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Dear friends, I am back from Deepest Suburbia, Pennsylvania, back from the actual factory part of the box factory, back from a frankly tiring week.  Even as I did have some nice quality time with my parents, I’m still thrilled to be back home with Lloyd, and I can’t wait to go out and play in the city tomorrow.  I was going to save posting for tomorrow, after the market run, on which I hope to buy more grapes for the grape tart recipe I’ve promised to post.  Then this morning, on the news station to which my parents listen for the traffic reports, the morning drive-time guy announced that today is the 56th anniversary of the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Normally I feel a bit of a scoundrel when I dip into the archives, but tonight I make no apologies.  It has been nearly three years since the magical weekend of which I wrote, and it feels like yesterday.  It still feels like magic, and as far as I’m concerned, Miss Neal still rules the universe.

Apologies in advance, dear friends, if the following story contains elements of name-dropping and braggery. I will try as best as I can not to be obnoxious, but it has been such a long time since I had a moment of pure, unvarnished, gleeful pleasure, the kind that kept me at absorbed and rapt attention to the speaker. That moment came yesterday afternoon at the Chesapeake Theatre at Harford Community College, the speaker was Patricia Neal, the subject was Gary Cooper. As long as I live, I will never forget the sound of That Voice, the voice almost unchanged from the one in Hud and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Subject Was Roses: “Oh, I adored him! He was a lovely man and I adored him.” That voice was accompanied by a grand sweeping of her arms, as if she were trying to take the memory of Gary Cooper and hug us all with it. I know I felt hugged by it.

It is an awfully neat story, and an awfully grand adventure; I knew it would be, but I seriously, sorely underestimated how grand it was going to be. I have been at table for two hours, trying to find an eloquent way to say that I am a lucky woman, but eloquence is failing me today, so I might as well opt for plain-spoken truth. I am a lucky woman.

Lloyd and I spent the weekend with my dad and stepmom in Maryland. Going to visit the ‘rents is always a good thing; we relax, we eat well, we drink red wine out of burgundy glasses; we watch Food Network and loudly berate the on-air talent (I find myself turning into Patrick Star and bellowing “Who *are* you people?” at the likes of Michael Chiarello and the low-carb guy); we fuss over, and are fussed over by, the 92-pound American Eskimo puppy and the 15-pound black cat and the 27-pound (this is not a typo) orange cat. We did plenty of that this weekend. We also went to a special screening at the Chesapeake of The Day the Earth Stood Still on Friday night. Between myself, my dad and my Lloyd, we have probably seen this movie a total of 100 times. I never tire of it. I never tire of watching Patricia Neal, cowering in terror before the robot Gort, saving Earth by crying “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!” (My father loves this scene so much that he made me promise to physically restrain him, lest he leap up in his chair and start cheering at that moment. Trust me when I say that this was not an easy thing to do, as my dad is a big fellow.) But it has been just long enough since I’ve seen The Day the Earth Stood Still that I had forgotten all the other little perfect moments of that movie: the sheer creepiness of the scene where the world is shut down for half an hour; the scene where Klaatu provides the clues for Professor Barnhardt to solve the puzzle on the blackboard; the scene at the beginning that always made me cry as a little kid, where Klaatu is wounded by a panicked soldier as he tries to present a gift for the President; the scene where Patricia Neal’s would-be fiance decides to turn the fugitive Klaatu in to the Pentagon and says, with braggadocio, “You’ll feel different when you read about me in the papers,” and she says, with wonderment, “I feel different now”; and, really, any scene where Michael Rennie has a lot of screen time. I had forgotten what a fine, fine man Michael Rennie was.

I would have been perfectly happy just watching the movie, but the college had a treat for us, namely Miss Neal, who took introductory questions from HCC professor Wayne Hepler. I was glad to hear that Michael Rennie was as suave as I’d always hoped he’d be ("I loved Michael! He was a wonderful man!"), and I was especially tickled by Miss Neal’s remembering that she continually cracked up on set ("oh, I thought it was hysterical"), so much so that during the shooting of the pivotal taxi scene, Michael Rennie asked her, “Now, Patricia, do you plan on laughing like that in every scene?” If you watch that scene closely, you can see a moment where he almost loses it, where he comes close to breaking character and laughing.

The following afternoon, we went back to the Chesapeake for Professor Hepler’s interview with Miss Neal. To say that she was delightful is to understate the case grossly. She was entertaining and lyrical and funny, candid about her attraction to married men ("oh, I was awful! Just awful!") and generous in her assessment of nearly everyone she worked with. She was full of affection for Gary Cooper (with whom she had had an affair for five years, and whose picture still adorns a wall in her bedroom), for Cary Grant, for Michael Rennie, for Andy Griffith (her co-star in A Face in the Crowd), even for Ronald Reagan, with whom she’d become friends while filming her first movie role, in John Loves Mary. Her voice was saturated with kindness as she remembered Audrey Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck; she practically glowed as she remembered one of her teachers in Packard, Kentucky, who fostered her love of acting. She was generous and loving about her ex-husband, Roald Dahl, calling his New Yorker short stories “fantastic” and saying that he had “done a really lovely job” of helping her recover from the three strokes she suffered in a single night when she was 39 years old and pregnant with their daughter Lucy. (Dahl’s efforts at rehabilitation were a source of controversy; many people thought that his rehabilitation regime for her was brutal, but if Miss Neal has any negative feelings about them, they certainly weren’t forthcoming in the interview.) About the only negative word she had in the whole interview was for George Peppard, her co-star in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Apparently she had met him on a previous job and they had got along well, but by the time they started shooting Tiffany’s, Peppard had undergone a complete personality change and become, in her words, “a horrible man! Horrible!...and years later, when I heard he had died, I was glad!” Considering that Miss Neal appeared to adore just about everyone she had ever met or worked with, I can only come to the conclusion that success did indeed spoil George Peppard, and if he felt any bitterness about spending the last years of his professional life on The A-Team, well, he had it coming.

Dear friends, I so wish that there were an extant audio or video file to which I could link, because my transcribing all of this doesn’t begin to do Miss Neal justice. How I wish you could have heard about her speak of her children, of the terrifying day when her infant son Theo was struck by a taxi and was plunged into months of surgeries and close calls, and of the loss of her oldest daughter, Olivia, who contracted a fatal case of measles when she was seven. ("She was a wonderful child, a wonderful wonderful girl...But she is no more, and has not been for a very very long time.") Spoken with sadness, but without tears, with resignation and with deep, deep love.) How I wish you could have heard how smoothly she was able to move from discussing the hardest moments of her life to the most frivolous and whimsical, like the ads for Maxim instant coffee she did in the 1970’s ("It was a job! I wanted to work! And I loved it, it was wonderful coffee!") And I really wish I could show you the look on her face during the discussion of Gary Cooper’s affair with Ingrid Bergman. “I don’t know how many people knew about that,” she said.

“Well, we know it now,” Professor Hepler said, gesturing at the audience and smiling.

Miss Neal looked at all of us, and drawled, “Spread it arouuuuuuund.” The expression on her face was priceless.

I didn’t think the weekend could get any better than this. If we had left at the end of the q&a session and just returned to the ‘rents’ house, my weekend would have been made. But we didn’t. It turns out that the HCC radio station manager, who coordinated the weekend’s events, is good friends with my dad, and thus it was that Lloyd and I were invited to join the station manager and his wife and her relatives, my dad and stepmom, and Miss Neal and her assistant at dinner. At the post q&a cocktail party, she had been looking tired, and we figured she would probably send her regrets and not come to dinner, but come to dinner she did, and she got her second wind quickly. My dad was seated next to her, and several pictures were taken of the two of them staring at each other with adoration. My stepmom was seated across from her; at one point I saw Miss Neal holding both of C’s hands in hers, telling her that her mother had died shortly before her 104th birthday. “I think you’ll live to 103, too,” said C. Miss Neal looked thoughtful. “Oh, I don’t think I want to live to 103. But I think 96 would be good, don’t you?” Lloyd and I sat at the far end of the table and watched, captivated but relieved that the pressure would not be on for us to be clever and charming with the famous movie star. Unfortunately, my dad had other ideas and announced to Miss Neal that his daughter and son-in-law had accompanied them. “Where are they?” she called. “Oh, the flowers are in front of you.” Lloyd obligingly moved the flowers. “Oh, there you are,” she said, and I thought, this is so cool! Patricia Neal is waving at Lloyd! It was at this point that I decided to screw up my courage and move down the table and—gulp—actually chat with Miss Neal. We spent some more time oo-ing and ahh-ing over Cary Grant and Michael Rennie, and I had the sense that if it hadn’t been so late in the evening, I could have had a good two hours’ worth of Gary Cooper stories from her.

“We should get a picture of you two together, for your dad,” said the station manager’s wife, who had been sitting to my right during dinner. I was about to demur prettily, sure that Miss Neal had had enough flashbulbs popping in her face for one day, when she turned to me. “What a good idea,” she said. “Shall we hold hands?” We moved closer to each other, we moved our heads closer together, and I knew the smile I was smiling was not a pretty one; it was the kind of smile you smile when you have had more than a little wine and are anticipating a bright flash in a dark restaurant. I tried to tone the smile down a bit, make it a bit prettier and less frightening, and then I felt my hand being clasped by the woman who saved the world with “Klaatu barada nikto,” the woman who handed George Peppard a check and said “you’re entitled to a week’s paid vacation” with a now-understandable relish, the one that Paul Newman called “the one that got away” in Hud, and I knew that smile wasn’t going anywhere.

Dear friends,

The mood and circumstances around here demand a long victory lap and plenty of celebrating and plan-making, but alas, time demands only a peek and a wave hello.  I’m at my parents’ house this week, working at the LuthorCorp plant outside of Philadelphia.  Because I’m working on a special project for LuthorCorp during the day—no, we’re not making kryptonite—and because I don’t like to monopolize the rents’ computer at night, my online time this week will be almost nonexistent.  Yet I could not wait until the end of the week, when I come back to New York, to thank every one who commented, or who called, or wrote, in response to last Thursday’s “My Life as a Droopy cartoon” post.  I had written it as a necessary battle cry against the things that made me miserable.  I had no idea that it would strike such a chord.  I certainly had no idea that so many of you were still reading, or would respond.  As much as it sounds like fishing for compliments, I promise that it is not.  I know that new content around here has been sparse, and what content there is isn’t up there with the better work I’ve done in the past, so I really believed that I had taken a good thing, i.e. the friendship and goodwill and meeting-of-minds that I had found here, and essentially lost it.  To discover otherwise astonishes and gladdens me.  Thank you, everyone.  You really do meet the nicest people on the internets.

I will be home on Friday night, and I will have stories to tell.  They will not, I repeat not, be about LuthorCorp.

(Cross-posting to PTMYB and to Flickr, because I’m a cow that way.)

If you watch cartoons the way Lloyd and I watch cartoons, you have probably seen all of the old Tex Avery Droopy cartoons about 5,000 times.  Thus you would be familiar with the theme of Droopy attempting to fight a bull/slay a dragon/win a competition to win the heart of a princess/starlet/some other beautiful girl, only to fail, repeatedly.  In every cartoon, Droopy sits down, pulls a photograph of his lady love out of his coat pocket, cries, "Oh, my darling, I’m a failure," and bursts into sobs.  As poor Droopy cries his heart out, the bull/dragon/nogoodnik peeks over his shoulder, pulls out a pencil and draws a mustache on the picture of the girl, laughing meanly as he does so.  At that point, Droopy dries his tears, walks up to the villain, stares eyeball-to-eyeball and announces, "You know what?  THAT MAKES ME MAD." Then he proceeds to beat the hapless villain senseless, swinging him back and forth by the tail, smacking him roundly and then throwing him off into the horizon.  He gets the girl, of course.

Dear friends, it’s been a long, tedious 2007, pretty much a never-ending font of that moment when Droopy is convinced he has failed in his quest.  It has been a year of disappointments, losses and heartbreaks, and each week has been worse than the one that preceded it.  The few real moments of sweetness I was able to achieve vanished into a puff of recrimination, failure and hostility within days, if not hours.  This past week, for reasons too numerous—and personal—to enumerate, has been a horror show, one in which I have not been able to sit still for fifteen minutes without bursting into tears, where the voices of more than three people at a time made my skin hurt (a real problem if you live in a city of eight million people), and where I could actually feel my own body compressing, curling in on itself, like a boiled shrimp.  Riding the train into work yesterday, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the subway window, knitting a sock.  My head was bent, my shoulders hunched to my ears, my shapeless black clothing doing me no favors.  I looked ancient.

Today started pretty much as yesterday had:  a series of slow, dreadful dreams; oversleeping to the point of missing the gym; dragging myself into the living room, hoping that the tv and the coffee and yesterday’s NY Times food section would provide even a little distraction from the terrible thoughts pinballing around my head; a commute into work that made my skin hurt again; a day full of LuthorCorp-based indignities, an urge to bolt for the door and run, run until I could find a car or a bus or anything that would get me as far away from my physical surroundings as possible—last time I checked, I was in Thermopolis, Wyoming—and only, only after I’d exhausted myself from running, would I call Lloyd and tell him to get his ass on a plane and run away with me.  I had spent the previous week trying to sort out why I was on such a precipitous slide, alternating hours of frenetic talking with hours of Easter Island silence, back and forth with Lloyd, with Momerina, with Bunni, with my blogging pals, with my good friends at the office, with girlfriends and boyfriends online and IRL.  I had talked and talked and talked, raged and wept and popped Excedrin and ranted about how I felt like I was catching a cold without actually catching a cold.  I made the decision to postpone the LSAT until December, knowing that there was no way I could take this pinball brain into the test center, and then instantly hated myself for postponing.  I had fallen asleep sitting up, laid awake listening to myself blink, went to work and stared at nothing for hours.  Nothing helped.

At least I thought nothing helped.  I suspect now that I was wrong, that all that talking and raging and Easter Island silence were pushing me toward something that I just couldn’t see.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that at 4:30 this afternoon, something snapped, or clicked, deep inside.  I thought of every moment of pain, fear, sadness and dread that have been clanging in my head, and I heard a voice:  "You know WHAT?"

This, dear friends, is officially It.  No more tears.  No more insecurity.  No more terror.  No more worrying that I am a horrible fraud, and that it’s only a matter of time before everyone discovers what a nematode I really am.  No more use of words like "nematode" in self-description.  No more crying over anything that happens at work.  No more worrying if I could have effected a different outcome on circumstances outside my control.  No more contorting to please people who will not be pleased.  No more fat jokes.  No more turning away from mirrors.  No more wincing at my reflection anywhere.  No more running away from cameras as if they were live grenades.  No more apologizing for baking.  No more apologizing for knitting.  No more indifferent friendship.  No more curling up, shrimplike, when I could be running my fingers through Lloyd’s hair.  No more watching bad reality tv when I could be on the phone with my parents.  No more missing birthdays.  No more late Christmas cards.  No more thinking about the old boyfriends who broke my heart when I should be running logic puzzles.  No more sleeping in when I could be in the weight room or on the track or in the pool, swimming the silly little crawl that shouts out "First time swimming in 30 years," but still gets me from one end of the pool to another.  No more shapeless black clothing.  No more shrinking away when someone on the street makes a comment about my ass, as though it were my fault for existing.  No more false cheer.  No more lost bonuses.  No more sloppy seconds.  No more no more.

My beautiful friend Shauna is a walking sandwich board for the power of saying yes.  There are better things to which to say yes than all of the above.  This starts now.  It’s high time that I got the girl.  (So to speak.

Caution:  The following post is light on common sense and heavy on the photography, for which I apologize to my dial-up-using friends.

Call it Bakerina’s Paradox:  I’ve been a bit down of late, as those unfortunate enough to speak with me lately know, and even when I’m feeling just fine, I can be brought low in an instant by baking gone wrong, like a cake that falls apart upon decanting from the tin, or bread that collapses on its journey from brotform to baking stone.  Yet these would-be macarons, which are about as wrong as baking can get, left me not despondent but amused:

Before I deconstruct these little miseries, though, I do owe everyone who has visited this page, as well as those of you who have called, written, offered advice and goodies and generally been just plain good folks, a little explanation and a lot of apology.  Yes, I have been getting your messages; I’ve just been a pill about acknowledging them, and for that, I’m sorry.  (Confidential to Pauline:  The antipodean sunshine has been very, very, very welcome.  Thank you, my dear.) No, I’ve not been ill, although I’m slightly under the weather now with a mild cough/laryngitis cycle that may be part of the annual autumnal viral cloud, or may be something I picked up in LuthorCorp’s new office, which is literally being constructed around us.  Lloyd, however, was very sick through most of August and part of September with a bad bronchial infection.  He’s better now, and once again able to sleep on his back, to my deep and copious relief.  The LuthorCorp office move took place over Labor Day weekend, and about the only good thing I can say about it is that the people in my immediate cubicle bank are friends:  they’re smart, they make me laugh all day long, we all have each other’s backs when we need help, and we have each other’s ears when one of us needs to let off a little steam.  We are all sitting closer to a window that gives us more light, as well as a better view of Park Avenue and 49th Street, and I’ll never say no to more light.  On the other hand, LuthorCorp with more light is still LuthorCorp, and I’m still chafing at the bit, still longing to escape, but not in a bridge-burning, finance-ruining way, especially now that I’ve been reminded just how sexy health insurance coverage can be.  There is also the small matter of the LSAT, now less than two weeks away.  Until Friday evening, the LSAT was merely a looming deadline, a test where the prep this time around has been difficult and stressful, much more so than it was last year, probably because I’m feeling an increased sense of urgency about getting into school.  Friday night, alas, brought even more unwelcome news:  Because my supervisor is needed to cover the workload of an outgoing new mom, I am needed to cover my supervisor’s work—including a two-week business trip to Philadelphia, right smack in the middle of which is the test date—on which I am scheduled to be at a test center in Manhattan.  Fortunately, my supervisor is a friend and a kind woman; she knows all about the LSAT plan and has been both stalwart in her support and impressive in her discretion.  She swears that we will find a way to make this work, and she will find a way to keep me in New York for the test, but my already-tenuous concentration and confidence have both been broken, and I’ve been considering an option I had considered untenable until now, namely postponing the test and trying again in December.  Add to all this the usual hash of lack of sleep, lack of exercise, lack of deep green leafy vegetables and garden-variety insecurity, shake well and serve on toast points, and you have one weepy, navelgazing, utterly tedious bakerina.

But I’m sure, dear friends, that you did not come here for weepiness, navelgazing or tedium—which is good, because that’s not what I’m here for, either.  You are here for silly stories about food, and tonight I am more than happy to deliver.

Laurie Colwin once wrote that terrible things can happen in the kitchen to anyone, even experienced cooks, but it’s still cold comfort when it happens to you, especially when that terrible thing is still in your kitchen.  These were supposed to be blackcurrant macarons, a variation of the beautiful recipe posted by Jen the Bread Freak at The Barmy Baker, who, in turn, found it at Tartelette.  Because I am a mad fool for blackcurrant desserts, I bought as many half-pints of blackcurrants as I could this summer, and turned them all into blackcurrant puree, ready to be turned into something wonderful.  I found that wonderful thing in the dream of a blackcurrant macaron, almond-based macarons flavored with blackcurrant puree, sandwiched together with blackcurrant buttercream.  It sounded like heaven in a teacup—and, to be honest, still does.  In hindsight, I should have remembered that if you replace a solid flavoring (like espresso powder) with a liquid (like fruit puree), you need to either subtract an equivalent amount of another liquid ingredient, or increase the amount of dry ingredients.  I did neither of these, and when I ended up with a batter so loose that it poured out of the pastry bag before I could even give it a squeeze, I knew that only trouble could lie ahead.  I soldiered on anyway.  What I got was certainly edible, essentially 50 little discs of blackcurrant-flavored pavlova, but nothing that I could get off the sheet pan intact, much less sandwich together with buttercream.

Ah, well.  I still have some blackcurrant puree left, and I think I know what changes I need to make for a workable recipe.  In the meantime, I can appreciate how pretty this stuff looks as you put it together:

Really, I should look this good when I fall short of expectations. 

The good news, dear friends, is that I managed to bake something else today, and had much, much better luck with it.  Stay tuned.

Apologies, dear friends.  This is not the post I wanted to write after nearly three weeks of radio silence.  There are better words in me than these, but I can’t seem to get them onto the page this morning.  I suspect that fatigue has something to do with it, for this August has been a tiring month.  Any rest and rejuvenation that came from my week of archive-diving in Connecticut pretty much evaporated on my first day back at LuthorCorp, where the usual box-based hilarity was augmented by our upcoming office move, taking place this weekend.  Under the best circumstances an office move is a pain the neck, but this particular office move has been a difficult one for me, calling up feelings I thought I had buried long ago.

(Well, yes, there is a story behind that somewhat provocative sentence.  One of these days, I really should tell it.)

In addition to this emotionally interesting office move, as well as the normal course of business in the box factory (including covering for the busiest woman with the most thankless job in the whole organization), I have also been living under the looming shadow of the LSAT, which is just under four weeks away.  I’m running a lot of drills, trying to improve both my speed and accuracy on the logic puzzles, but every time I try to breathe deeply, absorb the fact patterns and decipher the unwritten assumptions in each puzzle, I can literally feel my mind running into the brick wall that separates it from full comprehension.  Depending on what time I start studying at nights and on weekends, I run into this wall anywhere from four to ten times a night.  You run into that many brick walls at a time, and after a while it starts to leave marks.  I have been reminded by friends, parents, spouse, champions all, that if I keep working at the puzzles, the outcome of this test will be much, much better than the one I took in December.  I know they are right, but I’m not feeling it just yet.

I will also admit to a little distraction—hell, no, outright worry—because Lloyd is in the grip of a bad, bad bronchial infection. Two weekends ago he picked up a cough, which we thought was viral, passed on to him by the woman who sat behind us on the bus from Hartford to Danbury, coughing all the way.  A week ago, his cough getting worse and worse, Lloyd woke up and told me that one of his ears was numb.  Within 24 hours, he emerged from the doctor’s office with a battery of prescriptions for antibiotics, decongestants and cough suppressants.  He is now midway through his antibiotics, and while he is getting better, he is far from well, and he still has to sleep in a sitting position if he wants to get any rest.  I am amazed that he hasn’t cracked a rib from coughing, and I am well beyond frustrated at my inability to do anything to make him better.  I can make tea, and that’s about it.

If this all sounds depressing, or tedious, well, it is.  But I also know that it’s all temporary—we’ll settle into the new office, Lloyd will get better, the LSAT will be over soon enough, and at any rate is just a test—and that there will be better stories to tell.  I know they’re right around the corner, because I have proof:

Confidential to ‘mouse:  Relax.  It’s only a little yarn porn, it’ll be over soon enough, and when it is, I promise you’ll be smiling.

(There you go, ‘mouse.  I’ll bet you’re already feeling better.)