Did you read Julie & Julia? I did, and I enjoyed much of it heartily. Not precisely for the book itself, which is a perfect example of marvelous voice and great story minus adequate time and editing, but for the way it brings to vivid, crazy-passionate life the joy of throwing yourself madly into what you do.
If you are within arms’ reach of 50, you might remember Julia Child that way, too, the wild, delightful, not-quite-right lady who dug in and made do and generally got down with her food as an extension of herself. Julia was her food, and her food was Julia, and it was all infused with a kind of messy, art-infused passion you just don’t see in a Rachael Ray (who has energy, but fueled by the sell) or a Martha (who has passion, but confined by control) or a Giada (who has the sex-ay, but is, unlike dear Julia, gloriously unhampered by the plainness that plague mere mortals). Big, wild, plain-faced Julia burst through the screen and grabbed your heart because she was all about life, and just used that food as a vehicle to deliver the goods. (Also, she was funny, which goes a long way towards making things work.)
What’s more, while Julia brought fine, French cooking to a land whose food at that time was neither, one got the sense that she’d do the same kind of I-love-life cartwheels cooking up a burger or a baked potato as she would any of the fancier items in her repertoire. My own memory is shot (thank you, 1980s!), but YouTube continues to fill in the gaps and offer sound backup to my theses, as in this clip where Julia waxes rhapsodic about roasters with a lineup of actual, dead chickens. Good lord, no wonder a nation was transfixed by her! Even an idiot girl of 10 who had to be tricked into eating Dover sole by being told it was tuna fish in a different shape could dig that fusion of Method truth and vaudevillian showmanship.
I have been thinking inordinately about food and joy and showmanship of late because finally, and really, given my diagnosis and my age and how ill I fare when my fare is less than fair, it probably is final, I am back on the diet I use to manage my Crohn’s disease, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. As I’ve said before, it’s not that it’s the worst diet in the world, and I’m happy I was dealt the Crohn’s card instead* of something that wasn’t so easily managed by diet, lifestyle choice and exercise. It’s just that…
Well, French fries. And rye toast. And Coca-Cola. And chocolate, especially those Fannie May dark chocolate creams.
It’s like meeting three awesome friends in the first grade that you spend an entire lifetime goofing off and carousing with, and while, yeah, maybe some mornings after you wonder if you shouldn’t spend quite so much time with them, you still wouldn’t want to tell them that you’d come to a point in your life where the relationship wasn’t serving you, that you’d grown apart and that while it wasn’t them, it was you, you still needed them to understand that you could never, ever hang out ever again. Especially since, given their popularity among throngs of total strangers, you were likely to run into them for the rest of your lives on a regular basis. Awk-ward!
I was talking this over yesterday with my friend, Lucy Rosset, a.k.a. Lucy of Lucy’s Kitchen Shop, where many of us SCD-ers buy our SCD-legal supplies. I told her about my backsliding and my shame and how yeah, I knew pizza was a hoodlum but he was so hawt, I couldn’t resist. And Lucy agreed, but then she turned the conversation toward cool stuff we could eat. And all of a sudden, dontcha know, we were talking smoked salmon bites and salade Nicoise and dolled-up sandwiches with bacon and avocado and all manner of other delicious “legals” nestled together in the same small space of almond or cashew toast and damned if I wasn’t fired up to get all Julia Child on my food, to love up what I had, the gizzards and ends and weird parts, instead of bemoaning what I couldn’t. It was Lucy who got to the heart of it: we can’t have everything, but we can put crazy attention and focus and creative thinking into what we can, and, in addition to making our food taste a whole lot better, exercising that creative muscle has a wide-ranging, beneficial effect on everything we put our minds to.
It’s a nice kind of a practice, in these strange economic times, to focus on what’s true and before me. It’s a nice kind of meditation for an artist, to work with the materials she has, and to come up with something beautiful out of it. I have seen nothing less than magic worked with no more: fairy worlds from duct tape and plastic, empires from WordPress and persistence, re-written futures from collaboration and creativity.
We never have nothing. And what we can do with it?
Now that’s really something…
xxx
c
*Dear Universe: Please feel free to not deal me additional cards. Thank you! Love and xxx, Colleen.
Photo © LAist and/or Ken Roht’s Orphean Circus and/or photog Jim Hickcox. God bless the Internet! Share nicely!
Colleen, I so hear you when you talk about shifting your perspective about “legit” pleasure.
I haven’t been through an ordeal like Crohn’s disease but I did have bad episodes involving various parts of the human plumbing recently in 2008 and again in 2009 where I had to avoid certain (many) things food-wise. One of the things that helped me shift my perspective was reading a book by Martha Beck called The Four Day Win, especially the parts where she encourages people to “SIN” and cultivate abundance.
Dreaming of smoked salmon bites, yum! Take care. i
Colleen!
You have hit on two of my “things I could go on and on about” – Julia and forbidden food. I’ll try to be brief, but as a lover and student of Julia (albeit from very, very afar) I think you have hit it precisely on the head – the disarmingly charming Mrs. Child would have said “bravo” to your determination to love the foods you can. She was extremely brave and served everything she made without apology, even if it sucked. She also tried, retried and tested tested tested when she was doing something new (I think she spent three weeks making nothing but mayonnaise when she was perfecting her recipe). All this to say – I don’t know much about CSD, but I do know enough about the Julia to believe that she would be impressed with your determination to love whatcha got, and would happily sit down at your table and dig into whatever you created, however limited the ingredient list, as long as it was done with love and imagination, which seems to be what you’re all about here.
Bon appetit!
Oh, I needed to read this. I’ve got insulin resistance (a charming side effect of PCOS) and I’ve been thinking lately about trying to retool what I eat to keep the glucose down, but I keep getting stuck on fries, ice cream, Toll House cookie bars, etc. But I love the idea of getting mad creative within the world of low-carb eating. This post inspired me to look into that in the coming weeks. Thank you, Colleen!
1) cheers for sharing the info, I’ll pass it on to a friend who’s in the middle of being diagnosed, and
2) saw the trailer for the movie this weekend – looks like fun!
Hugs ‘n good stuff, Dee xx
A lovely post, as usual. But for me, the definitive Julia Child blog post will always be this one:
http://bullyscomics.blogspot.com/2008/08/riddle-me-this-french-chef-department.html
isabelle – You have it much worse if you’re stationed in Montreal. There is no bad food there, seriously. But yes, get CRAZY creative on the legals. Turning things into a game is such a good distraction, I’m realizing. No wonder parents use it on kids all the time.
Kathlyn – I thank you. I think Julia was a great spirit, and I tend to agree. She’s one of those now-gone people it would have been nice to meet, for sure.
Catherine – Do it! And blog it, and report back!
Doris – It’s probably a renter, but eventually, I see everything Meryl Streep does. She’s another one I really hope to meet someday.
Corey – Now *that’s* a tribute to Julia!
If 35 is within arms’ reach of 50, I don’t want to know. However, I used to watch Julia Child and later The Frugal Gourmet all the time in middle school. (Just screams active social life, doesn’t it?
Some years ago I saw her kitchen, moved preserving every detail, at the American History Museum (I think) in DC. It was pretty awesome.
Once again, you are thinking about the same things I’ve been thinking about. How do you do that?
Years ago, when faced with a terribly hard task that was intensely emotional, I was whining about it to a mentor of mine. Her response was, “well, I guess you’re just going to have to get creative about how you deal with it.” That one comment has forever changed the way I approach hard stuff. The concept of “getting creative” about challenges doesn’t make them less hard, but it does help me realize that I can make it through them. And, they might even be not so hard, once I am able to look at them a different way.
Also, Julia is one of my goddesses. Heck, she didn’t even start her road to her passion (food) until the age of forty. Gotta love that!