The Kitch Lit Series: In Over My Head

My diversion to Hogwarts put a pause on the Kitch Lit series, but the purple-spined Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson called out to me from the bookshelf so loudly that I had to listen.

Cooking with Fernet Branca is kitch lit adjacent, with a healthy spoonful of satire thrown in. Gerald, an Englishman who makes his living as a ghostwriter for sports stars and celebrities, acquires a house in the hills of Tuscany hoping to find inspiration in the solitude. Gerald’s isolation is quickly disrupted by the arrival of Marta, a composer who hails from a fictitious Soviet country. Cue the culture clash. 

One such clash is Marta and Gerald’s opposing culinary sensibilities. Gerald fancies himself a gourmand and finds Marta’s hearty, winter survival dishes far beneath him. Gerald’s recipes err more on the unique side, garlic ice cream anyone? But one thing the two share? A penchant for drinking Fernet Branca. If not the drink itself, at least the effect of the drink.  

Hamilton-Paterson uses alternating perspectives, switching narration every other chapter. We learn about Gerald and Marta through their own eyes and through the eyes of the other. It’s a smart technique that serves to underscore Gerald and Marta’s differences. The actual plot of the novel is a bit loose. Boy bands, mafia-esque crime families and the filming of a movie that turns out to be essentially soft-core porn all come into play. Hamilton-Paterson is a great writer. His prose flows beautifully. And while I appreciated that aspect of the book, I could not shake the feeling that true enjoyment of the novel's satire was floating over my head, just out of reach of actual comprehension. I will gladly admit intellectual defeat when it happens and, in this case, Hamilton-Paterson has crafted a story that I am not cut out to appreciate. Cooking with Fernet Branca is not a bad book, but I do not share enough similarities with the upper-crust Fraiser Cranes of the world to truly enjoy it. I am happily back in Hogwarts now, reading at the middle school level to which I am clearly more suited.

The Wand Chooses the Wizard and I Finally Choose to Read some Harry Potter Books

Of the millions of people who have enjoyed the Harry Potter series in its’ many iterations, I have somehow only enjoyed half of them: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. What passed me by was enjoying Harry Potter in its’ original form: the written word. When the books were released, I was just slightly older than the target demographic, and my interests at the time were rooted in reality. I usually chose historical fiction over fantasy. 

That said, I am enjoying JK Rowling’s masterpiece more than I would have when the books were released twenty years ago. In those twenty years I have read a lot of books. Some great, some good, some bad, some fact and some fiction and, because of that, my appreciation for a well-written and well-designed book has increased astronomically. JK Rowling has a seemingly boundless imagination. Good versus evil, it’s been done before. Endlessly. But Rowling has created a world that not only feels magical but also somehow totally plausible. Harry Potter is the most famous wizard in the magical world, but he’s also just a kid. He’s a kid with a crappy home life and friends that help him navigate the challenges of growing up – and the extra challenges that come along when the Dark Lord has your number. And, wow, can Rowling tell a story. All the characters, their connections to each other (sometimes going back generations), the spells and magical creatures would no doubt have been easier to follow in my younger years when I had no problem remembering everything. Oh well, que será será.

Since I’ve been to the Wizarding World and have seen Cursed Child - and because you could not be alive during the height of the craze and avoid them -  I am aware of some of the spoilers that have yet to transpire. Thus far, knowing some of what lies ahead has not diminished my enjoyment of the books in any way. At this moment I am halfway through the series, and when I decided to take a break to read some kitch lit, I actually read a couple of pages and wondered, “Hmm, what are Harry, Ron and Hermione up to right now?” And, seriously, what’s up with Snape?

We Are The Lucky Ones

The Derry Girls: James, Michelle, Erin, Orla and Clare

Derry Girls is a sitcom from Northern Ireland that, if not for the fact we’re all living in Netflix’s world, we may not otherwise have had the opportunity to enjoy. Set in Derry, Northern Ireland, the show follows teenager Erin, her cousin Orla and friends Clare, Michelle and Michelle’s English cousin James as they come of age during the conflict in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. With smart writing, exceptional acting and its' universal subject matter, Derry Girls is a hidden gem.

With the first series order sitting at just six episodes, creator and writer Lisa McGee has a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time. Lucky for us, McGee is up to the task. McGee employed an interesting narrative tool in the first episode – Orla steals and reads from Erin’s diary – that perhaps may have been worth pursuing, but it is mostly through McGee’s quick, natural dialogue that the Derry girls become fully formed characters. As an example, an exchange between Erin and Clare:

Erin: Any joy with the trust fund? 

Clare: Ah, according to me ma we’re actually quite poor. 

Erin: Ay, I think we are too.

Expertly delivered by Saoirse-Monica Jackson and Nicola Coughlan the exchange is factual rather than self-pitying and it’s far funnier than any conversation between two friends who just learned that their parents do not have trust funds set aside for them to go on educational trips should be. Dry humor your game? Sister Michael’s your girl. As a non-Catholic, I have only stereotypical portraits of nuns, namely Sister Mary Clarence from Sister Act, and Sister Michael fits none of them. If you want compassion, do not talk to her. She literally announces that to the entire school during an assembly.

In an era where some of the most visible teenagers on TV have superpowers, it’s refreshing to see a pack of friends just trying to get by. And despite what goes on around them (totally normal part of the day when a soldier boards and searches the school bus), the Derry girls are typical teenagers. Erin has aspirations of being a writer but is immediately in over her head when she becomes editor of the school newspaper. Orla (Louisa Harland) who may have a slightly too loose grip on reality has found her calling in step aerobics. Clare’s mouth often moves at the speed of light, a reflection of the speed with which the wheels turn in her brain. Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell) is the edgy, drinking, sex-crazed teen who positively bristles at the inclusion of her English cousin James (Dylan Llewellyn) in her daily life. And then there’s James. The Derry girl of the opposite gender who is admitted into the all-girls school out of fears he would be victimized by his own gender because of his English accent. James, who is refused use of the staff men’s room, literally does not have a pot to piss in at the all girls’ school. The Derry girls’ exploits are not new or unique. They cram for exams, they are forced to get jobs to earn money for the school trip, they have spats and develop crushes on other classmates. These storylines could come across as stale. Instead of feeling derivative, Derry Girls, with it’s unique setting and uncompromising Northern Irish dialect, is a breath of fresh air.

TV series that rise to the top often fall into one of two categories: the familiar and the trasnportive. Derry Girls is the latter. We become part of stories we may never have had a chance to envision before and, through that, learn more about ourselves. It’s hard to imagine you could have as much fun learning as you do learning through Derry Girls. Need more convincing? Flashbacks abound with a fantastic 90s soundtrack.

Christmas At The Movies

'Tis the season to enjoy a slew of Christmas-themed movies. Hallmark has become a holiday juggernaut with their singular brand of schlocky but watchable TV movies. I kid you not, the plot of one movie on the schedule today included the phrase "plans to buy her own plane are thwarted when she inherits a reindeer farm." As compelling as that description is, much better Christmas movies have hit theaters in the pas few decades. Here are some of the best. 

Best Christmas Movie That is Not Actually About Christmas: Home Alone. A childhood fantasy: left alone, eating pizza and ice cream, jumping on the bed. But Kevin McCallister grows up quickly when he realizes the Wet Bandits are out to rob their family’s suburban Chicago McMansion. It's his house. He has to defend it. The foley artist should have won an award for the sound of Marv tumbling down the icy steps. 

Best Christmas Movie That is Not A Movie: Peter, Paul and Mary, the Holiday Concert. A tradition if there ever was one. The concert features a range of holiday songs (“Light One Candle” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” among them) and classic folk tunes. Every year when I rewatch this, I dream of sitting down with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary for lively conversation and figgy pudding.

Best Overall Christmas Movie: Miracle on 34^th Street, 1994. Richard Attenborough is the perfect Santa. Elizabeth Perkins and Dylan McDermott are the perfect couple. And Mara Wilson is the cutest adult in a little kid’s body. She’s “trying to limit her intake of sugar.” Something a child has never said. 

Best Christmas Movie That Instills Jealousy: The Santa Claus. Your dad is Santa. You get to ride in the sleigh to deliver presents, with a puppy in your lap? Sign me up. What happened to the technology that that can manufacture something that looks like an ordinary CD player but is actually a cookie dispenser? Let's get our best minds on that. CD's are a thing of the past anyway. Might as well have them spit out cookies.

Best 'Just Go With It' Christmas Movie: Love Actually. Is the plausibility questionable? Sure. Are a few of the dozens of interconnected storylines just filler? Yes. But it doesn’t matter. As popular as Love Actually is, it should be given more credit for featuring a few incredibly understated performances. Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman and Bill Nighy to name a few. Hugh Grant dances to The Pointer Sisters, just get on board.

Best Underrated  Christmas Movie: The Family Stone. This ensemble dramedy was mostly passed over when it was released but it remains a must watch in my book. The slow reveal of Diane Keaton’s heartbreaking performance and the unraveling of Dermot Mulroney and Sarah Jessica Parker’s forced relationship is told with both humor and heart. No family is perfect, the Stone family reminds us of that.

Best You May Not Have Seen This Christmas Movie But You Should: Prancer. A young girl discovers an injured reindeer in the woods and is convinced that he belongs to Santa. Convincing others is not as easy. Cloris Leachman plays the grouchy neighbor. She spooked me but I loved it.

On Relevance

My connection to Peter, Paul and Mary goes back as far as I can remember – er, almost remember. We all have a few very distinct childhood memories that are not actually our memories. Rather, we have heard the story so many times that we convince ourselves that we do, in fact, remember the moment. One of mine is a Peter, Paul and Mary memory. At the end of a concert in 1990, Mary blew me a kiss goodnight. How I wish I could actually remember that moment. I was pretty tuckered out. I had been sleeping (my earliest experience with theater snoozies) and I don’t remember the kiss. But I do have a memory of the days and weeks following the concert. I wanted to be Mary Travers. I distinctly recall belting “Leaving On A Jet Plane” out in the backyard. Probably not fully understanding the lyrics, but understanding just enough to feel the power of the song. 

Fast forward to my college years and a very specific thought popped into my head, “I am definitely the only person in this lecture hall getting pumped for the Zoology 100 final by listening to Peter, Paul and Mary on my iPod.” Those other kids did not know what they were missing. 

Though I was not around for their peak in the 1960’s, I was lucky enough to grow up listening to their music and attending their concerts. It will not surprise you that I literally jumped at the chance to see Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey perform together at Hoyt Sherman Place. In fact, I arrived so early at Hoyt Sherman to buy tickets that the employee thought I was there for a meeting with a department head. 

Yarrow and Stookey, both 80 years old, may not be the baby-faced youngsters they were in the early 60s when they broke onto the Greenwich Village scene, but even with less hair on their heads they can still sing, play the guitar and command the attention of a sold out crowd. The concert, filled with their biggest hits, was truly a celebration. 

The energy in the theater was palpable from the very first strains of "Weave Me the Sunshine." When again will we have the opportunity to come together to celebrate and carry on the legacy of Peter, Paul and Mary and share our appreciation for them in person? The concert may have had some rambling interludes and the stage just didn’t feel quite whole without Travers’ powerful alto but the concert was a much-needed confirmation of the importance of music as an agent of change. Songs such as “Deportee,” “This Land is Your Land” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” feel equally appropriate as a glimpse into the past as they do a call for a brighter future. These songs should be songs of times gone by, but, instead, they are almost more relevant today. Joining with 1,200 people on that rainy December evening to accompany Yarrow and Stookey on “Leaving On A Jet Plane” and “If I Had a Hammer” was life affirming. Folk music reminds us that no matter how different we are, we share more than we realize. We can grow, we can change, we can make the world a better place. Music will bring us together and show us the way.

A Kitch Lit Series Tangent: Literary Lit

Robin Sloan is my current literary hero. Sloan’s writing style is all his own and I love it. The Kitch Lit Series recently featured Robin Sloan’s Sourdough, an entirely unique book that surprises and delights. After finishing Sourdough I eagerly devoured his debut novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Mr. Penumbra’s is a book about the intersection of technology and the written word. And even though Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is not kitch lit, I had to write about it. My plea to read it will be brief because to reveal too much would be to ruin the pleasure of watching the story unfold.

Clay Jannon’s marketing job at yuppie bagel company NewBagel does not survive the recession and Clay finds himself poring over the classifieds. It turns out, “in a recession, people want good old-fashioned bubbly oblong bagels, not smooth alien-spaceship bagels.” When he happens upon Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, with a help wanted sign in the window, Clay is more than a little suspicious. But he is also curious. When Clay passes Mr. Penumbra’s not so subtle personality test, he is soon working the overnight shift. Mr. Penumbra has some very specific requirements for his employees. He requests Clay document the appearance and attitude of all customers. And when Clay notices that customers do not pay for the books, rather, they check them out, he begins to wonder about the story happening amongst people and the books in the bookstore. Who are these customers? Are they connected? Clay is determined to find out.

A colorful cast of characters surrounds Clay and populate what becomes an adventure to use science and technology to unlock the mystery of the bookstore. His artist friend and roommate Mat, who works at Industrial Light and Magic by day, spends his downtime constructing Matropolis, a sort of mini-city, throughout their rental. And then there’s Kat, Clay’s love interest and an over-achiever at Google, who has a penchant for the notion of immortality. And Neel, Clay’s childhood friend, who made his fortune creating a digital technology for the design of women’s breasts in video games, is still attracted to adventures and now has deep pockets to fund them. They are a motley crew, joined together with a common purpose. Not to mention Mr. Penumbra himself, an older man who carries himself with an air of both mystery and certainty. 

These characters become real because Sloan’s writing style has a vibrant, energetic quality. The dialogue is realistic. That is, if all of us had an extensive vocabulary and a penchant for artfully structured sentences. The story never lags. Exposition and descriptive passages can often feel burdened by the need to explain and move the plot forward, but in Sloan’s deft hands the story leaps from the pages. This is the first passage in the book:

                           Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. 

                           The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind. The 

                           tops of the shelves look high above, and it’s dark up there – the books are packed in                                   close, and they don’t let any light through. The air might be thinner, too. I think
                           I see a bat. 

                          I am holding on for dear life, one hand on the ladder, the other on the lip of a shelf,                                     fingers pressed white. My eyes trace a line above my knuckles, search the spines                                         – and there, I spot it. The book I’m looking for. 

                          But let me back up.

The image Sloan creates is crisp, but it still allows the reader freedom to use his or her own imagination. The anticipation of discovery is palpable. It is impossible not to continue reading.  

Sloan skillfully crafts tales with intriguing characters, a plot that twists in all the right ways, and prose that reads so easily it belies the expertise between the lines. Read it.

Rule of Feminism #1: See Mean Girls

When Mean Girls was released in 2004, audiences and critics alike greeted it as a fresh entry in the genre of teen comedies. Sitting in the movie theater with my dad and my brother I very distinctly remember two things. One, Mean Girls is not really the kind of movie you go to with your dad or brother and, two, thank goodness my high school experience bared no resemblance to the one portrayed in Tina Fey’s hit comedy. Now on Broadway, and 10+ years later, I still thank goodness that if anything remotely similar was happening at my high school, I was in a very comfortable band geek bubble and had no awareness of it.

Mean Girls entered the Broadway landscape last year and a slew of Tony Award nominations followed. While Tony night was not generous to the show, it is going strong on Broadway and, after seeing it on Halloween a couple of weeks ago (thanks for the mouse ears!) it is apparent why audiences continue to pack the August Wilson Theatre. Mean Girls has only a few counterparts on a Great White Way packed with wizards, witches, Phantoms and Lion Kings, and there is something truly refreshing about a present day comedy. With a strong book, catchy songs and a message that bears repeating, Mean Girls will likely continue to rule the school.

For the few uninitiated, Mean Girls tells the story of Cady, a previously homeschooled teen navigating high school for the first time.  Cady first meets Janis and Damien, who march to the beat of their own drummer, and she can confidently confirm for her parents that, yes, she made friends today. But when the Plastics, led by resident mean girl Regina George, latch onto naïve Cady, she finds herself in uncharted territory, dealing with passive aggressive put downs and infighting. Cady's whirlwind journey from new kid, to insensitive Plastic and back to respectable human being strikes a balance between humor and heart.

Adapting a hit film for the stage is surely not an easy task, mostly because it begs comparison. Fey’s work on the book of the musical leaves most of the beloved lines from the film intact – how can you not, Glen Coco? – but the musical manages to gain independence from the film. What makes the stage venture unique? It is now set in the present day, the age of social media. When the film was released, Facebook was barely more than an idea in Mark Zuckerberg’s head - er, those twins played by Armie Hammer in The Social Network - and cell phones were still mostly used only for emergencies. I had a calling card my first year of college. Google that if you’ve never heard of one. As technological advances make communication simpler and faster, does it make us better as a human race? Mean Girls makes a pretty compelling argument that it does not. Nasty rumors, backstabbing and spreading rumors is easier than ever and self-worth is measured in social media followers rather than actual human connection. The song “Stop” sums it up: when you are compelled to jump online to “over share, troll or meme” just stop. 

“Stop” is one of many expressive, catchy pop songs crafted by Nell Benjamin and Jeff Richmond that expertly lend themselves to Mean Girls and fit perfectly with the tone of their respective scenes. Songs such as “Stupid With Love” and “Revenge Party” have a bubblegum vibe despite their exploration of difficult emotions. In contrast, “I’d Rather Be Me” is an anthem to self-confidence and has enough gusto to invite fist bumps and head bobs of solidarity. The use of catchy pop is smart. The complex themes are easy to digest when wrapped in such a fun package.

Most of the original Broadway cast is still performing in the show and across the board the singing, dancing and acting is strong. As Cady, Erika Henningsen has the somewhat daunting task of making the moral compass standout amongst a landscape of very loud – in all meanings of the word – characters but she is up to the task. Ashley Park’s Gretchen Wieners is a standout. Her portrayal of someone who knows the manipulation that Regina is inflicting upon her but cannot help but strive for that attention and approval is hilarious and heartbreaking. As Janis and Damien, Barrett Wilbert Weed and Grey Henson get to have the most fun with two characters whose sarcasm is worn as a badge of honor. And Wilbert Weed brings down the house with “I’d Rather Be Me.” Let us not forget the ensemble, some of whom play both male and female characters as the scene requires. They are a singing, dancing, set-rolling machine. Their flawless execution of the choreography of the set pieces is almost as impressive as the actual dance steps.  

The positive message in Mean Girls is heralded loud and clear. There is no subtlety here. But because of the importance of the message, I wholeheartedly support spreading it loud and clear. Social media is not a substitute for human interaction and cutting others down on social media, in person or through other people does not build you up. In fact, the opposite is true. Genuine concern for other people? How sad that it comes across as such a novel idea in this day and age. If you find yourself in New York City, or if Mean Girls stops in your hometown, make it a point to meet the Plastics.