We had breakfast at Nick’s Diner, the place by our house where you can always go up to the counter and see a friendly face provided that you wake up in time to get in, as we continued our week of sticking around at home and not doing much of anything. Later we went to see a production of Into the Woods at the Kennedy Center by the Fiasco Theater, where they dispensed with an orchestra and let the characters on stage play the trumpet, bassoon, percussion triangle, and piano, among other instruments. The break between the first and second acts of that play always comes to me as a little shock, with the first act keeping you pleasantly situated in an amusing and logical world of interlocking fairy tales, and the second bringing you uncomfortably close to reality with all of its random destruction and unfairness. In this production, they visualized the difference by overturning chairs and other props to make it look like a storm had come through; I could also imagine (and I’m sure some theater has done this before) dispensing with the fairy tale apparatus altogether and making the second act take place in an office building or something like that.
We had thought about going out to have an extravagant dinner at a David Chang restaurant, but we didn’t feel up for it, so we went home and got takeout phở. This was the first time I realized that phở does, in fact, begin with raw beef: To put it together piece by piece, you place the cold meat on the bottom of a bowl and cover it with noodles and onions and peppers, then pour in the broth, followed by the garnishes and chili sauce, and let the beef heat to your liking. The broth had gone a little cold during the trip from the restaurant to our house, so we ended up microwaving the soup for a couple minutes to cook the beef properly. The heat woke us up and made us almost feel ready, in a few days, to end our little vacation at home and go back into the world where witches can be right, and giants can be good.
(Photo: Scenic Café near Duluth, Minnesota.)
365 Days of Food 