But I lost my head this time, and I’m woman enough to admit it. I was up in my studio with a glass of sauvignon blanc, poking around the old muffin tins, bowls and jars overflowing with stuff. Wasn’t looking for trouble, but trouble found me. Amidst the buttons, bottlecaps, partnerless earrings, faded dominos, doll parts, china shards—the smallish bits and oddities that accumulate thanks to any mixed-media artist’s magpie tendencies—my eye came to rest on some vintage board of education cafeteria tokens I’d forgotten I had.  Was it the wine talking, or were they really as seductively quirky as I told myself they were? I guess it doesn’t matter now, I’m just telling you what happened.

One thing led to another, and a few hours later, those cafeteria tokens had taken me down the path of no return. A small decorative dressmaker’s dummy became the body of my evening’s muse, and I found myself fashioning her a frock out of some pages of an early 1900s issue of “Woman’s Home Journal.” The page that really fanned the flames of my artistic lust was titled “Recipes From Our Readers conducted by Winifred Trafford.” Seriously, now, can you blame me? I daresay you would have reacted the same way.  The recipes painstakingly “conducted” by Winifred for her readers became this fetching creature’s dress, with the article’s title enhancing her backside.

Then things got really crazy. I’m not going to get into too much detail here, but let’s just say there was a glue gun involved and feathers flying. Two spoons got in on the act at one point—and the unusually long handles on those babies were obviously made for stirring up long, tall drinks of water (or iced tea), let me tell you. Now they were going to be arms, I decided, and so I set about attaching them to the half-dressed body in front of me. 

Wouldn’t you know, I was in the middle of this pretty intense spooning scene when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Damn! Caught red-handed. Boyfriend blinked sleepily at me.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Uh, no…”

“It’s 4 a.m. What are you doing?”

“Making this thing… I got a little carried away, and now I can’t stop until it plays itself out.”

Boyfriend took it all in, his gaze shifting from the shredded paper to the tangled glue gun cord to my flushed countenance. He nodded and scratched his nose.

“Righteeo then,” he said. “Have fun. See you in the morning.” And he shuffled back down the stairs, trusting, I’m sure, that our relationship was strong enough to withstand this all-nighter episode of mine.  I jumped back into the fray, by this time a woman possessed, and just before dawn, the object of my affections and ministrations stood complete before me: Lunch Lady Winifred.

Those cafeteria tokens that sparked this whole thing? They became Lunch Lady Winifred’s token breasts, which were set off by a couple of provocative rosebud buttons. Once she started flouncing around in her vintage lace sash and excessive hat, I realized this was no run-of-the-mill gal.  

I rarely speak of that night, but don’t think I’ve forgotten her. While she was gone within a week or two, every once in a while I run into the delightful woman here in Columbia, Missouri, who purchased her. She generously tells me what Winifred’s up to these days—apparently she’s jumped onto the secular goddess bandwagon, holds court in their kitchen, and has attracted even more danglies on her spoon arms than she left me with.

Sounds like a good life, and I’m happy for her.

Live lusciously, all you crazy lovers out there. And if that means spooning all night, then so be it. You won’t regret it.

“Food is what she wrote about, although to leave it at that is reductionist in the extreme. What she really wrote about was the passion, the importance of living boldly instead of cautiously; oh, what scorn she had for timid eaters, timid lovers, people who took timid stands, or none at all, on matters of principle.”

Cyra McFadden, San Francisco Examiner, on M.F.K. Fisher

Last Sunday afternoon, my man and I were lounging on the bed decadently devoting ourselves to watching a movie, when suddenly we both realized we were a bit peckish. I wandered out to the kitchen to forage and took great pleasure in creating a lovely little something for us: two steaming bowls of orzo mixed with bits of sauteed tomatoes, asparagus, prosciutto, fresh basil and garlic, topped with grated parmigiano, lemon juice, sea salt flakes and pepper. Simple, yes—but in that moment, no elaborate dish could have satisfied us more. We share a love of food, and that was most definitely the food of love.

Which reminds me: This Saturday marks both the first day of spring and my local farmer’s market—so love is in the air, and more fresh asparagus dressed up in flirty, buttery finery is in the offing.  It is, therefore, the perfect time of year to offer a small and humble tribute to the zesty genius of the late M.F.K. Fisher.

Mary Frances Katherine Fisher was a strange and brilliant food writer with a talent for living large (lots of lovers, husbands, dinner parties and travel, not to mention creative output that included two daughters and 26 books). A wicked good wordsmith, Fisher created prose so vivid and tantalizing, you want to lick the page.

Two of her volumes, as you can see, live in a place of honor in my kitchen. (That’s How to Cook a Wolf on the end there. I highly recommend it.) Another one, the delightful photographic biography, A Welcoming Life: The M.F.K. Fisher Scrapbook, lives in my bedroom bookcase. The kitchen and the boudoir are, it seems to me, perfect homes for books by and about a woman who, to quote the well-worn jacket of A Welcoming Life, ”wrote beautifully and wisely about the complex hungers and satisfactions of life.”

The complex hungers and satisfactions of life…you could spend a lifetime making art using that one phrase as your springboard. Last fall, when the organizers of Slow Food Katy Trail asked me to again participate in their annual art auction and fund raiser, I was happy to oblige. I pulled out two tin recipe boxes I’d had in my collection for some time and played around with them. Nothing was quite coming together for me, however, until I found two images of topless, ripe maidens wielding equally ripe and juicy-looking fruit. Perfect!

But words, I needed some tasty words…. And so I turned first, of course, to M.F.K. Fisher and chose this quote of hers to write in the lid of the first box: “When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.”

Thus the resulting mixed media piece, “Hunger for Love,” came together and was sold for a good cause.

I like to think our Mary Frances would have approved of the sister piece I created, “The Fruits of Your Passion.” This box featured a George Santayana quote: “To be happy, you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”

I don’t know who bought these pieces but trust they are in good homes with people who, just as M.F.K. before them, happily take their place at the table of life and feast with great gusto.

Incidentally, if you’d like to get better acquainted with M.F.K. Fisher, there are wonderful stories to be found on the “Her Friends Remember” section of the all-things-M.F.K. web site. 

And as my parting gift to you, I offer a delicious slice of M.F.K. prose, served with a dollop of love and the invitation to treat yourself to something very, very good today:

 

Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.

…It was then that I discovered little dried sections of tangerine. My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. I can only write how they are prepared.

In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.

Listen to the chambermaid thumping up the pillows, and murmur encouragement to her thick Alsatian tales of l’interieure. That’s Paris, the interior, Paris or anywhere west of Strasbourg or maybe the Vosges. While she mutters of seduction and French bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear delicately from the soft pile of sections each velvet string. You know those white pulpy strings that hold tangerines into their skins? Tear them off. Be careful.

Take yesterday’s paper (when we were in Strasbourg L’Ami du Peuple was best, because when it got hot the ink stayed on it) and spread it on top of the radiator. The maid has gone, of course—it might be hard to ignore her bellligerent Alsatian glare of astonishment.

After you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of guetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. You are sorry, but—

On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.

All afternoon you can sit, then, looking down on the corner. Afternoon papers are delivered to the kiosk. Children come home from school just as three lovely whores mince smartly into the pension’s chic tearoom. A basketful of Dutch tulips stations itself by the tram-stop, ready to tempt tired clerks at six o’clock. Finally the soldiers stump back from the Rhine. It is dark.

The sections of the tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.

There must be someone, though, who understands what I mean. Probably everyone does, because of his own secret eatings.

–M.F.K. Fisher in Serve It Forth

Hope you enjoyed that.  Live lusciously, friends.

I suddenly feel the need to explain myself to the horrified bibliophiles out there.  Let me just say that I long ago got over my guilt about cutting up certain old books.  My justification, should you be interested, is that I work with these chosen victims the way sausage makers work with a pig – they use everything but the squeal.  But let’s get that unpleasant image out of our minds and get back to my story.

Actually, it was one Margaret Deland’s story, a 1906 novel she called “The Awakening of Helen Richie” and saw fit to populate with more tormented characters than I’ve ever found between two covers.  Along with Margaret’s fine prose I chose to use pieces of a charming old autograph book from my collection as well a picture from a 1950s  magazine of a suitably smarmy young man.

While I’ve harvested bits of dialogue and narrative far more dramatic and florid than this particular one, Margaret’s depiction of this poor sap (with his high hopes but low probability of ever scoring) spoke to me of every unbearable, glacial evening anyone’s ever spent in the presence of the relentlessly boring.

I am not alone in this, of course.  One need only look as far as Joseph Cornell, genius collage and assemblage artist of the early 20^th century and Patron Saint of All Artists Who Love Working Inside Boxes.  I have now managed to see dozens of his pieces in person, one time risking severe disapproval from a boss when I fled a meeting in New York to make it across town to the final hours of a special showing of Cornell boxes in a miniscule jewel of a gallery.  Makes me breathless just thinking about it – both the wild cab ride and the stress of finding the address, and then the thrill of walking into a dimly lit warren of intimate spaces where so many of my hero’s boxes were lovingly displayed.

I’ve read much about Cornell, and the rather “small” seeming life he led.  He didn’t travel, he didn’t get out much, he didn’t have any big love affairs.  Instead, he gathered objects and images that intrigued him, and he worked in his cramped, crowded room and created things of luminous, lasting beauty.  He made boxes, and he made magic with them.

Perhaps there is something about having limits that allows us to think bigger.

And so we did.

You know how your memories of a place can color your experience of it?  My memories were borrowed, but worked in the same way.  I was full of other people’s moony love affairs with the city, what with those books about life on the Left Bank, all the movies, the Edith Piaf songs.  I even wrote “Non, je ne regrette rien” on the cover of one of my high school text books, such a ready-for-zee-luscious-life little lass was I.

Suffice it to say that you tend to find what you’re looking for, and I found a city brimming with mystery, passion, beauty, and lots and lots of buttery sauces.  I had a good time.

This Zesty Shrine features a coquettish dancer lifting her full, layered skirts in a saucy salute.  And oh, those pink shoes, where did she find them?  Mostly, though, I covet her chartreuse, emerald and flamingo pink head dress.  I have embellished “Flirty Skirty” with found pink coral, sequins, a tiny rosebud, a flourish of unknown origins, and a remnant of vintage silk that I like to imagine was ripped from the hem of a show girl’s dress to make it just a smidge shorter.

I see the smooth black rocks arranged around a candle and recall several wonderful, romantic days and nights in Mexico.  Every time I look at the striped glass pitcher that lives on top of my kitchen cabinet, I am reminded of my grandmother, Hilda, and my great grandmother who used it before her.  The metal dog with the chipped paint displayed on a shelf was my father’s when he was a boy and makes me feel closer to him just seeing it.  Some things carry the aura of memory with them, and others – pictures and fabrics and books – were chosen by me because I love the colors, or the feel of them between my fingers, or the ideas they contain are ideas I want to try on, or they simply make me happy.

The small shrine pictured here is simply called “Home.”  I immediately responded to the picture of a white house bathed in the warm light of a sunset, and chose to include with it a piece of old velvet – in that mossy green I love so much – and some pieces of old rattan chair back, which speak to me of humble histories and the familiar, comforting feeling of home.

First, a brief art history lesson:  Memory jugs, or memory jars, or memory vessels, if you want to sound fancy, have been around a long, long time.  Basically they involve embellishing a bottle, jug or crock with an accumulation of smallish items – buttons, medals, pieces of broken china, game pieces, doll parts, you name it – that have associations or evoke some memory of a person or event.  Some historians say they have their origins in Southern Black communities, while others claim that no, it was really the Victorians with their sentimentality-on-steroids that we have to thank for this phenomenon.

But let’s let those two camps argue amongst themselves and get on with making something fun.  I urge you to get yourself down to the nearest big-box craft store and find yourself a jug that you can cover with the flotsam and jetsam of your own life.  (That’s what I did.  The jar I used looks old, but it’s that faux-old that can be had for under ten bucks, if you hit a sale.)  Get some grout, too.

That jug you buy is, of course, simply your blank canvas. By the time you’re done attaching all your own sentimental stuff, and then grouting it, there won’t be much of the original container visible.  (By the way, prepare yourself for the grouting part, it takes way longer than you’d think to work around all those oddly shaped and angled objects.)  When you’re done, however, you have a remarkable piece that you wouldn’t part with for a million bucks, because that’s your life on that thing, and it’s beautiful.  And only you need to know the stories behind it all.

The Mexican tin nicho obviously needed to be equally glamorous, and what better way to accomplish that then with some shells gathered by yours truly on a pristine, isolated beach in Mexico? I also thought the dangly, beaded number topping it all off was perfect.  (Is it just me, or does that look for all the world like a teeny pastie?)>

As for the name of this piece, it’s inspired by our heroine’s pose – one hand gracefully raised to her ear, the other outstretched behind her.  As in, “Hark! What is that? Why, I do believe I hear Destiny calling my name….”

I made this triptych in honor of –  and for – my mother, whose sense of adventure and optimistic, anything-is-possible outlook on life has been a powerful influence on me and many other people whose lives she’s touched.

I shamelessly incorporated some look-on-the-bright-side clichés, a la the ship coming in, the bowl of cherries, and the just-arrived piece of mail that could contain anything.  That adorable little girl in the pigtails – that’s my mom.  And then there’s the image I was thrilled to find of a young woman standing at the side of a highway, suitcase at the ready, waiting for…who knows?  But you know something’s going to happen, she’s clearly on her way somewhere, and the air practically crackles with both anticipation and certitude.  Meandering across the top of the piece is a phrase my brothers and I have heard my mother say any time it would seem the deck was stacked against us:  “You just never know.”