Category: Uncategorized

Can you think of the last time you went to a movie, concert or restaurant and got to enjoy the show, music or meal — and your companions — without disruption from at least one neighboring person or party?

I cannot. Here are some recent experiences. …

There was the play, written by a certain dark-witted playwright whose humor certainly calls for enjoyment including laughter. But does it really call for the theatergoer who lets out a resounding Ha! accompanied by an equally resounding single clap every single time? And whose point-proving appreciation (See, everyone? I get the edgy jokes!) overlaps the next line of dialogue … every single time?

As annoying as that experience was — enough that I left the theater during intermission — at least the playgoer was there to take in a play. I can think of countless outings where the people around us seemed to wish as deeply as I did that they were somewhere else.

There was the movie lounge, where you can order and receive food and drink during show time, and yes, I realize such a setup invites people to talk and get drunk during movies. But does it really invite a girls night out? Complete with everyone in the party getting tipsy and giggly and loud, but with the added advantage of a movie to talk noisily over and about while people not in the group struggle to simply view a film over a craft beer?

There was the concert in a vintage theater with tiny, crowded seats and the drunken couple who sat directly in front of us. Well, “sat” is a broad term for all those moments when they weren’t climbing over people to go to the bathroom, return with two drinks each, and go back for more drinks and/or more potty runs. While “sitting,” they constantly made sure no one missed their seat-dancing or their vocal harmonies, going so far as to tap on the shoulders of the people in front of them or twist around to demand eye contact with the people behind them in order to assure us all that they were just having fun.

There was the lunch at a moderately priced restaurant that serves wine and uses cloth napkins, and the neighboring table with a couple of 10-year-olds allowed to chase each other back and forth in the path along our table. … The dinner at a pizza patio where the two mothers blissfully ignored their two children as they run around, climbed a tree and hollered at each other, next to our table. … The breakfast place where the party of nine included three daughters who eventually tired of the dolls they brought and decided to run around the restaurant calling to each other while the six adults got free babysitting.

We recently went on a long weekend to Kansas City and had similar experiences almost everywhere we went. The one that stands out is the concert, though.

We had tickets to a standing area on the fifth floor of a beautiful theater, and the only way to view the stage was by standing at the railing. As luck would have it, we stood next to a group of chatty people who leaned back against the railing — yes, literally keeping their backs to the stage — and did not turn around when the show began. They continued to carry on a conversation, nonstop. For the first half-hour, we kept giving them looks, to no avail. The sound system was quite muddy, so even in scant pauses between chatter we couldn’t hear the artists singing softly.

Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and turned around to face the most talkative one. I caught his eye immediately and said something like, “Dude, we paid to listen to this concert. Would you just let up and let us hear it?” I gave him one last glare and turned around, cupping my ears to hear the show. Try as I might to simmer down, I had one angry, recurring thought: Why would anyone buy tickets to a concert and then not watch it? If I wanted to spend two hours talking with my friends, I wouldn’t pay admission and talk over a live show!

A few minutes later, the man tapped us on the arm and handed us two tickets to seats at that very concert. “Guys, I’m really sorry,” he said. “Please take these, they’re on the second floor. Enjoy the show.”

Wow! What a great way to apologize! We hurried down to the second floor and enjoyed the remainder of the show immensely.

But the rest of the weekend was more like the concert pre-apology: The restaurants, the lovely night spot where we saw a jazz duo, the art museum — drunks, loudmouths and unattended children intruded on our enjoyment everywhere we went.

The fellow who apologized with those concert tickets might have had an expensive awakening, and I’d bet he thinks twice the next time he wants to talk over a show. But we were lucky he was capable of that awakening. Most of the time I don’t feel safe confronting a disruptive person or parent, or even casting a dirty look.

 

For the second consecutive month, my book group is reading a title I would never read on my own. This time it’s a modern romance; last month it was a lurid murder story. Both books are by best-selling authors.

The member who chose the murder story said she wanted a quick read during the busy holiday season. I don’t know the motivation of the person who chose the romance, but I would bet she had a similar reason. Maybe a quick read, maybe something easy on the holiday-harried intellect.

I cannot identify with the impulse to choose a mindless read.

I remember the time a friend posted a request on Facebook asking for recommendations for an easy-going beach read for her vacation. The suggestions ran one extreme to the other, perhaps inadvertently because of me.

It started with the highbrow. She was a university employee, and many suggestions were made to impress her, I thought: heavy tomes that would be very difficult to tackle while lolling around on a sandy towel under the burning sun. I picked a Miami-based crime novel by a former journalist — not high literature by any stretch, but intelligently written and containing wry humor and some insights about the state of newspapers as voiced by the protagonist, a reporter whose career is on the downswing.

Apparently I lowered the bar way too much. On the heels of my proposed title came a suggestion for what was termed a “mindless” read. In fact, I suspected the word came in response to my title, as if to say, well, if we’re getting off our high horse to go there, then by all means let’s do mindless and call it what it is. I think the person suggested something on the order of these latest titles chosen by my book group.

But I take issue with mindless reading — the practice and the attitude behind it.

As a reader, I choose how much of myself to put into a book. If I’m busy or distracted or time-constrained, I might read it lightly — sort of intellectually skimming the text — but I can also choose at any time to give the book my full, deep attention. I might mark up the margins with notes, I might read a passage out loud to my husband, I might write a reflection or two in my journal. I don’t have to do any of this, but I can, because I choose books that give me something in exchange for my time.

I don’t want the book to decide for me how deeply I should read. That’s what these murder stories and romances do: They are the equivalent of bad TV, mind-numbing pabulum that serves only to kill time.

If I want to kill time, I can turn on the TV. If I want to invest my time in a book, it’s not to numb my mind. In fact, I turn to books when I feel my mind going numb watching TV. The books I choose wake me up. I read to make myself feel or think something. If a book is too much like TV, I’ll turn to a better book!

 

 

 

 

A few days ago I closed a book after reading the first 30 pages and decided not to pick it up again. This was a big decision for me. The last time I decided not to finish a book, many months ago, was probably the first time too.

Until now, I’ve always approached books and the finishing of them as I do a plate of dinner: You must finish your plate because it’s a sin to waste food. I was many years into adulthood before I made peace with the idea of throwing away uneaten food. And perhaps that experience sheds light on how I’ve finally made peace with not finishing a book.

In the case of food, I learned long ago to be careful at buffets: Choose wisely and dot your plate with a teaspoon of this and a bite of that, so your plate looks like a crazy tray of hors d’oeuvre. I’m a pretty adventurous eater, so it’s no big deal if I don’t like everything I taste. But that doesn’t mean I want to eat or waste a big helping of it. After sampling everything, I go back for seconds of the things I liked. Easy.

But then there’s the restaurant experience. I’ve ordered foods naively assuming the worst they could be was mediocre, only to discover some dishes were so bad I literally could not put any more than a few bites in my mouth. I could write 750 words just on the three gumbo experiences I’ve had in Wyoming, Michigan and Arkansas that ultimately contributed to my détente with food waste.

Let’s cut to the third of that shameful triad: Arkansas, where the gumbo was black as ink and bore the extremely heavy taste of … I guessed pure Liquid Smoke. After the first revolting spoonful, I took to sifting through the bowl with a fork to pick up the rice and let the inky broth drain. It left black silt on the rice, and of course, that flavor. After a while I got angry and indignant and I put my fork down. How dare the kitchen even serve this swill? When the waitress offered to bring me something else, I declined. Clearly the kitchen would only waste whatever food it handled.

And there was the key to my dilemma: It was not I who wasted food, it was the restaurant cook whose abuse of innocent foodstuffs was so extreme as to be a sin! By throwing it away, I was merely laying those mutilated remains to rest instead of humiliating them further by tasting them with curled lip.

Since that Arkansas gumbo experience, I have thrown away partial plates of food whenever I was confident it was the kitchen and not me who sinned.

And now, I see an analogous situation in choosing whether to read and savor a book all the way through or to put it down after a fair tasting and cleanse my palate with something better.

I belong to a book group, and we take turns choosing a book once a month as well as a place to discuss it over margaritas and dinner. Our choices are all over the board, as are our members. Although I haven’t liked all of the choices, I’ve finished every one of them since joining the group, probably because of some residual clean-your-plate ethic.

But this book is like that terrible gumbo.

The author doesn’t need or deserve any publicity from me; let’s just say he churns out bestsellers that bear his name at the top and a co-author’s credit at the bottom. Most are destined for movies, and they typically involve a murder story narrated in three-page chapters.

His work reminds me of the many TV series I switch off before the opening credits. I simply can’t stomach those crime shows that open with some woman being kidnapped, then return after the opening credits to detail exactly how she was raped and tortured before being killed by a serial pervert who’s still on the loose.

After a brief prologue, the narrative of this book jumps right into the victim’s kidnap and on to her explicitly described bondage, rape, torture and finally her murder — all filmed for a paying customer. When I put the book down, it was with the same indignation I felt when I put down my fork. The author and his cohort have done to words what that Arkansas restaurant cook did to food — made it into garbage. I cannot and will not swallow another bite.

Food is many things to me: I grew up in New Orleans, which is shorthand for I love food, I love to cook, I love to eat, everybody I grew up with cooks, oh the dinners, the parties, the crab boils, the restaurants, Uncle Henry’s gumbo. … We used to go to restaurants and, while eating a great meal, talk about other great meals past and planned.

Now that I don’t live in New Orleans, much of my homesickness centers on the food.

Around the holidays — which to me include Mardi Gras — I cook up a storm. My homesick cuisine, of course, is Louisiana fare, Cajun and Creole. Oyster dressing for Thanksgiving, gumbo for Christmas, pork roast with Creole mustard and bourbon orange sauce for New Year’s, oh my god, talk about good! One day I’ll get the hang of king cake, but in the meantime, I’m  close to perfecting a hurricane that passes for a fine punch with or without the rum.

In between holidays, when homesickness is at bay if not (ever) gone, food is there for me. The food, the eating, the cooking … all there. It’s entertainment, hobby, pastime, meditation, comfort, story. I talk about cooking and trade ideas with cooking friends (sadly, outside of Louisiana, not all friends are cooking friends). I have Opinions with a capital O about the meals I get in restaurants. I try something new and want to crack the mystery and go one better. I scan multiple recipes for a dish and combine ideas to come up with my own.

I’ve invented a Louisiana recipe or two, inspired by the mantra I heard as often as any nursery rhyme: Well, cher, you start with a roux. … Those inventions are just as nostalgic for me as the old standbys I recapture during and between holidays. I have no doubt that if I told my Louisiana friends I’ve created something I call Cajun meatballs, some would swear, truthfully, that they’ve done the same.

And then we’d talk about it over dinner.

My name is Wanda Freeman, and I am a writer. Writing is my calling, my passion, my profession, my hobby … my identity.

I discovered I wanted to be a writer in high school when I took a creative writing course. I can still remember (admittedly faintly) a couple of pieces I wrote during that time. There was a humorous tale with a twist about a Wild West-era gambler, a vignette about a lonely hermit … and then there was the one that changed my direction (or gave me one) forever.

We were assigned to write a story in class that began with some line like “It was a dark and stormy night.” I wrote in first person in the character of a young man who has car trouble out in the country and knocks on a door for help. A woman answers, invites him in … and — as I suspect many stories by many teenagers go — she turns out to be off her rocker. She attacks the young man with a knife, and he barely escapes to tell the harrowing tale.

I turned in my story, sat at my desk and watched my teacher read … and I knew exactly when he reached the end: He looked up me and bugged his eyes in mock horror. Of course, I collected an A.

From that day on, I knew I was going to be a writer. The University of New Orleans didn’t offer a creative writing major at the time, so I majored in English literature. Some time into my freshman or sophomore year, I read an article in Newsweek (remember them?) about first-time authors getting published without the help of agents. Writers who submitted over-the-transom manuscripts might stand out in the crowd if they had already developed a credible reputation as writers for newspapers, the article suggested.

Well, that was that: I decided to go to work for the newspaper — The Times-Picayune. I loved working there so much that I fantasized about becoming one of the old guard one day, reminiscing with ink-stained editors at the neighborhood bar. I happily turned my attentions to being a forever journalist and forgot about writing the great American novel.

Until I left the paper, that is. I worked there for about seven years, and when I left and began freelancing as a business writer, the fiction bug returned. By this time, UNO was offering creative writing classes, and I took a couple. Thus began a long period of writing fiction on my own time while freelancing, then later working at jobs that often had nothing to do with writing, until I finally fulfilled a new dream: graduate school.

I earned my master’s in creative writing from Eastern Michigan University, after which I found myself rather miserable trying to complete the novel that was my graduate project. Back to journalism I went, nostalgic for the camaraderie of the newsroom, the delicious, worldly humor of journalists, the dream of recapturing a future as part of the old guard.

But as we all know — especially those of us who have actually worked in journalism — the future I once envisioned had evaporated. Newspaper reporting had become incredibly stressful, punishing work, and the writing was not joyful for me. I worked at two newspapers in Arkansas, where I live now, and both were much smaller than the Times-Picayune in its heyday. Newspapers everywhere were shrinking, and opportunities for fulfillment were vanishing. I found myself wanting to return to more joyful writing, both on and off the job.

During my last year at my last paper, I entered NaNoWriMo — National  Novel Writing Month — and wrote with abandon, as I hadn’t done in years. I chose a humorous storyline, with the working title “Ha!” to remind myself to have fun, and I wrote in madcap two-hour increments as fast as I could type. The experience jump-started my dormant creative side, reintroduced a spirit of joy in my writing, and helped me get through the waiting and watching for a job where I would be surrounded by people who were as smart and creative as journalists and perhaps a lot happier.

Today I work as the marketing editor at a university. I get to make my living doing what writers do to make a living. I’m surrounded by delightful, funny, smart, creative people. And I get to go home and write fiction, poetry, songs, movies, reviews, recipes … and a blog!

I have lots of ideas for future posts, but for now I’m working behind the curtain. I’ll be back soon!