[Sca-cooks] "Rosita's Day of the Dead"

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

Ok, so I decided to break out of my SCA rut, and go volunteer for 
Touchstone theater, a place I was a frequent volunteer at before I 
joined the SCA and misplaced my life. :)

Turned out when I called them, they had an open shift for a 'cafe 
assistant' (sell drinks and sweets at intermission) the very next night 
for their opening show of the season, "Rosita's Day of the Dead". There 
was a reception afterward for which a volunteer had donated Spanish 
food...

Now, this is a sequel to a play I haven't seen ("Dona Rosita's Jalapeno 
Kitchen"). It was done as a one-woman show, by Ruby Nelda Perez, from San 
Antonio. We meet Rosita in her little restaurant, where she is 
frantically working on the orders for next day's Dio de los Muertos. 
While she bustles around preparing tamales, she tells us about her family 
and friends, and especially the strange experiences she's been having 
that are appearances of her dead mother, urging her to travel back to 
Sonora to see her long estranged father before he, too dies... :)

Sounds morbid? More like sitting in your grandmother's kitchen, or your 
aunt's, or your local Pelican's, catching up on gossip... Why Lucy, loco 
that she is, still feels bad about the death of her first husband, 
Nacho... what happened with Rosita's grandaughter Marisabel... what 
really happened the night someone was stabbed with a steak knife... 

Apparently the play was originally done in San Fransisco as an ensemble 
piece but with Ms. Perez playing each character in turn it was amazingly 
funny.

Ok, so that's the play. But there was the reception... ohhh! Yum! I 
helped the volunteer get her stuff set up. There was an orange cake, some 
kind of 'Heavenly Bacon' tart-- almonds, egg yolk, flour, sugar; there 
was a sort of green bean or maybe pepper pie; tapas; some amazing little 
meatballs; a dried garlic toast; marinated mushrooms with ham or 
proscuitto... She said she got it all out of the Williams Sonoma Spanish 
cookbook. It was amazing. We ate like pigs! (Ok, it's a small theatre, 
maybe 100 seats but probably not that many-- the lady had provided 2 of 
each pie and 3 of each tart... oooh...)

Anyway, it turns out that the theatre is doing an adaptation of Don 
Quixote next summer and I said I would be happy to donate some of my 
Spanish food (the stuff I worked up for my feast...) and if they are 
interested I may be asking others in our area if they want to pitch in. 
:)

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"I have always maintained that librarians are the ultimate 
share-your-toys people, and that the worst punishment you could inflict 
on any of us is to offer to show us an incredibly useful free resource 
but only if we swear not to tell another living soul about it."
-- Marylaine Block