Essential Poe Facts

Very important facts about Edgar Allen Poe’s cottage in the Bronx:

There was no bust of Pallas above the chamber door, I am quite devastated to report.

There is this bust of Poe in the corner of the living room.

It's made of chocolate.

Poe rented the cottage for $100 a year from a farm.

The Bronx used to have farms, as well as forests.

Poe used to drink and play cards with the nearby Jesuit monks. Naughty.

According to the educational video played in a loop in the attic area, the cottage was built with high ceilings in order to conserve heat.

The low ceiling theory doesn't hold up – I nearly leaped over the barriers and lit a fire in the wood stove by rubbing together my dry, dry hands.

Poe had the best writing desk ever. Perhaps it’s a reproduction, but I don’t care. Just look at it.

Poe wrote next to this picture of penguins. You heard it here first.

Virginia Poe passed away in this bedroom.

After Virginia died, Poe wrote a prose poem called Eureka that anticipated the big bang theory.

The Bronx Historical Society volunteer guaranteed that if you read any sentence in Eureka, you will get a headache.

Poe was really, really depressed and thinking about Eternity when he wrote Eureka.

He considered it his magnum opus and submitted himself to death after writing it.

The educational video in the attic said that Poe spent the happiest years of his life there.

Ten minutes later it said they were the most excruciating years of his life. So which one is it?

Probably the latter.

Dirt Candy

My pictures did not come out, but here are four leeks. Or are they scallions? Hmm...

There comes a day in the life of every young woman when she does something absolutely abhorrent to her body in the name of having a cool experience. This is exactly what I did at Dirt Candy, a vegetarian restaurant in New York City that serves whimsical dishes made exclusively of photosynthesizing things that grow in the ground.

When one hears “vegetarian,” one envisions something healthy, like steamed carrots. Dirt Candy wants to shatter that association and melt maple butter all over it. Here are some things that are vegetarian: French fries. Waffles. Deep-fried waffles. Ice cream. Five-cheese ravioli. Speculoos cookie butter. Speculoos butter on a deep-fried waffle.

In conclusion, “vegetarian” and “healthy” are hardly synonyms. I learned this lesson the hard way at Veggie Galaxy in Boston a few months ago as I choked down the last bite of vegan cream cheese waffle and this week I learned it again. I am no stranger to making myself sick with yummy foods. Everything I ate at Dirt Candy was deep fried, slathered in butter, or alchemically transmogrified into cotton candy.

Dirt Candy, it turns out, gets completely booked at least three months ahead of time. I found this out when I tried to make a reservation online. I might have secured a seat sometime in June of 2014. Instead, my friend Abbey and I showed up around the time the doors opened and tap danced in their window until they seated us. (Until someone forgot that reservation they made three months ago.) Every time someone got seated, we hovered in the window with a look of disdain that burned into the very essence of their beings, especially when they sipped a beverage. The unseasonable October heat was oppressive and I was dressed for autumn.

Inside, the seating was intimate. The waitress pulled the table out so that I would be able to squeeze into the bench against the wall. We ordered jalapeno hush puppies with maple butter. We liberally applied the maple butter. Maple butter is a shameful thing to waste.

Everything on the menu was enthusiastically named after its primary vegetable ingredient. Mushroom! Cucumber! Potato! I took my chances the Parsnip! while Abbey asked for the Corn! as her entrée. My dish was described as “parsnip pillows” – essentially, extra squishy parsnip gnocchi. On Abbey’s plate, a tempura-fried poached egg sat atop some very cheesy and savory corn grits.

One of my main motivations for wanting to go to this vegetable alchemy lab was to try a dessert made of vegetables. We wavered between an ice cream bar made of peas and rosemary eggplant tiramisu. We asked the waitress what we should order.

“You want the tiramisu,” she said very seriously.

Of course, the tiramisu was two dollars more than the other desserts. When the plate arrived, we first saw this white fluffy cloud hovering on the plate. The woman next to me leaned in.

“Is that a wedding veil?” she asked.

No, that was the rosemary cotton candy. Resting below the cloud was a 2” by 2” square slice of tiramisu. It tasted like tiramisu, but also like eggplant. Somehow it worked. The cotton candy tasted like rosemary and I haven’t had cotton candy since age ten and probably will not have it again. My pancreas got so angry at me. I can’t believe you've done this, said my pancreas.

As we walked out of the restaurant, I felt like I needed a small perambulator on which Abbey could wheel me through the streets of Manhattan. Instant nausea. Between the butter and the sugar and the creamy sauces and all the disparate food items, I felt like my entire body shut down in order to digest the chaos. I wanted to make words and talk to my friend, but apparently walking and digesting and listening and speaking at the same time was more multitasking than I could manage. I suggested we walk it off, perhaps in the direction of a hospital. The walking did not last long and I ducked out early to go home and recover.

Was it worth it? Yes. I enjoyed the eating. Can I eat like this every day? No. I felt a little sad after the meal because I don’t get to see Abbey too often and here I was channeling all of my energy into assimilating the parsnip pillows. We made some jokes about the cotton candy being a poodle, but the thing is I actually felt like I ate a poodle. If I ate a small, snooty dog, that is exactly how I would feel. The Dirt Candy experience, although delicious, was a good reminder of why I eat the way I do.

One thing to cross off my list.

Story Slam!

Reading in front of people makes me feel like I’m going to asphyxiate. It’s almost as bad as giving improvisational speeches. I hope I never have to be a best man. In spite of all this, I treasure a masochistic enjoyment of reading to crowds of highly critical strangers and all of the minor seizures that come with it. 

Over the weekend I did it for the first time in two years and it was thrilling, much like running away from an explosion in slightly tattered formal wear.

When the literary arts journal Gigantic Sequins advertised a story slam at the Stonewall Inn to benefit the Al Forney Center, I wanted to be part of it. Dave and I went into the city, got some excellent falafel, and joined in on the story slamming festivities.

The storytellers shared novel bits, creative essays, and short stories and I learned about Norwegian food and bikram yoga and New Jersey. In the tradition of American television, there were three judges who critiqued each piece and gave gratuitous fashion advise.

I wish I talked to more people rather than clinging to my table and my Dave – next time, perhaps, I will give myself a quota. (i.e., Today I will talk to five strangers no matter how sweaty it makes my palms.) I did get the chance to speak to Ian and Kimberly Ann from Gigantic Sequins and they were very kind and welcoming even though I was the only person in the room (save Dave) that they didn’t know.

When my turn came up, I read this story that I posted on my blog last year. (Dave, always incredibly supportive, let me read it to him a hundred times on the subway.) The spotlight blinded me from seeing any crowd in front of me at all, which was perhaps why I didn't begin the reading with my customary asthma attack. At the end, I was at the mercy of the three judges.

“I have to admit, I was skeptical when you came onstage. I mean, orange and sea foam? Not many people can pull that one off, and yet here you are, pulling it off – well, not really, but your writing redeems you,” said the judge with the mustache.

After the readings, I was picked to be one of the three finalists by the judges. As a finalist, I received two tickets to the Museum of Sex and an egg shaped sex toy that was very much made for a man. Our fates were left up to the audience, who applauded loudly to choose a finalist. It was a close call, but in the end, I won.

At this point I was too excited to act like a human. I was a blushy mess, unable to accept the prize gracefully. I kept kissing Dave on the cheeks, and when another reader tried to kiss me on the cheek I thought he was trying to whisper something in my ear. Note to everyone: Never try to kiss me on the cheek, there is no telling how I will interpret your body language.

Thus, I left the story slam with Museum of Sex tickets, a men’s sex toy, one hundred dollars, and a whole lot of love for Gigantic Sequins. (This is hardly surprising. A gerbil with an automatic hand gun is featured on the cover of the most recent issue.) I think every once in a while I have to do something that makes me feel uncomfortable.

Check out Ian's pictures from the event here.

Love and Magic

I had heard about a free play in Central Park and my friend L. and I decided to venture into the city for the day to see it. By the time we found the outdoor theater there was no one around. The chatty employees in matching shirts did not notice us staring into their booth, clearing our throats. Waiting. We noticed a sign hanging above us that leveled our lukewarm hopes:

Tonight’s Show SOLD OUT

A man came around to the front of the booth to put up a poster.

“Excuse me,” I said, “But the sold out sign – is that for the play at seven?”

“Oh, yeah, we ran out of tickets hours ago. People start lining up at six in the morning and wait there until two when we begin passing them out. Then it’s crazy for a half hour and it’s all sold out by two-thirty.”

I sighed. It was about three now.

“If you want, though, you can get in line over there and I can just about guarantee that I can get you a seat when the show starts.”

He indicated a line of people on the distant sidewalk, kept far from the ticket booth. Neither of us felt like waiting in line for four hours and enduring the lethargy that was sure to madden our fragile minds, so we declined and moved on. There was an enormous park before us, several hours of daylight, and a half-eaten bag of truffles in L’s bag for us to feed our sugar highs.

I smelled a delicious smell wafting through the air.

“Food,” I said lovingly.

L. and I followed the path and passed the turtle pond and a little league baseball game. We came to a stand and knew immediately the source of the orgasmic odor.

Waffles.

Waffles.

We inched closer to the waffle stand and read the menu carefully. I wanted to know everything.

“What are you girls doing, standing all the way over there?” a black haired fellow with glasses and a white apron said from inside of the stand. He had an accent that sounded Scottish to me, but I rationalized that he must be a waffle expert from Belgium. “Come closer. Come on.”

We took a few little steps towards the stand.

“Where are you girls from?”

“New York,” I answered, gazing down at the varieties of waffles described below his face.

“Brittany, we’re in New York,” L. said. “Saratoga.”

L. and I did not want anyone selling us anything. We quietly discussed waffles. We wondered what dinges were and how to even say it.

“I think it’s pronounced ‘dingus,’” L. whispered.

“That’s what Dave calls people when their being idiots,” I said. “Spekaloos - what is that? Is that a Belgian thing?”

The fellow behind the counter overheard us.

“Do you want to try it?” he said.

I nodded eagerly. He dipped both sides of a plastic knife with a tan, buttery substance, much like a goopy peanut butter. I took it, licked the knife end, and handed L. the handle. It was warm, spicy, and smooth. She tasted the handle end.

 “This tastes so familiar. What is this made of?” I asked.

“Love and magic,” the man behind the stand said. “What do you think it tastes like?”

“Love and magic seems about right, actually,” I said.

“There’s some cinnamon,” said L, thinking aloud.

“It’s gingerbread,” the fellow in the stand said before either of us could produce the answer.

Gingerbread!

“Oh! Gingerbread!” I cried. “That’s exactly what it is!”

That’s what we were smelling before; it wasn’t merely the waffles.

L. and I whispered about the possibility of buying some fragrant waffles. We had already planned to go to Alice’s Tea Cup and fill our happy stomachs with scones and tea after dinner, and with bellies already gushing with truffles, the thought of waffles seemed over the top.

“Should we go then?” I asked her.

“Let’s go.”

“Bye,” I said to the guy at the stand, “Thanks for all the magic!”

He looked sad. We walked away very quickly.