Tangent: was, RE: [Sca-cooks] semi-topical: Good Friday dinner?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Denise Wolff:
>For lunch, I had curried chicken. ( And I can't tell you how many 
>people looked at me at work and told me I shouldn't be eating meat- 
>assumptions are way off).
>
>I'll be practicing Lenten recipes for appropriate fasting days.

Up to you. Give my regards to the lake of fire ;-). But seriously, 
people came up and gratuitously harrassed you about your lunch??? I 
confess I haven't seen anything like that, at least based on some 
religious reasoning, for maybe 30 years.

On the flipside of peculiar behavior, I am reminded of the tale of 
(puts on best W.C. Fields voice, although I have no doubt this story 
is true) the time my dear mother's childhood home was visited by the 
kind gentlemen of the Ku Klux Klan, looking, as Headley Lamarr might 
say, to stamp out runaway decency in Oceanside, Long Island. It seems 
that in Oceanside in the 1920's, a major industry was fishing and 
clam-digging, and these folks didn't get out much, and their pool of 
eligible marriage partners was understandably small. Suffice it to 
say that, while being a rural clam-digger (it was rural then, anyway) 
by no means precludes intelligence, on this particular occasion it 
doesn't seem to have naturally selected the genes for it. Do a Web 
search for Jewish legends of the village/town of Chelm and you'll get 
the idea. In case it matters, my mom's family wasn't from there; 
they'd moved in from New Jersey in 1921 or so...

In any case, it seems some of the good men of Oceanside's bivalve 
harvesting industry saw fit to fight the growing threat to the 
American way of life by forming a local band of Knights of the Ku 
Klux Klan, and looking around, saw no one to whom they might express 
their all-consuming patriotism, minority groups of all kinds being in 
the extreme minority. Luckily, one of them remembered a Catholic 
family living nearby, one of highly suspicious Irish/German-American 
lineage, so that evening, a visit was arranged to the home of this 
family, who would no doubt be busy grazing papal bulls in the back 
meadow, worshipping saints, doing a fine business in selling plenary 
indulgences, voting for Al Smith, and generally being Catholic.

It was apparently a cool, rainy evening, and it seems they had a 
little trouble getting and keeping the cross lit. There was some 
commotion over that, and, the father of the family being absorbed in 
Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam, the lady of the house went 
out to see what all the fuss was about. It seems there were seven or 
eight gentlemen in bedsheets trying to start a badly-laid campfire 
outside, shouting peculiar ethnic and religious slurs.

My grandmother picked up a broom and surprised them by going on the 
offensive, identifying each of them by name and insulting their 
bedsheets, saying they should pay more attention to what their wives 
thought, since they had obviously refused to take part in sewing or 
washing the bedsheets. So, with a rather aggressive tongue-lashing, 
she laid into the Klan with the broom, and in the end, they were 
apologizing, stamping out bits of burning cross, and vowing they'd 
never bother her family again. And please, Mrs. Brennan, you don't 
need to discuss this with _Mrs._ Johnson, do you?

Finally, they were dismissed, and my grandmother told them, as they 
limped away, "Tomorrow is Friday. Bring me around a quarter's worth 
of clams."

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04