I was supposed to do a lunch time poster session, really a resource table, at the Teaching Academy Summer Institute, on Tuesday. It should have been a nice morning – if I had gotten home when I was supposed to, on Monday evening, I could’ve been at the Institute for the morning’s programs, one of which was a performance by students who are part of First Wave, “a cutting-edge multicultural artistic program for incoming students.” But, since Delta didn’t manage to get me back to Madison until like 10:30 Tuesday morning, I just cabbed home, dropped my bags and drove out there. Fortunately the 2:00 meeting I was supposed to go to at the library school canceled, so after the resource table, I went home.
The cats were so mad at me for being gone, somebody puked on my bed. While the bedspread was in the drier, I sacked out and my two and Hammie got into bed with me, and even Kahn came into my bedroom and lay down on the floor.
It was good that I got a chance to rest, because I had a ticket to see Ruth Reichl at a benefit for Madison Public Library. I believe she was following me from New York, and also had travel delays. It was called “meet the make-hers” – kind of a barf-y name – they got about a dozen female entrepreneurs who have food businesses in the Madison area to set up booths with samples, and called it a cocktail party – except there were no cocktails, and it was almost all sweets. The cocktail party, or reception, or whatever, was in the big main public area on the 3rd floor of the library. There’s also a large meeting room there, that was set with chairs for the book talk part. When us ticket holders arrived for our VIP seating, we got little yellow cards, so we could go in and place them on our chosen seats to reserve them.
After a lot of milling and tasting, there were some opening remarks, and Reichl said some really nice things about libraries. Then the food booths were taken down, and we were told to go grab our signed copies of Delicious!, and take our seats, so they could see how much room was going to be leftover for the hoi polloi. Which meant we had about 20 minutes with nothing to do but sit – or get up and stroll around, with our seats protected by the little cards, but harder for the event organizers to count – and wait for the talk to start. Reichl didn’t read from Delicious! which I wasn’t sorry about at all – as the NYT review I linked to the title above says, I agree that the best thing about Reichl’s first novel is the recipe for ginger cake – that’s why I wanted my signed copy, even though I’m pretty sure I photocopied the recipe when I borrowed the book from the library in the first place. Instead she talked about food writing and her life; I think everyone there was happy to hear that for her next book, she is going back to memoir-writing, and write about Gourmet. She took lots of questions – and somebody asked about what she foresaw as the next hot trend in restaurants – that’s when she talked about places like Jacob’s Pickles in New York, Au Cheval in Chicago, Graze here in Madison, casual restaurants with really good food, locally sourced, quoting and mashing up interesting roots & traditions, hipster joints. These are the places our kids are going, and us boomers, too. They are uniformly loud, and they mostly don’t take reservations, so often the dining experience is not very comfortable. Reichl predicts that in the next few years we’ll see these places “grow up”.
I enjoyed the talk, but maybe because I was too cranky and tired and jet lagged, I felt like it just underscored what I didn’t like about Delicious! – the main character, Billie, has one great talent – she has a great palate, and can taste anything and know the ingredients. Pretty much, the world falls at her feet, and her life is set because of her one great talent. Irksome to someone like me, since I’m still trying for my big break.
So that was Tuesday. The rest of the week is going to get its own post.
