossing her head, insouciant. "I kept taking money out, so they knew I was alive, but my mom was on the point of filling out a missing persons report. Eventually someone from the embassy found me and told me to call her." She was about to board a plane to Colombia.

Our food arrives: eggs benedict, crab and salmon; home fries; fruit salad. Fawn-like and skittish as Patria is, she packs away most of her teeming plate and drinks cheerfully, taking dainty swallows frequently enough to outdrink me. "Cheers to a good story," we clink.

After Colómbia, Wyoming hardly cut the mustard. So Polly headed for Seattle, where she found work at the youth hostel. In December 1996, she flew to Las Vegas to see Phish perform. Coincidentally, one of the band members was on the same flight. "I didn't look like a Phishhead," she remembers. "I was wearing, like, a blazer or something. I looked like an English writer." Her shirt on the day we brunch depicts a silhouette of a woman with a star for a crotch, and she's wearing a Suicide Girls hoodie. Hardly a look associated with jodhpurs, but she's the kind of girl who survives by on strength of cutting cheekbones, slim thighs and her wry, sly smile; whatever the apparel, she looks at once capable of freezing and warmth.

"He just swooped me up," she says. "I was like a deer in headlights. I'd never been to Vegas before, and my plan was to take the bus to the hostel. Instead, I was suddenly in a limo on my way to Caesar's Palace." She's quiet for a second. "It was a crazy few days—I remember a mother-daughter yodeling duo, Malachi from Children of the Corn was there, I mean, some crazy shit!—and when they left, I went back to the hostel. All I could think was…what just happened?"

The musician had her number, but she didn't hear from him again until March, when he called from Dublin to say he was on his way to Seattle. She went to the show. "Everyone's dancing and doing their drugs, and I'm there, stone-cold sober. He'd just gotten engaged. And he came up and said, so…how about a dip in the hot tub?" The band and various groupies all lounged, stylized, within the swirling chlorine. Later that night, Polly, the guy, and a woman named Lindy had sex in practice room under the stage. It was the first time, she thinks, he'd ever cheated on his girlfriend. At this moment Patria moves the fuchsia scarf from her neck back up to her head, which nimbus makes her look at once vivacious and consumptive, like an L.M. Montgomery character destined for a blowsy life and tragic end, volatile and vulnerable, but potent, heady.

Polly's brother was living in Prague, so she moved there shortly after, and hung out for a couple of years. Then she moved to Japan and spent six months pouring sake, singing karaoke and making polite conversation with Japanese businessmen. "I liked being there. The money was good, like $40-50 an hour, although they taxed the shit out of us." I ask her, is that like being a prostitute? "No." She laughs. "Only the girls who did the meth did the sexy dance."

Patria's next stop: Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her best friend from the Phishing days was there, engaged to an Oxycontin-doing, beer-drinking fisherman, and invited her to stay awhile (the fisherman, meanwhile, died; the friend is now an elected Green Party official). Polly got a job at a restaurant called The Studio. "It was me and all these salty Gloucester girls—'Eh, got a coupla kids, getting my real estate license,' but good people." They drank next door at this place called the Rudder, where, one night, she met the owner's son Mark.

"He was that whole New England WASPy thing: Exeter, Brown, an architect. He lived in Boston. I was on my way home and was wearing my bike helmet. All these blinking lights around my face. He'd never seen anything quite like it." Her large earrings jangle dance spastically to much the same effect. Polly's saving grace: despite her ice-princess looks and self-involvement, she possesses an appealing goofiness, a genuine ability to poke fun at herself that is really endearing.

Once the season ended, she thought about going back to Japan, but Mark said he'd miss her. "It's funny to say, but the harder thing for me to do was stay and see if it'd work between the two of us. It was a novelty to me, this new adult life, like playing dress-up." They dated for two years, and one day he told her they were going away for the weekend and that she should wear something nice. Drinking a ginger ale, he proposed. "The ring was beautiful: a square princess cut, a striking diamond, really clean. He did a good job." And like that, the most unlikely couple in Gloucester, Mass, got married.

A call interrupts our conversation. "Girl, what's the haps, the haps?" she yelps into the phone, a sleek little number. She clicks off. "That's my pot dealer. I gotta little pickup this afternoon—" and, slipping the phone back into her pocket, picks up right back where she left off—"What were we talking about? Japan--meth--money---oh, my husband."

If in the beginning, Mark and Patria complemented each other, before long, she starved him as much as he suffocated her. "He'd go to bed, I'd go into the bathroom and get stoned and talk on the phone." Mark had wanted children by the time he was forty (he was 36, she was 26), and she'd assumed that "that maternal thing" would kick in by the time she was twenty-seven. It didn't.

I ask her how she knew it was over. "I'd been telling him for years that all I wanted to do was go dancing. And for my birthday, he takes me to the SYMPHONY?"

So Polly Patria, single, moved to New York. Gone was the car payment, the mortgage. All she had was a cell phone bill to pay. She found a Craigslist roommate and an Australian surfer.

A year later, she's still here. Managing a shoe store in Soho, bursting in spectacularly through fifth-floor windows, finding Sunday mornings perfect for downing mimosas, wearing that scarf wrapped around her head like a furry fuchsia mane. A modern-day Gibson Girl who wouldn't say no to a crack pipe, if it came from the hands of someone intriguing enough.

I think she's rad.
 Nathalie Jordi 2007-02-15T18:14:21+00:00