I have just eaten a pizza that was not covered in pickle chunks. I feel better about the entire food group.
(There's not much story here. When we took my mother to Za for her birthday last Sunday, I ordered one of the specials: its toppings were chorizo, dill pickle, caramelized onion, Swiss cheese, mustard cream, and parsley, almost all of which I like. I expected a tangy white pizza with slices of chorizo and dill pickle. What I got was a lot more like a Chicago dog in pizza form. Minus the tomato. Thank God I asked them to hold the onions. The salient features were thick chunks of dill pickle everywhere under the cheese, like a blocky, flat-toned relish, forming an unavoidable majority of every bite with the chorizo crumbled bravely on top among zigzags of yellow mustard, which I would not have called a cream. I deconstructed as much as I could with knife and fork, trying to salvage the bits of chorizo and cheese while dissecting out the overpowering pickle, but it was a semi-successful effort at best. I ate it because I had ordered it. With the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge of how I felt for the rest of that day, I should totally have accepted my mother's offer of other people's pizza. In Za's defense, it was my first disappointment after a decade of cheerful weird pizza-eating and the Caesar salad I ordered at the same time was delicious: a creamy, lemony dressing thickened with not too much Parmesan and garnished with anchovies in the form of soft silvery fillets as oily as sardines, not the tiny dry spiny eyebrows so many salads are cursed with. As failures go, though, it was a doozy. I felt betrayed by pizza. So tonight we went to Flatbread and their carne special was steak and mushroom and Gorgonzola—plus the waitress let me order a salad that was mostly kelp; all was forgiven. I am sure that someday I will encounter a pizza that makes brilliant use of pickles, but March 9th was not that day.)
Yesterday's Ides of March in Union Square was pretty much everything I was hoping for and even a little bit more. What I went for was the Romanitas of the thing and the chance at Union Square Donuts, which is almost never open when I'm around. What I got was roving street theater of the first water, complete with audience interaction and quick-uptake improv. The crowd in the parking lot outside of the Independent was full of people in togas, some of whom were Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, Casca, and the rest of the conspirators. There was a caricaturist and a gladiatorial arena. Students from the Latin club of a local high school were running a thermopolium, selling liba (sweet cheese cakes with bay leaves), honey cookies, and a pennyroyal salad out of Columella's De de rustica. (I asked about dormice. They said they didn't have a license.) The soothsayer had set herself up in the little fortune-telling booth that attends all street fairs whether they asked for it or not. Up onstage, where the microphone and the masters of ceremonies were, there was a Roman numeral bee, a trivia contest, a pet costume contest for the Dogs of War. (The chariot race took place in the parking lot.) And down on the ground, in the Forum, gathering pace throughout the afternoon, there was the first two-thirds of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
And most of it worked really well. The trivia contest was less Roman than sorta-kinda-related-to-Latin-and/or-assassinations-ish, but I made myself give it a pass for not being written for classicists. I'd been betting on radio-controlled cars for the chariot race, but it was pedicabs racing up Sanborn Court and back down around a spina of construction-striped sawhorses, taking on a new load of happily screaming children at the end of each lap. The simultaneity afforded by the staging-in-the-throughout was great: Casca and Cassius could plot in their secret clubhouse ("KEEP OUT NO EMPERORS") at the same time as the soothsayer was telling Caesar's fortune with a Tarot deck (the astrology chart at the back of her booth proclaiming "The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes"). Caesar was cut down by the community access TV building with much splashing of Karo syrup and enthusiastic assistance from several small children, one of whom gave him a noogie with a fistful of Karo right before Brutus got in the unkindest cut of all. The conspirators took to the stage to rally to the crowd to their cause, after which Marc Antony commandeered the mic and rallied the crowd right back. Not all the performers were used to competing vocally with street noise; Cassius and Casca acquitted themselves well, especially in the ad-libs (the letters to Brutus in Cassius' several different hands included a Star Wars shout-out and fashion advice), but Brutus, a tall, grave, rawboned girl with her hair pulled back in the nearest thing to a Roman haircut a bun could manage, spoke her lines with the correct intent conviction and not a lot of projection. Marc Antony's "HAVOC!" was Brian Blessed-class, though. We stayed through the funeral orations, after which the event broke up into gladiatorial games. The bus was dramatically late.
The weather even got into the act. Most of the day was bright and blastingly windy, just sun-warm enough that I overheated walking down from Highland and started to freeze as soon as I'd stood for a few minutes. As the conspirators trailed Caesar into the fatal Forum, the clouds darkened; a storm front appeared over the horizon, grimly lowering. The stabbing and splashing started and the sky began, lightly and coldly, to rain. By the time we were shivering for the bus and Brutus was wrapping up the funeral proceedings with the production history of Julius Caesar ("Brutus has stabbed Caesar over two thousand times"), it was bright and blasting again.
(We made it to Union Square Donuts, too. By two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, there were not many donuts, but enough remained for me to have a strawberry glazed and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel a chocolate marble and they were as good as I'd been hearing from rushthatspeaks. I don't normally even like strawberry donuts. This was real fruit in the glaze, not high-fructose Red #2. I want to go back for either the brown butter hazelnut crunch or the sea salt bourbon caramel, both of which were listed on the board, but I am extraordinarily pleased with the one I ate.)
So that was the Ides of Purim, and absolutely worth the hassle of public transit it took to get there. Rob has a more complete account here.nineweaving took photographs I'm hoping she'll post. It wasn't even my entire day—in the evening, I took Rob to A Face in the Crowd (1957) at the Somerville because he'd never seen it, and after that I brought the promised hamantashn to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
phi's birthday party and ate a lot of cake and olives—but it was a very fine way to spend an afternoon, and I wouldn't mind seeing it become an annual event. I didn't even begrudge it the lack of piñata. Next year, garum.
(There's not much story here. When we took my mother to Za for her birthday last Sunday, I ordered one of the specials: its toppings were chorizo, dill pickle, caramelized onion, Swiss cheese, mustard cream, and parsley, almost all of which I like. I expected a tangy white pizza with slices of chorizo and dill pickle. What I got was a lot more like a Chicago dog in pizza form. Minus the tomato. Thank God I asked them to hold the onions. The salient features were thick chunks of dill pickle everywhere under the cheese, like a blocky, flat-toned relish, forming an unavoidable majority of every bite with the chorizo crumbled bravely on top among zigzags of yellow mustard, which I would not have called a cream. I deconstructed as much as I could with knife and fork, trying to salvage the bits of chorizo and cheese while dissecting out the overpowering pickle, but it was a semi-successful effort at best. I ate it because I had ordered it. With the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge of how I felt for the rest of that day, I should totally have accepted my mother's offer of other people's pizza. In Za's defense, it was my first disappointment after a decade of cheerful weird pizza-eating and the Caesar salad I ordered at the same time was delicious: a creamy, lemony dressing thickened with not too much Parmesan and garnished with anchovies in the form of soft silvery fillets as oily as sardines, not the tiny dry spiny eyebrows so many salads are cursed with. As failures go, though, it was a doozy. I felt betrayed by pizza. So tonight we went to Flatbread and their carne special was steak and mushroom and Gorgonzola—plus the waitress let me order a salad that was mostly kelp; all was forgiven. I am sure that someday I will encounter a pizza that makes brilliant use of pickles, but March 9th was not that day.)
Yesterday's Ides of March in Union Square was pretty much everything I was hoping for and even a little bit more. What I went for was the Romanitas of the thing and the chance at Union Square Donuts, which is almost never open when I'm around. What I got was roving street theater of the first water, complete with audience interaction and quick-uptake improv. The crowd in the parking lot outside of the Independent was full of people in togas, some of whom were Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, Casca, and the rest of the conspirators. There was a caricaturist and a gladiatorial arena. Students from the Latin club of a local high school were running a thermopolium, selling liba (sweet cheese cakes with bay leaves), honey cookies, and a pennyroyal salad out of Columella's De de rustica. (I asked about dormice. They said they didn't have a license.) The soothsayer had set herself up in the little fortune-telling booth that attends all street fairs whether they asked for it or not. Up onstage, where the microphone and the masters of ceremonies were, there was a Roman numeral bee, a trivia contest, a pet costume contest for the Dogs of War. (The chariot race took place in the parking lot.) And down on the ground, in the Forum, gathering pace throughout the afternoon, there was the first two-thirds of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
And most of it worked really well. The trivia contest was less Roman than sorta-kinda-related-to-Latin-and/or-assassinations-ish, but I made myself give it a pass for not being written for classicists. I'd been betting on radio-controlled cars for the chariot race, but it was pedicabs racing up Sanborn Court and back down around a spina of construction-striped sawhorses, taking on a new load of happily screaming children at the end of each lap. The simultaneity afforded by the staging-in-the-throughout was great: Casca and Cassius could plot in their secret clubhouse ("KEEP OUT NO EMPERORS") at the same time as the soothsayer was telling Caesar's fortune with a Tarot deck (the astrology chart at the back of her booth proclaiming "The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes"). Caesar was cut down by the community access TV building with much splashing of Karo syrup and enthusiastic assistance from several small children, one of whom gave him a noogie with a fistful of Karo right before Brutus got in the unkindest cut of all. The conspirators took to the stage to rally to the crowd to their cause, after which Marc Antony commandeered the mic and rallied the crowd right back. Not all the performers were used to competing vocally with street noise; Cassius and Casca acquitted themselves well, especially in the ad-libs (the letters to Brutus in Cassius' several different hands included a Star Wars shout-out and fashion advice), but Brutus, a tall, grave, rawboned girl with her hair pulled back in the nearest thing to a Roman haircut a bun could manage, spoke her lines with the correct intent conviction and not a lot of projection. Marc Antony's "HAVOC!" was Brian Blessed-class, though. We stayed through the funeral orations, after which the event broke up into gladiatorial games. The bus was dramatically late.
The weather even got into the act. Most of the day was bright and blastingly windy, just sun-warm enough that I overheated walking down from Highland and started to freeze as soon as I'd stood for a few minutes. As the conspirators trailed Caesar into the fatal Forum, the clouds darkened; a storm front appeared over the horizon, grimly lowering. The stabbing and splashing started and the sky began, lightly and coldly, to rain. By the time we were shivering for the bus and Brutus was wrapping up the funeral proceedings with the production history of Julius Caesar ("Brutus has stabbed Caesar over two thousand times"), it was bright and blasting again.
(We made it to Union Square Donuts, too. By two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, there were not many donuts, but enough remained for me to have a strawberry glazed and
derspatchel a chocolate marble and they were as good as I'd been hearing from rushthatspeaks. I don't normally even like strawberry donuts. This was real fruit in the glaze, not high-fructose Red #2. I want to go back for either the brown butter hazelnut crunch or the sea salt bourbon caramel, both of which were listed on the board, but I am extraordinarily pleased with the one I ate.)So that was the Ides of Purim, and absolutely worth the hassle of public transit it took to get there. Rob has a more complete account here.
nineweaving took photographs I'm hoping she'll post. It wasn't even my entire day—in the evening, I took Rob to A Face in the Crowd (1957) at the Somerville because he'd never seen it, and after that I brought the promised hamantashn to phi's birthday party and ate a lot of cake and olives—but it was a very fine way to spend an afternoon, and I wouldn't mind seeing it become an annual event. I didn't even begrudge it the lack of piñata. Next year, garum.
