Food As Murder: the insidious 99cent Snacker

I dont know where to start. Im so behind. Dont worry, I havent been so busy working out and enjoying my fitness routine that I havent had time to write. No, not at all. I think Ive been to the gym about once a week average in the last two months. I guess I was so concerned by my low blood pressure results at my annual that I decided to make a concerted effort to get my numbers up. And speaking of soaring blood pressure... I have REALLY gotten my panties in a twist about fast food. I hated it already, but there is a new wave going on that I find particularly venomous. Fueled by Supersize me and the "Food Porn" section of my Nutrition Action Newsletter (thanks mom!) I have become acutely aware of the potential of "food" to be used as a weapon. There are MANY examples (friendly ol' ben and jerry's at 400 calories per half cup is a good one, and the ever convinient and alarmingly cheap Top Ramen packing in more than two days of sodium in one sitting to name a couple old standbys) but the one thats killing me is the marketing advent of the SNACKER. The snacker is exemplified best by KFC's New Ultimate Chicken Cheese Snacker. The goddam thing is only 99cents, so it cant be a meal, its a snack, obviously or they wouldnt call it a snacker, so youve got people eating a fried chicken sandwich between meals, feeling like theyve gotten a bargain (though ive heard it "isnt that good," check out http://www.roadfood.com/Forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=15508 for a glimpse into how much spare time people really have), consuming i would guess, about 400 calories with the mayo and bun, and somehow playing on the health food industry suggestion to eat lots of "small meals and snacks." Ben and I watched Supersize me on our upstate getaway and then had to (and I mean HAD TO because that is literally all there is) stop at several Mc Donalds based rest stops and watch people, all with children, pour in and out of that place. Theyre selling a fried chicken snacker as well, its a "wrap" since everyone knows wraps are healthy and a great way to cut carbs...holy misleading nutrition information. Before i leave the endless and anguishing terretory of food as murder I have to mention another upsetting food development; TGI FRIDAYS introduction of their alternative appetizers. Here we are to understand that the rest of the world has become complacent with their jalapeno poppers, their bloomin onions, their fried mozzerella sticks, quesadillas, tater skins and fried calamari rings! Those cholesterol laden greasy precursors to your huge meal are not only passe but are akin to being a conservative hillbilly, or a stupid throwback hippie, according to their advertising which proposes that some stodgy sticks in the mud cant HANDLE the new shit theyve come up with, only the true livers of life can understand the sizzling triple meat fondito (which is a large puddle of melted cheese on a skillet topped with THREE meats that you scoop up with fried dough, hence the miserable bastardization of the word fondue a la mexi fry,) cant handle the green bean fries, they fear the deep fried mac and cheese bites. The fact that people take deep fried cheese for granted, and can feel safe that whatever bar they go to will be sure to have deep fried squid rings and hot peppers stuffed with cheese and thrown in the hot fat for good measure is bad, very bad, worse than bad. THen again, i felt sick as a motherfucker after eating an all raw food dinner at Pure Food and wine, where everything is made out of young coconut and nut butter (probably not so hot on the fat content either come to think of it, but at least the enzymes are intact? Not damaged by high heats? WHATEVER. I felt like i was gonna hurl. There must be a happy medium somewhere.
I met Rick's (actually you know he's really ben dont you? I forgot, but i think i like the rick thing...) parents several weeks ago for Rosh Hashana. It went very well. I love them. We got along well and have endless commonalities which made us very comfortable together right away. His mom is a terrific cook and both his parents have great senses of humor and do a lot of laughing, which is the best. Plus you always get to see lots of embarrasing pictures of your significant other during occasions like that which is a bonus. Rick was an adorable kid, blonde. Nobody's perfect;)
Last week was Yom Kippur. For those gentiles out there or jews of ill repute, yom kippur is the day of atonement (of course these nicey nice reformy services like to point out that that also says "at one ment" which if we were really buddhists might hold up in court) the day where jews dont eat (god forbid!) and we sit in synagogue and repent for all of our sins against god and misdeeds in the community over the past year. Rick and I went to Boston to be with his family and attend his parents synagogue. Its a nice place, conservative enough to be traditional and new agey enough that i didnt feel like i should be wearing nude hose and a scarlet letter. We fasted, which aside from TREMENDOUS thirst, was easy. I think I may have a water addiction. The service was nice, also youre supposed to wear all white to symbolize the purity of having all your transgressions washed away. I like wearing white. We broke fast at one of Rick's moms friends houses and it was beautiful. Her house was huge and in this grand hotel style scale. I belive the house was built in the 20s or 30s and it was decorated with deco wallpaper and had all this dark wood detailing in builtins and in the stairwell. Amazing. Boston is like Spokane in that there isnt really anything to do but the houses are gorgeous. So right before we left for boston, I got this amazing offer to do grooming for a Marlboro print ad. It was Mon thru thurs and paid extremely well, especially since the producer wasnt even planning to have hair and makeup but he panicked at the last min and thought they should have someone on set. I was bouncing around on potential new mattresses in the basement of the Conway store in the Fulton Mall when I got the call. We dont have stores like conway on the West Coast, they sell everything from sheets to clothes to canned tuna to electronics at prices that make you wonder if there isnt a trap door straight to china under the flatware. So they have this little corner of the basement cordoned off to sell matresses. I found this lady on craigslist, and she sells new, really nice matresses for outrageously cheap prices. i had been sleeping on Mahdis' old mattress which was like kleenex with springs inside. For 199 dollars plus 25 for delivery I got a full size simmons beautyrest mattress. Its some kind of hustle, but im not asking questions. So I this evil Marlboro empire made it impossible for me to say no. I tried to, but my friend YoungAh called me and told me "If i were you I would do everything in my power to get this gig. Its what you want to be doing, so do it!!" I was wishy washy cause I knew id have to shaft the salon but when i heard her say that, which I REALLY appreciated, i knew I had to just do it. So on the evening of yom kippur, after I was sure he had eaten, i called Chaim and told him I wouldnt be in on Tues and Wed. He told me he felt like a second priority and that he needed me and all that and I simply told him I couldnt afford not to do it, that Im normally a model employee and that I know it isnt an ideal circumstance but that I didnt want to lie and tell him i was sick.
The job didnt start until four on Tuesday, we shot at Relish in Williamsburg. Its a diner in an old train car that my friends stephen and ryan both used to manage, and one of my fave dinners in NYC. There were five models, two women and three men. None of the shots can show their faces and they are blurry background in all of them. So i did some blowouts and mushed the guys hair around so it would look smooth in silhouette, checked their nails for the smoking hand shots and that was about it. A few of the shots were taken in this amazing electric blue chevelle SS hot rod. The car belonged to this archetypal long island guy who was there watching like a hawk, wiping fingerprints off the varnish, putting chamois under the camera cords so they wouldnt rub, he brought his sister and they both sat in NASCAR folding chairs and watched the shoot. He kept leaping up of course, sometimes to show people pictures of his car from different angles on his digital camera. His accent made fran drescher sound like Dame Judy Dench. "Yah, I take dat baby out maybe what twenny minutes, see wha' she ken do, den i takes 'er back to da gareage cuz i cant pahk her any wheres, nex' ting you know some kid swings a door open and dere goes the paint, fuhgettaboutit." Seeing all the manhattan production types interact with him and his sister, who was basically him, lose the shorts gain the cameltoe jeans and a frizzy scrunchied ponytail, was hilarious. The next two days were at a bar called Zablonski's. It was also in williamsburg. We got there at one and the models werent there until four so we went shopping and had lunch. Again there was no face and no close ups so I didnt have much to do. I gave the producer a haircut. The place is next to a poultry processing plant and the whole block smells like fermenting bird death so we stayed in the trailor or off set. The same models were there, the two girls were unremarkable. The main guy, the marlboro man character, was a gay Czechoslovakian guy, a real sweetheart who was so perfectly tousled he needed almost no work. There was a short muscular italian guy with thinning hair that needed to be blown to his head, he had a couple small blemishes he was fixated on and kept lamenting that he wanted out of this meaningless business. He had been in an off broadway show that got panned and i think it bruised his ego. The third guy was a real peice of work. The first day I didnt even meet him cause he didnt come into the trailor for hair or wardrobe and we got outside and were like who are you? Why arent you dressed? "Nobahdy caymen gaht me! I dinnt know!" Marcel is this huge hunky french and bolivian guy from queens who you would swear was italian. He is so annoying that you think hes kidding and will let up any moment but, he doesnt. I told him I want a room in my house that hes in all the time and I can just go in there and watch him for entertainment whenever I want, and that i want to make sure the door has a lock on the outside. He was in the car shots, he was the driver, and he was on the phone the ENTIRE time until the photographer, a very famous one at that, had to tell him, Marcel Im shooting, could you put the phone down, and Marcel gave him the "just a second" finger! Unreal. His hair is coarse and dense and needs a cut and he insisted, even though I asked him EVERY DAY to not put wax in it, on sticking the front straight up with wax so that there was nothing i could do but go with it once he got there. The client hated it but without shampooing the wax out there was no other option. He talked about women, especially tits, constantly CONSTANTLY, like a teenager. Hes dating this wannabee maxim model and he busied himself show pictures of her on his treo in various stages of undress. He didnt lock the door to the bathroom and YoungAh walked in on him and he unflinchingly looked up from the urinal with, I imagine, his standard superdopey grin and was like " a coupleah seconds earleah and you woudda been in luhv!" He was so obnoxious that you kind of liked him by the end, he took the ribbing that everyone gave him about being dumb and always showing off his abs and talking about the "draining the dragon" episode well, so at least you didnt have to pretend he was normal. So the shoot went well and Chaim had one of the receptionists call me to tell me that i was punished and couldnt come to work on Sat, NO! Not a day off!! Whatever you do dont throw me in that briar patch! I came back to work on monday. It was fine, had a talk with Chaim and told him that I am an exeptional person and you reap my benefits while making a few exeptions or you can decide Im not worth it and let me go. What could he say?
I did a shoot in westchester county the week before for a look book, which is the way designers show their new seasons designs to stores. We had two models, they wanted a sexy disheveled pinup look. I wasnt given enough time to do fingerwavey or pincurl styles which is what she really was describing, so i did that kind of pointy bettie page bang roll. She wanted a very dark and smoky eye, which doesnt really go with the pinup look, but thats what she wanted (read: she didnt really know what she wanted or how to communitcate it to me.) the makeup was great, the hair was alright. They looked good and we had a good time. the stylist was this tiny tiny woman who was that goth girl in your highschool class who wore black laceup high heel boots to school every day. Well she still does and that day she was also wearing a tightly laced flowered corset, a long black skirt, a top hat and carrying a bullwhip. Mind you this is out at a country home with pastures and a barn in westchester county. She is from new jersey. Her boyfriend was there doing video work for the website and they talked to each other just like the goth kids in high school, arguing about stuff in that rediculously flirty way. She affects this low sultry voice. It was insane. I hated most of the clothes.

The wedding and the suckery of PA, hotels packed with amish ambulance chasers, the woman who slumped over in her chair and her return, old cat alien vs young cat alien, guest writer!

Nina!

If you want to get waxed in New York, you can go see Nina at Randee Elaine salon in the west village. Nina is an old redheaded russian lady, potentially trained in torture by KGB special forces, who now uses her skills for hair removal. Because my entire family reads this thing, i will keep this short and sweet but it was so hysterical, somewhat like the colonic, i just feel like id be shirking my duties to leave it out completely. I dont know that i can call it non consensual since I entered the room willingly and paid her at the end but ill tell you that what happened between those two times was DEFINITELY not within my control. You lay down on the butcher paper on this old brown naugahyde bed. There is a bare lightbulb right above your head (certainly a trick held over from the KGB days!) She does not respond to comments or questions, simply applys (smolderingly hot!!!) wax and removes it at such lightning speed that the linin strips sing under her hands. I was unsure just how ahem, thorough? a wax it was that i wanted, but it didnt turn out to matter what I wanted! It was excruciataing and HYSTERICAL. I was laughing absolutely hysterically, and she remained completely stoic, as if my lower half were floating on the table, disembodied from the laughing half. She muttered consistantly to herself in russian as she examined me more intimately than maybe anyone ever has and despite my cries of protest, demands that she tell me what she was saying in russian and requsts for even a short break, epilated me en toto.
Thats all the detail we need here, sufficed to say, Nina is a NY freak landmark and if you are fearless (which I may now be) or exessively hirsuite, you know where to go. They also offer every service known to man, from pedicures, to cellulite removal to ear candling. Get to Randee Elaine! Your body has needs that you dont even know about yet!

Six degrees of Sufferation...Six Days of Great Vacation!

You can tell that New Yorkers are lonely because the new television series are pitched directly to them. Living outside new york, i always thought they were placed here because the city was interesting and made a cool and intriguing backdrop for a show. Now that Im here, and I am privy to the unbeleiveable amount of New York directed marketing for the shows, i can see that its really because New Yorkers watch a ton of TV! They are too busy, broke, lonely and/or alienated to do a lot of socializing in the city, so they sit at home and watch shows like 6degrees, or Sex and the City, and they see people that look like people they see, walking around the streets they walk around, dating solving mysteries, getting jobs, breaking up, reuniting with long lost friends and family, eating out and buying shoes all without leaving the claustrophobic comfort of their apartment. There is intense marketing for every new show in the subways, the actual trains and in some cases huge banners hung in the stations. hoping to convert the lonely commuter with nothing to stare at to viewership. 6degrees for instance is about to launch. Its a ripoff of the Six Degrees of Separation movie, which proposes that we are connected to each other and need only examine our connections to see how close to our fellow man we really are. So all up and down the subway aisles there are signs like "the lady across the aisle is flirting with you," and " the man standing on the platform will be your boss," and "the little girl next to you will marry your son." I made that last one up, but you get the drift. And in the B'way Lafayette station there are huge banners "there is a man on Houston who will come to you for a job." I suppose it is meant to give you the feeling that everyone is somehow connected, which is a comforting thought considering the reality that most new yorkers go through every day without speaking to anyone outside of work and certainly no one they dont already know. The woman across the aisle is probably NOT flirting with you, and the truth is if you tried to talk to her she would probably pretend she couldnt hear you or look youin the face while she got up to move seats. Anyway, you know I NEVER watch TV but just by taking the train I know what all the new shows are and their premises. Most conversations I over hear are about the plots of these serial shows (lost, CSI etc) all the meanspirited reality shows (top model, project runway, american idol, so you think you can dance...) or about the serial show lives of celebrities that people here are so fixated on. Its pretty amazing. If they cultivated their real relationships with the regularity and enthusiasm that they maintain their relationships with these TV shows, what would NY feel like? I think it would be really different. Im eating a half a pumpernickel bagel with creamcheese tomato salt and pepper as I cut on NY, and it is so good. Reaping the benefits even as I dis! Lonely maybe, but the bagels are terrific.
Lets see here. Since last I wrote, the seasons began to change. Its much less hot and thank the good lord, much less humid. The grapes on the arbor outside on my porch came to ripeness and, in familiar starling/fig fashion were set apon by birds almost immeidately. my porch is covered with sticky grape juice and empty skins. I am having heretofore unheardof allergies, the inside of my head feels like a mosquito bite, thank god for Clartin OTC. I worked a photo shoot for Microsoft inhouse stock images. It was a four day shoot of which I worked three days. It was fun, I didnt get to do too much as they always want a REALLY natural look. The hair and makeup people got all the talent ready and I stayed on set to powder, smooth, comb, redo ponytails, apply lipgloss and listen to everyone complain about the producer. True enough it wasnt well organized, one day we ended up at the wrong location, the client (two nice, soft and out of style art directors that MS shipped out from seattle to oversee the shoot) was unhappy with the space and we all had to search the city for the location that they had been shown, or a similar one. A huge loft space with high ceilings, and lots of color. Amazingly we found one and we all piled back into the red motorhomes we came in and hauled uptown to midtown eastside (from tribeca, downtown westside) and set up in a design center on the 11th floor. Another day we were shooting on the beach in Sandy Hook New Jersey. That was probably the best work day I ve had to date. The weather was flawless the sand was soft and hot, there was nothing you could do about people's hair blowing in the wind off the ocean, and the client thought it looked natural anyway so I spent a lot of time with my feet in the sea, digging just below the sand for beautiful little rounded clear and amber colored agates, purple peices of clam and mussel shell, tiny snail spirals, and pure white pebbles. Half the shoot was children, who we shot running on the dunes, and playing in bright colored transparant donut floatys. They had a great time on the beach and I couldnt believe how they never forgot they were working and kept running through the same play sequence over and over like a game of its own. They were adorable and couldnt wait to go swimming when it was over. I had no idea that the Jersey shore was so gorgeous.
What else. I went on a real vacation. That was fun. When you live away from family all your vacations end up being visiting family. Which is great, but then I never really go anywhere other than seattle or LA. And Ive never seen anywhere on the East Coast. So I was feeling down about how damn ugly NYC is. So Rick (ok, his name is Ben. Rick is hilarious, but Id never vacation with anyone named Rick...Im afraid he'd take me bungee jumping!) Ben and I decided to take a trip upstate to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. North of Lake Placid and about an hour and a half south of Quebec, Saranac is a series of three lakes which are all connected to each other (Upper Middle and Lower) and surrounded by the gentle curvy peaks of the Adirondack Mountain Range. Ben has spent his summers there since childhood and so knows the area really well. We drove halfway there, stayed in a motel north of Albany, ate breakfast at one of those really country type restaurants (hang your yarmulke at the door) where they have wagon wheels nad milk jugs lying around and rustic signs for fishin' holes and the like decorating the walls. Then we drove the rest of the way up to Saranac, its about an eight hour drive from the city altogether. We stayed in a really old cluster of cabins on Ampersand Bay on middle saranac. The cabins were all named after trees, oak, sumac, maple, birch, except ours which was called Patti. Patti was tiny and adorable with a shower that ben said was an exact to scale replica of the showers in which so many of our forbears met an unpleasant end during the third reich. We showered as little as possible.... The rest of the cabin was super quaint and gave you a real camping feeling but with a bed, a microwave and no fear of a wet sleeping bag. We had SO much fun. We hiked up Mount Ampersand (an ampersand is an and sign, you know, this one; &. I dont know why its called that or which one came first) which Ben assured me was long but "not that steep." That didnt really turn out to be the case, I mean he was right about it being long, that part is true, but its long and QUITE steep actually. Really it is. An all fours situation from time to time even. Ben does this Russian Commie style workout nearly every day. It uses these weights called Kettlebells (which I cant even lift let alone throw around like a cossack,) which apparantly makes you a climbing machine, who knew? I wasnt quite a climbing machine per se, but I kept up admirably and after a midway sandwich and quite a few breath catching breaks as the air thinned out, we made it to the top. It was well worth it. Unlike the tops of WA state mountains which are mostly snowy and craggy if not glacial, this one was round and flat with a three hundred and sixty degree view of the whole valley and the lakes and mountains all around for miles. There was an Upward Bound group up there who cheered for us as we crested the trail and a leathery polish family with a miniature schnauzer, an older pair of women, possibly lesbian, also polish who told us some other good hikes in the area and some abnormally fit senior citizens who inadvertantly made me feel pretty lame for having so much trouble getting up there. We lay on the top and enjoyed the view and the feeling of acheivement for a while and then ran down the mountain in about half the time it took to get up. The next day we went kayaking on the lake by our cabin. I was nervous about it at first but once i got used to being on the water and not so scared of the motorboat wake waves it was really fun. I like rowing. The lake was so calm and peaceful, when we stopped rowing and just glided it was totally quiet and beautiful. The landscape here is not so dramatic and breathtaking as the pacific northwest, the plants are smaller and the evergreens are skinny and short, but it is beautiful in its own way, very green, and very picturesque. the lakes are clear and very blue and there are no roads right next to them for the most part so all you see is trees on the shore and the occasional "adirondack" style house. We pulled the kayak ashore and went swimming off one of the tiny islands in the lake. the water was suprisingly cold. We also discovered some cool antique stores where I loved Ben for not rushing me and discovering lots of cool treasures, old charmbracelet charms (incl a scissors and a blowdrier!) a necklace with a V pendant and a tie pin with a little lion on it. Not for me, of course. We ate lots of mediocre town food, and had a lovely dinner with his aunt and uncle (as well as a cousin and said cousin's sweet daughters) who have a house on one of the lakes out there. We brought them famed soft ice cream from Crystal Springs Dairy which seems to be a nearly religious sacrament in the area. They serve one flavor (mixed with vanilla) per day, and have a sign posted that says "pick a size the flavor has been chosen for you!" The flavor of the day was strawberry mixed with vanilla. It was shabbat and we lit the candles and sang the prayers together. That was nice.
We had planned to go up to montreal but its pretty far even from up there and it sounded less than relaxing, unfortunately Patti was booked for the next night so we drove south took the ferry across lake champlain to vermont, stopped for an excellent organic thai dinner (what else?) in Hippiecollegeboro VT, capital of the bumperstickers, and went to stay in a really sweet b&b in Stowe called the Gables. Highly recommended. We had every intention of touring the Ben and Jerry's factory but when we got in there, saw the ice creamy family crowd and heard the tourguide's voice, we looked at each other and wordlessly headed for the door. We always want to leave things at the same time. thats good because I always like leaving things before theyre over, and its usually annoying to everyone.
By this time the weather had changed and it was drizzly and cold as we made our way back into the city. The drive was nice, you can watch the ugly set in as you get closer to the bronx. The moment we hit the lower east side, right near Kossar's Bialys a hasid with a minivan stocked with pallid wife and kids tried to cut ahead of us, not to merge or anything, just left his place in the lane hoping to get one ahead of everyone else. Ben didnt let him in, so he drove along next to us, staring and raving and motioning wildly, and honking of course honking, peahs swinging, window rolling down, for several yards like "what are you doing? how can you drive like that!?!?!?" Fully convinced that we were in the wrong. Welcome back! I know why people dont leave here, it has a lot to do with not wanting to return...
But, once you reacclimitize, its fine. Im back in BK, its virgo season which means you can wish my Bubba, Mahdis, Stephen and Jess a big happy Birthday. Mahdis is thirty!!! We have known each other for twelve years! We had a nice dinner at Pure, a raw food restaurant in the city and she is having a party, almost a year to the day of her party last year which marked my arrival to New York. The seventeenth of this month will be a year that Im here. A year. How am I doing? I will be assessing, and am taking opinions, no censorship please! Any that are submitted will (pending approval:)) be posted to the blog. Submit to vivi@vivilapidus.com