September 26, 2006
The Musical About Mrs. Lincoln Posted by Claire Lui at 05:00 PM EST I am a sucker for all shows entitled “[____]: The Musical!” I have attended Medea: The Musical!, a campy drag-queen version of the Greek tragedy, and Bat Boy: The Musical, a cheerful version of a Weekly World News tabloid story about a half-bat half-boy rendered in song.
It was not until last week, though, when my colleague Andrea and I went to see Asylum! The Musical, that I fully realized the possibilities of the genre. In our July 2006 issue we published an article by Jason Emerson, “The Madness of Mary Lincoln,” about the former First Lady’s years in an insane asylum. I fact-checked the piece, and I was drawn into the world of Lincoln obsession, becoming totally engrossed with the family trials of Mary Todd Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln, and the rest of the Todd and Lincoln clans. Jason Emerson had discovered a cache of long-lost letters from Mary Todd Lincoln, and reading the copies of those old documents really drew me into the story.
I am not, however, convinced that a topic that makes for exciting fact-checking makes for exciting musical theater. I never imagined that dry and dusty facts (the early flirtation of Mary Todd and Stephen Douglas or the scheming of Mary Todd Lincoln’s savior, Myra Bradwell) could be set to song, and watching these facts be sung by a cast of five was a probably the strangest history experience I’ve ever had. I was sufficiently mesmerized by the play that when I turned to Andrea to comment that the actor playing Abe Lincoln looked more like the actor John Lithgow than Abe, she started laughing and pointed out he was the same actor who was playing Dr. Richard Patterson, something that had completely escaped my notice.
The musical, which portrays Mary as a loving mother forsaken by her cold and money-hungry son (an image, I think, that hit home with many of the audience members), is only one take on the incident. But no matter how you cut it, the tale of Mary Lincoln in the asylum is essentially a domestic one, and thus a footnote. The story is closer to an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond than anything else. I think this kind of history appeals to women—and I say this as a woman—because it represents a kind of forgotten history, a reflection of daily life that is ignored in the stories of battles and politics that make up most history textbooks. Both the composer-lyricist, Carmel Owen, and the book writer of the play, June Bingham, are women, as is the author of a new novel about Mary Lincoln, Janis Cooke Newman.
Newman’s book, Mary: A Novel, seems in my brief skimming to have taken the novels of Judith Krantz, rather than a family television show, as a model. There are many steamy passages between Mary and Abraham Lincoln in this book, and I realized that there are places where my historical imagination is limited. Despite my fascination with the Lincoln family, I do not know if I am ready to read a bodice-ripping (and let me tell you, there is bodice-ripping) description of Mary and Abraham’s love life.
Both the musical and the book have an admirable goal: to make history relevant, and to point out that the Lincolns are not so different from you and me. I think, though, that sometimes we like our heroes to be heroes, and not quite so much like us.
If you are fascinated with the domestic life of First Ladies, you may be interested in Asylum! which ends October 1 and is playing at the York Theatre here in Manhattan. Mary: A Novel, by Janis Cooke Newman, is published by MacAdam/Cage, and the publicist tells me that the book is going to be reviewed by People magazine. At last, a trashy history book.
April 6, 2006
About Food Posted by Claire Lui at 09:15 AM EST American Heritage bloggers have been writing about politics and about food, but what about political food? Food lore gives political power to a number of everyday snacks, including the croissant and the pretzel. I first heard the croissant story in a high school history class, though I fear it may be only a myth. Legend holds that a Viennese baker (or perhaps a Turkish one; the details are muddy) overheard the Turkish army tunneling under the city. His sharp hearing led to the tunnel being blown up, and this patriotic baker asked only that he be given the exclusive right to bake crescent-shaped pastries in honor of the occasion (crescents being the symbol of Islam). Alan Davison, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food, credits this story to the first edition of Larousse Gastronomique, but finds it unbelievable. (I’ve also heard that in French bakeries the curved croissants mean that they are made with real butter, while straight croissants are made with margarine. This too, may be only rumor.) Pretzels, as I learned while watching Final Jeopardy! the other day, are in the shape of crossed arms in prayer. A site called www.catholicculture.org gives more of an explanation: Pretzels, made only of flour, water, and salt, to satisfy the requirements of Lent, were shaped into the crossed arms of prayer (the preferred position of praying back in the early pretzel-making days) to remind snackers that Lent was a time of prayer. (This pretzel history is remarkably like the symbolism of matzoh, another timely holiday food.) And finally, in our own modern times, I was amused to see that in Iran bakeries were renaming Danish pastries “Roses of the Prophet Mohammed” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4724656.stm), in response to the uproar over the political cartoons in Denmark. We, of course, have our freedom fries (a name that my local pizzeria continues to use). Considering that the Danes don’t call breakfast goodies Danishes and the French don’t call their pommes frites French fries, it seems like a bit of a fuss over nothing. The best quote in the BBC article is from a sweet-toothed shopper in Tehran: “I just want the sweet pastries. I have nothing to do with the name," shopper Zohreh Masoumi said.
March 14, 2006
Spelling Tests Posted by Claire Lui at 07:00 AM EST Reading John Steele Gordon’s blog post reminded me of Woody Allen’s joke that the Russian Revolution simmered for years and finally erupted when the serfs realized that the czar and the tsar were the same person. I suppose I am on John's side, if only because too many variant spellings mess with my ability to get through crossword puzzles. But I am curious about his mention of the Persian Gulf. I assume that even Mr. Gordon no longer calls Iran Persia. And Beijing seems to have become the default spelling for the Chinese capital, while Peking duck remains the preferred spelling, even in China, for that lovely dish. When should the English language change a geographic name? When the borders are redrawn? When a new regime seems permanent? I don’t know the answer, but perhaps Mr. Gordon has some thoughts.
November 11, 2005
The Best and Wurst Street Food Posted by Claire Lui at 02:15 PM EST Last night I attended the first annual Vendy Awards, which recognized the best street food in New York. The event also served as a benefit for the Street Vendor Project, whose mission is to advance economic justice and civil rights for street vendors. (First, full disclosure. My boyfriend, Adam Kuban of Slice, a pizza blog, was one of the judges.) As someone who has always been a fearless street eater, ignoring the wimpy and fearful protests of my weaker-stomached friends, I loved tasting the chow of the four finalists: the Best Halal, Dosa Man, the Dragon, and Hallo Berlin, all cooking their goodies out of their carts in a long, narrow warehouse. And eating my chicken sausage (little mustard, no ketchup, $4 from Hallo Berlin) and drinking my guava juice ($1.25 from Dosa Man), I started thinking about how anonymous cart vendors are. Often we refer to them by their product rather than by name (“Oh, the kebab guy on the corner is good”), a symptom of the fast-food quality of our lives and meals. Though many of the cart vendors have an encyclopedic memory of their regular customer orders, I suspect that they too remember us, their customers, with mnemonics, such as: “Annoying brunette likes tea with milk, no sugar,” or “Ugly sweater guy likes his chili with no cheese.” I have a standing order at almost every cart where I eat with any regularity, and I wonder how much neighborhood knowledge and gossip is contained within the minds of the various cart vendors. Unsurprisingly, these observers of our daily eating habits are almost always immigrants and have been for centuries. Nancy Ralph, another one of the judges and director of the New York Food Museum pointed out that the first street vendors in New York were probably Germans who sold hot potatoes from carts beginning as early as the 1640s. Later, in the 1800s, oysters were sold raw and freshly picked off the shore, a delicacy today that was then considered nothing more than a pedestrian staple. Ralph mentioned that during the 1880s in New York, almost 800 million oysters were processed annually, making them the nineteenth-century equivalent of today’s pretzel or flabby hot dog. Today, New York is one of just a handful of American cities (Philadelphia’s lunch trucks with their hoagies and cheese steaks come to mind) where one can choose from a varied selection of street food. With our large pedestrian population, New York is probably the ideal American metropolis for selling the street foods so popular in other countries. (Even Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the impresario of fancy restaurants, embraces street food with Spice Market, his restaurant that serves upscale variations of Asian street foods. Appetizers there can cost a whopping $14, ideal for street-food lovers who wish to munch in a more genteel environment rather than loitering next to a fire hydrant.) Unsurprisingly, these men, like many street-food sellers of yore, struggle with heavy ticket fines for legal infractions and the pressure to keep selling enough food to turn a profit no matter what the weather. After the announcement of the winner (Hallo Berlin, aka the Wurst Street Cart, beat out the other three contestants by two points to claim the trophy), the event took on a distinctively union flavor, with instructions that we all hold hands and yell “Vendor Power!” and “Si se puede!” (“Yes, we can”), giving the thing a Norma Rae-esque vibe. All in all, an interesting event, and a reminder that street foods represent so much of American history in each bite. Someone said to me recently, “For each new immigrant group, the language is the first to go, and the food is the last.” Street vendors bring a taste of home to recent immigrants while introducing new foods to the American vernacular. Who knows? Just as yesterday’s oysters became today’s hot dogs, tomorrow’s dosas will give way to something still unknown to the American palate.
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