Just Peachy: Selected Shorts and The Lucky Peach

I would never go so far as to describe myself as a foodie but I do enjoy trying new restaurants and cooking. And who doesn't love eating? So I was very excited for last night's Selected Shorts program, which was produced in conjunction with the food magazine Lucky Peach. I confess I'd never heard of Lucky Peach before purchasing tickets for the show. It's a collaboration between Peter Meehan, a writer prior to Lucky Peach and David Chang, the genius behind the Momofuku (translation: lucky peach) restaurants. They co-authored the Momofuku cookbook years ago, and have now moved on to magazine production. Lucky Peach is a quarterly collection of fiction and nonfiction writing all about food. Each issue has a theme. Meehan acknowledged that he doesn't cook recipes from most magazines, and feels that most other people don't either. Part of the reason is that sometimes the recipes are just not that good, certainly not as good as the recipes you'll find in a good cookbook. And the ones that are good are usually too complicated to make at home. Something David Chang would make his kitchen, said Meehan, could take several days and would usually require complicated equipment the average person is unlikely to have. For this reason, their magazine doesn't really have recipes; rather, it has literary descriptions of recipes written by chefs that evoke the experience of cooking. The magazine started in 2011 and has been very popular and successful.

Peter Meehan

David Chang

The show started later than usual last night. People seemed intrigued by the new theme-Selected Shorts usually focuses on a particular author or something a bit more abstract-and it took forever to get the long line of ticket buyers through the door. As Ed and I, who'd had our tickets mailed to us, waited in our seats, I eavesdropped on conversations around me. Lots of people seemed new to Symphony Space, which normally tends to draw more or less the same lit-loving crowd. 

The show began at last with an introduction by our intrepid host BD Wong, wearing his usual bowtie and vest. Next, Meehan and Chang took the stage. Meehan opened with a self-deprecating joke about how they were not performers and had no stage presence. As it turns out, this was absolutely true. I really enjoyed hearing their commentary throughout the evening, but they seem slightly awkward in front of all those eyes. Chang is a tall, chubby Asian man; never trust a thin cook, they say. Onstage, he stood with his feet apart as though he were steadying himself on a rocking ship's deck. He looked anxious. He wore Timberland boots, jeans, and a gray cardigan, which he unbuttoned and buttoned over course of the evening. Meehan wore jeans and blazer, his hornrimmed glasses perched just below a strange, pompadour-like mound of brown hair. He was probably about my age, but stood slightly stooped. He was pretty funny, but had a serious, deadpan delivery; a deaf audience member would have had no idea there was humor in his words. He seemed like the kind of very intelligent person who is always slightly scattered, and we got confirmation when he later told us that it was his four-year-old daughter's birthday that very day, and that when he'd scheduled this performance months ago he'd totally forgotten. He said she was pretty forgiving about the whole thing...

This was the first Selected Shorts performance I've attended at which I've recognized all of the readers. Often, most are local actors who've gotten parts in movies or TV shows here and there. One or two is usually quite famous and I'll generally recognize some of the others. But there are always unfamiliar faces. I recognized all of last night's line-up, though. It was headed by David Cross and Mario Batali. David Cross was simply hysterical, and did a bit of his own comedy routine at the end of a reading when he congratulated us for raising lots of money for a charity, then pretended to have a conversation with someone in the wing who told him that this wasn't a fundraiser. "But tickets are $28!" he exclaimed. "To listen to people read?" He wore a gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and his beard made scratching sounds against his body mic as he read. 

Mario & crocs

Mario Batali was the only one of the bunch who was not a professional actor, but he was a very good performer anyway. I guess he's done enough cooking shows to have a stage presence, and he seems like a man who likes to entertain in general. No shrinking violet here. He spoke perhaps a little faster than would have been ideal, but he was expressive and entertaining. He read three pieces, all in the first half of the show, and we didn't see him again after intermission. He wore a massive vest over his protruding belly, and a thin red scrunchy (it had been a very long time since I'd seen one of those) held his somewhat limp ponytail in place. On his feet were his ubiquitous orange crocs, even though temperatures outside the theater hovered around thirty degrees.

The other two readers were Gaby Hoffman (if, like me, you're not exactly up-to-date on pop culture trends, you'll know her best as Kevin Costner's daughter in Field of Dreams) and Sarah Steele (who played Adam Sandler's daughter in Spanglish). I recognized both women, though they were much younger in the movies I knew them for. Both read very well. Interestingly, two of the writers whose work was read came to speak briefly about how they came to get the assignment they'd gotten, or the experience of writing the piece.

David Cross

Steele read the only fictional piece of the night. The style of the pieces was really varied, reflecting, I imagine, the hodgepodge found in each issue of the magazine. We heard several personal narratives, one about eating snake in a small African village and one about the emotional implications of seasoning cast iron. There was the fictional short story, and there was an essay about "perfect moments" in cooking, such as the brief week or two during which you can use fennel buds before they bloom and are gone until about the same time next year. Cross read a verbatim narration to a magazine writer by a chef in the South Pole. Hoffman read a short love letter to Seville Orange Marmalade. Batali narrated a series of comics drawn for one issue of the magazine as they were projected onto a screen above him. One piece, from the Chinatown issue, was all about Chinese drinking games. Meehan read a piece of his own, a meditation on crab rangoons and the period of his life when he was young and poor enough to think they were wonderful. (I still secretly think they are, though I know, deep down, that anything that combines cream cheese and imitation crab meat should not be wonderful.) The quality of the writing was good, particularly Meehan's piece, but not nearly as good as Ed and I have come to expect from Selected Shorts. But we both really enjoyed the evening and the performances very much. 

The show ended at about 9:30, and we were starving for several reasons. Eager to get to a restaurant and order half the menu, I was dismayed when it took forever to get out of the theater. When we reached the exit, we discovered the reason: Ushers were frantically handing out individually wrapped chocolate chocolate cookies from Momofuku to each member of the audience. I was eager to taste mine, having never been to Momofuku, but Ed and I ended up eating so much at a nearby restaurant that I couldn't imagine trying even a bite of my cookie. It awaits me on our kitchen counter, a tasty morsel to remind me of the deliciously good time I had last night.