I was looking into the multiverse of faces on Etta’s computer, and saw a photo of myself in Wisconsin walking the lakeshore in shorts and backpack and realized I had gained about twenty pounds since the summer. My shirts and pants are tighter. I am fat. My coworkers who happen to be Mexican-American have been saying it for a while. One of the bussers at Frontera grins each time we pass and says, “You like the tortas!” The extra pounds may as well be part of the uniform, though, as many of my work friends carry them. My cat is also fat.
The irony is that a photo of me in Wisconsin made me realize how much I have changed. That I was at my thinnest in the Midwest; Wisconsin in particular. Last week, after much anticipation over the Nytimes story on supper clubs, Etta and I ate at our first Wisconsin supper club. We ate at Toby’s, in Madison. It was my most intense dining experience of 2011, very emotional. The premise is totally opposite much of contemporary dining. You have drinks at the bar until you are ready to order your food, which you do with the bartender. You are brought to your table, preset with your soup, salad, rolls, relish plate, and dessert (which I mistakenly ate first, of course.) The main course comes, and you eat that. When you ready to settle up, you head back to the cash register at the bar.
If the American Dream was once a family, a home, a car, the whole white picket fence, now, in the wake of all these changes, the new American Dream is just to be thin. The folks in Wisconsin haven’t got the memo. Etta and I were the youngest, thinnest diners in the supper club. It was mysterious, in a way that all restaurants were back when you were a kid. I felt like I was in a place with my mom, Aunt Judy and Aunt Mo, and my grandmother and grandfather. The supper club brought me back in time. Not to when I was young and thin, but to when I was little and fat.
Darling Bear,
The woman’s magazines I read on the journey down the East coast advise how to eat the least from the bounty, the feasts presented at holiday parties. The land is rife with plenty. The cup overfloweth. This is better than a ‘hunger winter’. This is not the worst scenario. Until, of course, the lumbering of a person down the street makes you think of strained knees and impossible hikes, and you of your own hand, full of Cheetos. So steer clear of the unending supper.
Oh, and Dear Bear, enjoy running around. And exercise. I can’t at the moment, but when you’re better we should climb at the Gunks in NY together, some classic 2 or 3 pitch routes. You’ll then get even more motivation to not sink like a stone into a Midwestern armchair.
I just looked at Toby’s menu and there is nothing for a vegetarian, never mind a vegan, to eat. The unending bounty comes at the cost of factory farms in which animals live out a miserable life, in prison so that some Midwestern person can overeat.
“In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they’re the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer, author, Nobel Prize 1978