Holder lays down a tweeting challenge
At a San Francisco Foundation luncheon last week, reports Jon Funabiki, foundation chief Fred Blackwell introduced the speaker, former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder, as “general counsel to the resistance.”
Holder told the audience that he is learning to tweet (@EricHolder) and is “ready to joust with @realDonald Trump,” emailed Funabiki. “He’s from Queens,” said Holder. “I’m from Queens. Let’s do it.”
P.S. Tracy Bates was visiting family in Maine when his sister went channelsurfing, looking for a political talking heads show. “Aren’t you mad enough already?” her husband asked.
Whether you’re reading this over a bowl of breakfast cereal or over a serving of eggs Benedict, you’ll wonder what that breakfast preference says about you when you ponder, “What She Ate,” the latest book from food historian Laura Shapiro. To be sure, the “remarkable” in the book’s subtitle, “Six Remarkable Women & the Food That Tells Their Stories,” doesn’t always equate “remarkable” with “wonderful.”
The women studied are British authors Dorothy Wordsworth and Barbara Pym; Edwardian-era caterer Rosa Lewis; Eleanor Roosevelt; Eva Braun and Cosmo editor/sex maven Helen Gurley Brown. Apart from Lewis, her subjects “did not live culinary lives,” said Shapiro at a recent Hayes Street Grill lunch hosted by Patty Unterman. Shapiro said she’d leave writing about “beautiful ingredients, great cooking, the passion for food” to other writers. “I like the mistakes. People who go into the kitchen and start cooking ... and it doesn’t go well.” That said, Shapiro’s last book was a biography of Julia Child .In this one, her idea is “to use food as a lens. ... What we eat reflects everything: race, gender, politics, economics, social and cultural” factors. “It’s all in the food.”
As to Eleanor Roosevelt, at lunch Shapiro said that she “presided over the White House kitchen when it was producing the worst food in the history of the presidency.” A lot of that had to do with the state of her marriage, Shapiro added. Roosevelt had been raised with cooks doing the cooking, and as a young married woman, her mother-in-law presided over the kitchen. After Roosevelt learned of her husband’s philandering, she became interested in the study of home economics, which “could package the traditional responsibilities of womanhood in a way that allowed her to achieve mastery,” wrote Shapiro in the book.
But Roosevelt didn’t enjoy being the gracious White House hostess. “The sight of guests toying miserably with their ‘Eggs Mexican’ — rice topped with bananas and fried eggs — had no effect,” writes Shapiro, who quotes Roosevelt’s second memoir, “This I Remember”: “It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the President’s wife. I was lost ... that is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.” At the Willits Public Library, where
Lucie Faulknor was filming a mask giveaway last week, librarian Benjamin MacBean had put together a display of books relevant to current events: “Fire: Friend or Foe”; “Curious George and the Firefighters”; “The Complete Firefighter’s Exam Preparation Book” (for anyone inspired, Faulknor said); “The Firefighter’s Workout Book”; and “ThreeAlarm Jokes” like this one: “Why did the firefighter bring a ladder to the library? (S)he heard there were lots of stories there.” If you weren’t already groaning as a result of the fires, that joke should do it. Bertie Brouhard went to hear Krzysztof Urbanski conduct at Davies Hall on Thursday, Oct. 19, and then on Friday, Oct. 20, watched Houston Astro Justin Verlander pitch a playoff game. Reading Joshua Kosman’s review of Urbanski’s concert — “His conducting combines a masterful precision of detail with a command of the broader expanse of even the most challenging repertoire” — she thought the music critic’s description apt for the ballplayer, too.
The percussionist/DJ/actor/musical director Questlove, who DJed at the Midway on Friday night, was promoting his book, “Something to Food About: Exploring Creativity With Innovative Chefs,” around town earlier that day. In preparation for his visit to the company where he works, Alex Marmur thought about what he might want to ask Questlove. When it was Marmur’s turn in the meet-and-greet line, he asked how it had been to share his birthday, Jan. 20, with presidential inaugurations. “He responded that it was hardest in 2008,” emailed Marmur, “when it coincided with both Obama’s first inauguration and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He said his mother’s attention was somewhere else.
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “Do you want to see a picture of Uncle Alvin when he was a girl?” Girl to girl, overheard at La Taqueria by Holly Cost