Lunch with Bèbè

Did you read this?

 I did.  The author, Pamela Druckerman, an American raising three small children in Paris, has some good ideas, especially on how the French systematically teach their babies to eat healthy food and behave while they’re doing it. (In England the book is called French Kids Don't Throw Food.) Hint: parents start very early, offer lots of different tastes and don’t sit around waiting for their kids to grow out of bland food or into good food. Unfortunately, by contrasting the thin, well-behaved and omnivorous French enfants with the chubby, plain pasta (ONLY) and goldfish chomping hellions of the States, Druckerman set herself up for righteous indignation and got put into the same crazy mother memoirist box as last year’s Tiger Mom, Amy Chua, It’s a pity.  With our obesity rate (one in three U.S. kids is overweight or obese) we need help wherever we can get it. And while not everyone will go to Harvard or play Carnegie Hall, everyone eats.

Druckerman covers other child-rearing topics,  but for me, her dissection of the French approach to feeding kids was the most interesting. It's a hot topic: another North American, Canadian professor Karen Le Billon (she is married to a Frenchie and splits her time between Canada and France) has written a whole book about it, called French Kids Eat Everything. 

 In excerpts and on her blog,  Le Billon comes across as more measured though slightly less amusing than the kooky Druckerman (who once wrote an article about arranging a threesome for her husband’s 40th and appeared in all her American TV interviews wearing a dopey beret.)  Just like Druckerman, Le Billon experiences the culture shock of bringing (in her case two) picky North American children to France. She was blown away by the polite garçons et filles eating the exact same meals as their parents without complaining. Her book offers instructions on how to stage your own Gallic makeover without leaving home. Here is Le Billon in The New York Times.

One part of the equation - totally inapplicable to us - is the government's support provided by France in the form of healthy, delicious school meals made for children from the time they enter state-sponsored day care-nursery school school all the way through high school. Le Billon has a blog dedicated to school menus from around France.  Druckerman absolutely rhapsodizes about her children’s crèche and brings readers on a visit to the Commission Menus in Paris, where the crèche menus are meticulously planned.  The chefs there fret over repeating items or tastes and brag of triumphs like getting the kids to eat things like sardine mousse.

Eating is an integral part of French education, not an afterthought stuffed with pink slime. Depending on your political bent, you are either unbelievably envious of this or think it is socialism at its worst. I’m in the envy camp. My son was a notoriously picky eater, with food allergies to boot. Any kind of support would have been heavenly.

What truly puzzles me is how people in our country got so far way from healthy eating.

No, we don’t have the gastronomical lineage of France, but we were not always fat people who snacked throughout the day. My mother was a plain, but reliable cook. My parents come from Irish- Germanic stock in the Midwest. Pork roast figured large, but it was cooked from scratch and our portions modest.  Hamburgers, fresh sliced tomatoes and celery spread with peanut butter were the staples of my childhood table. My two brothers and I passed through the usual swim and ballet lessons, hockey and baseball games, yet snacks happened only once a day: after school. The only activity which routinely included a snack was Brownies and only because it occurred  right after school when we all marched over to Mrs. Evan's house and she gave us Kool-Aid and graham crackers.  Candy was dispensed on Valentine’s Day and Halloween, not for getting an A on a spelling test.

Contrast this to my kids’ experience: no sporting event, school ritual or happy moment passes without an accompanying snack and often the most horrid available: really gross supermarket cookies or cupcakes.  I rarely hear parents uttering the familiar refrain of our youth: ‘don’t eat that now! You’ll spoil your dinner.”

The French, who prize variety,  would never approve: every school day, since preschool, my 14-year-old son has had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. (The coffee is mine.)

While the debate rages over the cause of our overweight nation (Suburbs! Big agriculture! Sedentary lifestyles!) it seems to me that one under-analyzed part of the equation is that our country is totally schitzo about food. We are divided between  people who cook and care - on the extreme you have home canners and Mark Zuckerberg butchering his own meat - and people who could care less,  eat pretty much everything and consider the kitchen a foreign country.  "I think cooking is a total waste of time," an educated, well-heeled former colleague, admitted recently. Until we give the growing, preparing and eating of nutritious food its due, we're left with the consequences. And they're not pretty.

Here is the completed American lunch and a snack for my 14-year-old. His school day includes a two-hour swim practice and not nearly enough vegetables. Terrible? No. Room for improvement? Yes.  My kids attend public school in Los Angeles. They do not have much love for Cafe L.A. - the school food service.

Patti Smith: Unplugged

I never tire of girl-moves-to-New York City stories. I recently inhaled Just Kids, poet-rocker-artist Patti Smith's memoir of her early days in the city and her romance-cum- friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith's prose is spare and beautiful; her restraint a surprise.  She was involved with Mapplethorpe, renowned for pushing buttons and boundaries with his shocking photographs, yet she is discrete, almost prudish, in her revelations. For instance, she describes their first time together with the Victorian phrase "our first intimacy."

Smith's story moves softly through the bold names and places of New York in the late '60s and early '70s. She encountered Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, had an affair with Sam Shepherd, lived in the Chelsea Hotel and hung out at legendary nightclub Max's Kansas City.

Yet, her very earliest times in New York intrigued me the most.  She left college, New Jersey and a factory job. She had no money and sleeps on the street and in parks. She barely ate.

This skinny girl, who idolized the poet Rimbaud, first saw Mapplethorpe when he walked into Bretano's bookstore, where she was clerking. Later he serendipitously materialized in Tompkin's Square Park and saved her from a horrid date. Soon they were living together in Brooklyn.  He was ostensibly a student at Pratt Art Institute. Holed up in together, they dreamed of artistic accomplishments, sketched, wrote and listened to music. Dinner was splitting a grilled cheese sandwich at a diner. A day in Manhattan was one person going in to museum, the other waiting outside and then describing his or her experience to the other. They could not pay for two.

The portrait of their home life in the pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre- electronic age is an astounding period piece. Take away their electricity, and they might as well have been the Brontës creating into the void of the desolate moors. Their apartment had no TV, radio or phone. Some evenings they played a game called "Night of the Record" and drew while playing the same record over and over. Its album cover would be displayed on their mantel.

Last week I watched my nine-year-old daughter iChat for the first time. My 14-year-old son is always texting or scrolling through Facebook or You Tube. The contrast is incredible. What is it like to live an unplugged life?  How does a plugged-in person capture enough quietude to develop as an artist, a writer, an anythinger these days? What feeds the creative soul better: instantaneous online recognition or silent isolation?

The Half That Makes the Artist Whole

While my friends Scotch taped pictures of David Cassidy, Michael Jackson or Elton John to their bedroom walls, my teenybopper longings went in a different direction. I loved Bob Dylan.

The first album I ever bought was Desire. (It was so long ago I bought it in the record section of the long-defunct Jordan Marsh department store.) It was a bad pressing. The first two tracks skipped, but I loved it and the homemade cassette tape of Blood on the Tracks that I found on the street. The trippy tangle of words strung together into fantastic stories was unlike anything else I heard on WRCO, Boston’s top pop station. I loved the poetry. I loved the melodies. I loved Bob Dylan.

Eventually, he returned my love. On the first date I had with my now-husband, loving Dylan was one of our first bonding points. The fact that we were walking through the same East Village streets he once roamed made the conversation all the sweeter.

A few years ago when Dylan’s famously silent girlfriend Suze Rotolo published a memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, her straight-forward remembrance of the Village when the folk music and protest scenes were fomenting and she was living with Bob, I gobbled it up and loved her too. First, having had my own romance with life in New York, I’m a sucker for young-woman-in-the Big City tales. As a Dylan fan, I had wondered about the Boho glamour girl strolling arm and arm with the musician down a snowy street on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album cover. And, finally, as the wife (of an artist!) I am fascinated by the whole dynamic of muse-dom and couples and the half that makes anyone, but especially the artist, whole.

Suze Rotolo (pronounced Rote-o-lo) didn’t inspire by just sitting in a corner looking beautiful – although it looks as though she could do that very well -she educated and guided. In her book and a subsequent press interview, she comes across as a grounded New York girl, serious and smart, not silly, but a bit dreamy. The working-class daughter of Italian-American Communists, she was schooled equally in social justice, opera and the arts. She started taking the subway from Queens to Harlem to volunteer for the civil rights group CORE while still in high school. Dylan, a relative bumpkin from Minnesota, learned a lot from her.

“I listen to Dylan’s songs spread over his early albums and I remember how it was; it’s like reading a diary,” she says in A Freewheelin’ Time. “A private smile because no one knows about that, a laugh because that was really funny, or a tear because it was so hard.” When her book came out, she told The New York Times that she and Dylan “created a private world” and that “We were searching for poetry, and we saw that in each other. We were so ultrasensitive, both of us. That’s why it was a good relationship but also why it was difficult.”

She also gives some tantalizing details of everyday vignettes that were transmuted into lyrics: in one she reminisces about walking home from nightclubs or parties in the early morning. They sometimes passed a Thompson Street butcher that stocked live chickens. On the deserted dawn street, they could hear the roosters crowing. “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” a song widely believed to be about her (even if she doesn’t admit it,) has the line “When the rooster crows at the break of dawn, look out your window and I’ll be gone.”

As a lover of New York and student of Bohemia, I thrilled to her descriptions of the village in the early ‘60s: cheap rents, apartments filled with books and records from secondhand stores and clothes she made or found in thrift stores. She describes one apartment as an “empty canvas” which she filled with free-hand designs painted on the wall, richly colored burlap curtains she made herself and bookcases made from fruit crates.

Rotolo died of lung cancer last week at home in the Village not far from where that iconic portrait Freewheelin’ portrait was taken on Jones Street. (Unfortunately Chesterfields and hand-rolled cigarettes also make an appearance in her book.) In 1961 when she met Bob, he was 20 and she 17. They were together for three years. An artist, activist and Village resident for the rest of her life, she married, had a son and, by all accounts, was happy mostly ignoring “the elephant in the room of my life,” until publishing her book in ’08.

Dylan is known for being opaque, yet Rotolo, whose endeavors as a visual artist never met the audience his work has, in some ways, had the last word. Refusing to be reduced to the girl who inspired one song or the other, Rotolo says she doesn’t “lay claim” to any one piece having been written about her, but that Dylan himself said certain ones would not have existed without her. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean a particular song,” she explains in a Freewheelin’ Time, “It means I served as a muse during our time together and that I don’t mind claiming.”

For that time, she was the half that made the whole. Did he ever thank her?