by Lillian Ross
And bumped into Jane Scott, the vice-president for home furnishings, Saks Fifth Avenue. Jane was perfectly polite. She told us she found the Taste of Texas show “interesting, because it focusses on a very hot segment of the market,” but she declined to say whether we should start looking for pickled okra, mesquite-grilled fajitas, bluebonnet jelly, or three-alarm chili in the gift-foods section of Saks.
Nieman-Marcus, on the other hand, has already committed itself to distributing New York, Texas Cheesecake. Lyn Dunsavage, who makes New York, Texas Cheesecake at her home, explained, “Our farm overlooks the hills of New York, Texas.” NY, TX, which has a population of twelve, is seventy-five miles southeast of Dallas. “There’s a Baptist church, a graveyard, and a store,” Mrs. Dunsavage said. “The store doesn’t sell any cheesecake. It sells mainly baling wire and oil for tractors.” A young man stopped to sample Mrs. Dunsavage’s cake. He pronounced it better than anything available locally. “That’s a bodacious statement to make in New York,” said Mrs. D.
The Texas 1015, although it was one of the few products displayed that didn’t all but shout “Taste me!,” was a showstopper. It’s a huge, flawless-looking onion, bigger than most urban grapefruits, and Paula Fouchek was on hand to extoll its virtues. “It took ten years of research, and a million dollars, to produce the 1015,” she told us. “It’s a super-sweet onion. Why is it called the 1015? Because you plant it on October 15th. They tried to change the name, but it was too late. Consumers already knew it. They’d say, ‘I want the one with the number.’ They didn’t know the number, but they knew the onion.”
We asked where we could find a 1015 in New York City.
“Nowhere right now,” Paula said. “It comes out of the ground in April, and it’s only available here from about mid-April to mid-May. But it’s one of the few varieties of sweet onion that can be stored. Like, we knew we would be coming here, so we put six or eight cartons in the refrigerator, and they don’t look too bad, do they?” They certainly didn’t. “Another thing about the 1015 is that it’s predominantly single-centered. If you’re a food-service outlet, making onion rings, you don’t want an onion with two, three, four centers, do you?” We certainly don’t. If we’re a food-service outlet, we want a trainload of 1015s.
But we changed the subject. We mentioned all the Texas-shaped things at the show—Texas-shaped corn chips being served on Texas-shaped trays, for example.
Paula’s colleague Betty Ricks said, “That’s right. It’s one of the few states that are like that. I’ve lived in California. I’ve lived in Michigan. And you just can’t buy things shaped like those states. I’ve got Texas-shaped ice-cube makers, Texas-shaped cake pans.”
Phyllis Hsu didn’t have any Texas-shaped egg rolls at her booth, but that doesn’t mean that her line of Amy’s Egg Rolls and Fried Wontons is without patriotic content. They are named after her fifteen-year-old daughter, whose name written in Chinese characters means, according to Mrs. Hsu, “I Love America.” Amy’s Fried Wontons are big in Houston’s public schools, and Mrs. Hsu was clear about her reasons for participating in the Taste of Texas show. “I want to get into New York schools,” she said. We tried a wonton, and found it bodacious.
1987
ON DISPLAY — Susan Orlean
STEVEN JENKINS’ grandfather Adolph Mayer has a big beefsteak tomato named for him. “The Adolph Mayer is a really wonderful tomato,” Mr. Jenkins told us the other day when we dropped in at Fairway, the busy produce market on Broadway near Seventy-fourth Street, where he is one of four junior partners. “My grandfather helps the University of Missouri test new vegetable seeds, so they honored him by naming one after him.” Being immortalized anywhere, especially in association with an appetizing vegetable, would probably please almost anyone, but for Mr. Jenkins that kind of recognition has special significance. “Would I like a cheese named after me, the way my grandfather had a tomato?” he asked himself. “That sounds great. You bet I would. You bet.”
Mr. Jenkins’ specialty at Fairway is cheese, but his real passion is writing chatty and enticing signs for all the store’s products. A few of the Fairway signs just do their job—they say something simple, like “NEW CROP YAMS” or “CRISPY WESTERN ICEBERG SOLD AT COST PRICE”—but those are made by the other Fairway partners, who figure that a sign’s a sign, especially when you’re in a hurry and there are crowds stretching from the cash register to the back door. Mr. Jenkins’ signs have become something like required reading among shoppers in the neighborhood—they can be informative, argumentative, comic, autobiographical, or sassy—and whatever time he finds between checking cheese orders he spends making them.
The signs are about five by seven inches and are made of white tagboard. Mr. Jenkins hand-letters them with bright-red or orange or blue or purple laundry markers. One of his signs that day said:
HOOP CHEESE: NO FAT! NO SALT!
AN INTRIGUING MARRIAGE
OF WET COTTON AND LIBRARY PASTE
“I’m very opinionated about cheese,” he explained to us, and he pointed out another sign, which said:
MIMOLETTE: HARD, BLAND. DE GAULLE’S
FAVORITE,
WHICH FIGURES. I DON’T KNOW WHY,
IT JUST DOES.
WE STOCK IT BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE
CHEESE.
His all-time favorite sign is no longer in service, but Mr. Jenkins was so pleased with it that he saved it for display. It’s stapled to the store’s back wall, and says:
RAW SEX
FRESH FIGS
SAME THING. 49 CENTS
Some of Mr. Jenkins’ signs acquaint shoppers with people who supply choice items or who figure in his interest in food. On signs here and there throughout the store are mentions of Ted and Sally (makers of Wieninger cheese), Laura (California chèvre), Jane and Bo (pie bakers), Nana (Mr. Jenkins’ grandmother, who introduced him to kohlrabi), Dr. Scott Severns (his dentist), and Al Grimaldi (bread baker). “I think it’s important to know where food is from— that’s why I name some of the suppliers,” he said. “I wanted to write about my grandmother because she really taught me about the value of fresh foods, and my dentist just asked me to order sorrel for him, so I thought I’d mention him, too.” Some signs have won Mr. Jenkins gratitude from customers. His treatise “NEVER WASH A MUSHROOM!” was very popular, for example. Other signs, however, have been controversial. A sign on some Illinois goat cheese asserting that the cheese was exciting but Illinois was really boring offended so many shoppers that for a while he had to post a note beside it admitting that he was from Missouri and considered it even more boring than Illinois.
Mr. Jenkins, who is late-thirtyish, curly-haired, blue-eyed, and barrelchested, told us that he moved to New York fourteen years ago to become an actor. His career went well—he played the Dean & DeLuca counterman in “Manhattan” and had a shot at a major role in the soaps—but he soon realized that his day job as a cheese man was making him happier than his acting did. He decided to get serious about food, and he discovered that the thing that made him happiest of all was driving around Europe looking at food and finding the villages that his favorite wines and cheeses were named for. He also liked finding towns famous for their sauces. He more or less gave up acting, and seven years ago he joined Fairway. Today, Mr. Jenkins has credentials in cheese—he is America’s only Master Cheesemonger, which means he’s an elected member of the Guilde des Maître-Fromagers, Compagnon du Saint-Uguzon—and he manages to satisfy his hunger for an audience by making signs. He recently described this professional odyssey in a sign for cornichons:
WHEN I GOT STARTED IN THIS BUSINESS
13 YEARS AGO, I
THOUGHT CORNICHONS WERE LITTLE
CORN COBS.
AND NOW LOOK AT WHAT A GOURMET
I’VE BECOME.
MY GOD, LIFE IS AMAZING.
“I think the best way to show off food is to have a big, huge, untethered pile of stuff,” he said as he tidied up around his department, straightening a sign
that chided the makers of Pecorino Toscana sheep cheese for charging so much. “Then you stick a big, funny, outrageous, eye-catching sign in the middle of it. You say everything there is to say about the product. There are several schools of food-display signs. One is the fancy-shmancy school, where you have a tiny little sign that says ‘One-Hundred-Year-Old Quail Eggs, Eight Thousand Dollars a Dozen.’ Another school, which is the one I’m in, is where you take a garish sign and staple it to a big stick and you wedge it into the pile of food. It’s a real peasant way of life, making your living from food, and I enjoy the peasant quality of putting a sign on a stick into the food. My partners are always yelling at me for spending so much time on my signs, but I love to do it. You can tell the ones I didn’t make. They’re rather terse.”
As he walked past a sign that said
HANDMADE STUFFED PEPPERS: WOW!
HOOO!
STRANGE BUT TRUE!
FROM RHODE ISLAND. . . . CRAZY
AMERICANS!
he spotted a woman in the checkout line clutching a bottle of olive oil. “Hey, you’re not going to buy that, are you?” he asked her. She eyed him nervously. “There’s another brand that’s better and it’s seven dollars less,” he explained, pointing toward a shelf. Then, to us, he said, “I do have an urge to communicate. The truth is, my ideas about food are not necessarily commercial, but I think they might help people know more about what they’re getting. I think people should come into the store to have fun and learn something. If you’re not going to learn something, why get out of bed?”
1987
PALACE — Adam Gopnik
FROM the time the Loew’s Kings Theatre in Flatbush opened, in 1929, until it closed for good, in 1977 (the last feature was “Exorcist II: The Heretic”), it was the grandest theatre in New York devoted exclusively to the movies—perhaps the single most ornate movie house in the country. The Kings (it is still standing and, though derelict, is in fairly good shape) has not one but two lobbies: a forty-by-seventy-five foot outer lobby, where you could just collect your thoughts, and an immense foyer beyond it, where you would wait to be seated. The orchestra is a hundred and sixty feet wide and a hundred and fifty-five feet deep; its ceiling is seventy-two feet high. The Kings has more than three thousand seats. Its decoration—the screen is the only unornamented flat area—has been described variously as “Deco-Baroque,” “Louis Quelquechose,” and “M-G-M Horror Vacui.”
From August 9, 1938 (when the main feature was “Holiday” and the second feature “Prison Farm”), until July 4, 1940 (“Waterloo Bridge” and “Dr. Cyclops”), Lester Binger was an usher at the Loew’s Kings. On a recent Saturday afternoon, while a man named Charles Sinclair was inside the Kings leading a walking tour called “Flatbush and the Movies” (the other stops were some old houses that the Vitagraph company built for its crews and an apartment building where Fatty Arbuckle once lived), Mr. Binger, sitting a few rows from the front, talked about those years. There are almost no working lights left inside the Kings, and as the visitors let their flashlights race around the enormous, cold theatre, one improbable detail after another suddenly came into view, and then vanished as the flashlights danced off somewhere else: a pair of thirty-foot replicas of the twisted columns on the Bernini baldachino in St. Peters; a twenty-foot mural of high life at Versailles; a group of five gargoyles holding up a balcony.
“I came to the Kings Theatre not to be an usher but as a young man with a dream,” Mr. Binger explained. “It was my ambition in life to own and manage a movie house in a small town somewhere on the East Coast. Although I grew up largely in this neighborhood—Flatbush and Maple, and so on—I spent the years from 1924 to 1927 in Lakewood, New Jersey. I noticed that the people who ran the movie house in Lakewood—these were the distinguished citizens in the town. They would open for a matinée at three o’clock, go home for a dinner, and then return for the seven-o’clock and nine-o’clock shows. The Strand Theatre in Lakewood—I never forgot that. It made a great impression on me.
“In 1936, I went to the Kings and applied for a job as an usher. The head usher, Jerry Sager, told me that there were no openings. He told me to go get some seasoning at Loew’s Coney Island. The Coney Island and the Kings played the same material—mostly M-G-M pictures—because they were both part of the Loew’s chain. The Coney Island was a living nightmare for an usher. My first afternoon, everything was going smoothly until I heard the crack of thunder outside and it started to rain. If you can visualize a two-thousand-seat theatre filling up with people in ten minutes, that is what happened. I thought, Seating two thousand people in ten minutes—this is not a skill I am going to need in a movie house in a small town. I was able to get a job at the Patio Theatre in Flatbush, and I worked there for two years. Once in a while, I would go over to the Kings and make a polite inquiry. I waited and waited, and one day, in the summer of 1938, the call finally came.
“Working in a movie house like this was like working in a palace. Really, that’s the only comparison I can make. The shows played one week. There were no stage shows. It was a movie palace. Punctuality was continually stressed. A day’s work had elegance, and it had order. There were eighteen ushers, including four captains. If you opened the house, you would arrive at eleven o’clock. First, you would change into your uniform. We had two uniforms. The winter uniform was dark gray with red trim. In summer, we were all in blue, because in summer everything was done to emphasize coolness. All through the year, you were expected to have an immaculate pair of white gloves. Elegance and order. It was a rule that an usher could never, under any circumstances, use the word ‘side,’ as in ‘side aisle.’ You never said ‘Open the side aisles.’ You said ‘Open Aisle 7’ or ‘Open Aisle 1.’ ‘Side’ had connotations. If people heard that they were being sent to a side aisle, they might protest.
“I made twenty-seven cents an hour. I used to tell people that I made twenty-five cents an hour, but I went back and checked my records recently, and it was twenty-seven cents. No tips. ‘The acceptance of gratuities is strictly forbidden’—I still remember that rule. At the end of the evening, we had to raise every seat in the entire theatre. The rule, however, was that you could not for any reason disturb a patron. Inevitably, there would be some couple sitting all by themselves, the last people there, and you would have to wait until they were gone before you could even touch a seat in their general area.”
Mr. Binger walked up onto the stage to look at the huge screen—still bright silver, but torn and ruined. “I suppose the high-water mark of my years as an usher occurred during the week that ‘Gone With the Wind’ appeared here,” he said. “This was the most long-awaited movie in the history of pictures. They sprayed the screen silver again, just to make it more reflective, more perfect. The electricians had to take down the red ‘Exit’ signs and change them to blue ones, so that nothing would interfere with the Technicolor effect. It was one of the few reserved-seat pictures. We had to mark out the rows with stencils and paint, and so on. The evening show was O.K. But we began the shows at eight-thirty in the morning. The theatre would fill with older women, and there would be the sound of sobbing from one end of the theatre to the other.
“Then the war came, and I went overseas. The Army—well, you know the Army. Someplace I had written down that I had worked in a movie house, so I ended up handling training films for the Signal Corps. I was still working in the distribution of Army training films when I retired, in 1970. I searched for a theatre after the war—God knows I saw a lot of them—but it never worked out. No matter how good it seemed at first, how high your hopes were, somehow it never checked out. You asked yourself, ‘If it’s so great, why are they ready to sell it?’ Or I thought, I’ll buy a ticket and go see for myself, and there was always something. I was travelling once, and I went at midnight just to look at the old Mastbaum in Philadelphia—maybe the biggest movie palace of them all. It had already closed, and a cop came up behind me and said, ‘Hey, don’t you see that theatre’s closed?’
I said, ‘Yes, Officer, that’s why I want to see it.’ He said, ‘Hey, let me see some identification.’ I showed him my driver’s license, and he said, ‘Hey, this is from Brooklyn.’ That made him suspicious, and he told me to go back to my hotel. He pointed me back toward the hotel, just like an usher.”
1988
IN PROGRESS — Bryan Disalvatore
WE had no idea that 1989 was the Year of the Diary until we read Diarist’s Journal, a fourteen-issue-old monthly tabloid out of Lansford, Pennsylvania, which Ed Gildea, the founder and publisher and co-editor, believes to be the only periodical in the world devoted exclusively to diary- and journal-keeping. We like lots of things about Diarist’s Journal, but most of all we like Ed Gildea’s candor concerning the genesis of the Year of the Diary. “It’s not an official designation,” he told us the other day. “We declared it ourselves, because somebody had to do it and we thought it would help circulation. We have about four hundred subscribers. We’re growing, but we thought that by now we’d have twice that many. We have twenty-three subscribers in Hawaii, and we’ve published excerpts from a diarist in Sri Lanka. We’ve printed entries from the diary of a ninety-two-year-old man and from the diary of a teen-ager named Julie, who confessed in her diary that she had been reading her sister’s diary. We have Jane Begos writing about women’s diaries and Shelley Barre writing about diaries in general, and, best of all, we have Edward Robb Ellis writing a column for us. Have you spoken to Eddie?”