Late Monday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Louisa Shafia and "Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life" at the Leonard Library

At 5:30 p.m. today we crossed Metropolitan Avenue and went over to the Leonard Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library for a fascinating one-hour talk and demonstration -- "Secrets of the Farmers' Market" -- with Louisa Shafia, author of the wonderful bestselling organic cookbook, Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life. She's worked as a chef at really wonderful restaurants like Aquavit, Pure Food and Wine, and Roxanne's and Millennium in San Francisco.

Louisa Shafia and her husband, who was in the audience downstairs in the library's community room, live down the block on Devoe Street. It was great to s hear her talk in the neighborhood about a subject she is an expert on. After being introduced by David Mills, the Neighborhood Library Supervisor (who has always been incredibly helpful to us), Louisa spoke of the importance, which we hope everyone is aware of now, of eating locally and seasonally. She brought all kinds of interesting produce she'd gotten this morning at the Union Square Greenmarket.

Louisa had us guess what each food was, and this young man with his mother seemed to know everything, displaying an impressive knowledge. When we were his age, we knew only about iceberg lettuce and Bermuda onions. Actually, many of the women and men in the audience were foodies or experienced cooks, though maybe not as quick to identify produce.

It's hard to convey how entertaining and informative Louisa's talk on using the items -- which included sugar snap peas, which we'd eaten at lunch (okay, courtesy of Green Giant); beets and rhubarb, which we love; fava beans, which we have mixed feelings about (they seem dreadful eaten plain, and Louisa explained why); artichoke zucchini and another rarer kind of zucchini; and then stuff we'd only heard of (sorrel, Thai basil) or were complete unfamiliar with (garlic scapes, shiso).

We got to smell and taste most of the greens, and we learned imaginative ways to use all the foods in our meals. (We have the best mom in the world, but she always hated to cook, even after becoming a vegetarian, and so growing up in Brooklyn, we ate in restaurants most nights, and for the most part we take after Mom.)

Louisa Shafia's Lucid Food is a wonderful book, and she was kind enough to stay afterwards to autograph the copies bought by audience members, whttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifith all profits going to the Leonard library's Support Our Shelves program.

We're grateful to her for this talk and to the Leonard library and all the Brooklyn Public Library branches, which nurtured us as a kid and which merit your support in these fiscally-challenged times.

Monday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Sign of Spring on Devoe Street

After a long, hard winter, it's great to see the first tree blooming. This afternoon, as we were walking towards Graham Avenue from the Leonard Branch library down Devoe Street (pronounced "Duh-voo" by us natives, as opposed to those in the new majority who pronounce it to rhyme with oh), we said "Ohh" aloud when we saw the pink flowers on this tree near the intersection of Manhattan Avenue, in the house next to the always-delightful Fortunato Brothers. Every year, it's the first tree in the neighborhood to bloom.

Monday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Graffiti-Free NYC Van on Leonard Street

We were on our way to return some books to the wonderful Leonard branch of the Brooklyn Public Library around 3 p.m. when we saw, for the first time, the Graffiti-Free NYC van with two people from the Department of Sanitation getting ready to clean off a building on Leonard Street, just south of the library on Devoe.

When we came out maybe ten minutes later, the van, the city workers and the graffiti were gone.

But nearby tags remained.

Saturday Afternoon in Williamsburg: The First Day of Spring at Jaime Campiz Playground

After a harsh winter - our last, we hope, in New York - along with a lot of folks, we're delighted with the unseasonably warm weather at the start of this spring.
Leaving Brooklyn College around noon after teaching stories by William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor to our wonderful BMCC class, we spotted the first buds on a cherry tree. Our hands were full so we didn't get a pic, but there were definitely red flowers starting to form.

Soon after getting off the G train in Williamsburg, we got into our T-shirt and shorts and joined the crowds enjoying the outside. After getting a copy of Dante's Inferno at the Leonard branch library, we got a soda on Metropolitan Avenue and took our book to the Jaime Campiz Playground by the BQE.

The playground's named after Jaime Campiz, a Puerto Rican athlete - who played baseball in some Puerto Rican leagues and as a boxer was a finalist in the Golden Gloves in the 126-pound division - and Williamsburg civic leader. A Korean War vet, he was active in Williamsburg as a baseball coach and then as president of many local baseball leagues (Canella’s, Pedrin Zorilla’s, Collazo’s and the Pan American) and organizer of the La Calsana Social Athletic Club.

The playground was hardly crowded; the chess/checkers tables and benches were empty.

But a few little kids were playing on the swings or sliding pond;

a couple of skateboarders zoomed by; one group of guys was playing basketball;

and a few of us hung out on the benches. That's the Church of the Annunciation in the background.

We read about eight cantos of The Inferno but the warm sun on the day of the vernal equinox made us feel more like we were in heaven.

Walking back home,

we spotted this sporty convertible on Metropolitan Avenue in front of the laundromat.

It was another welcome sign of the warm weather to come.

Monday Afternoon in Williamsburg: "The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza)" at the Leonard Library

On Mondays, between our early morning composition class at the fantastic Fordham University and our late afternoon Cold War literature class at the wonderful City College of New York, we get to come home for a few hours of lunch and work and, if we're lucky, a short nap and enough time to go to one of our favorite neighborhood places.

This afternoon we walked across Metropolitan Avenue to the Leonard branch library to return a copy of Invisible Man and pick up a copy of Waiting for Godot, which we'll be teaching later this week at the fabulous School of Visual Arts (yes, part-time college teachers sometimes borrow the much-read books on their syllabi).

We had the great fortune to be in the library just as a story time reading for young kids commenced. It started while we were in the middle of checkout and looked like a school class. When we realized the book the librarian was reading was Philomen Sturges' delightful retelling, The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza), we happily joined the audience.

The librarian read with great expression and showed the witty collage illustrations by Amy Walrod to the kids. Even better, one sitting "onstage" to her right held a big stuffed hen (actually, it might have been a rooster), and to her left sat two girls and boy with stuffed animals representing the Little Red Hen's friends who can't be bothered to help her make the pizza: the duck, the cat, and the dog.

There was a (low to the ground) table with three adults nearby, and we supposed they were teachers or parents, and another man with the class was also present.

We liked the audience participation part and the kids onstage playing their parts, saying "Not I," "Not I," "Not I" to the queries about helping to shop for mozzarella and pepperoni (this green-thumbed red hen grows her own basil in a pot on her apartment balcony) and helping to do the baking, etc.

As The New York Times Book Review noted:

Sturges likes to play with recurring jokes, so whenever the Red Hen realizes she is missing an ingredient, she cries out ''Cluck!'' There's also a running gag about pickled eggplant. As with Bugs Bunny and the Simpsons, this story is at work on more than one level: a grown-up will have just as much fun reading this book to a child as a child will have being read to. In the original, each time the Little Red Hen asked who would help, the animals replied, in turn, ''Not I.'' But this time, when the pizza was finally done, ''it was lovely, but it was not little.'' So the Little Red Hen calls out the window to see if anyone wants some.

Instantly, the story of the Little Red Hen has been transformed from a story about holding a grudge to a story about sharing, even if the cat does scrape most of the toppings off his piece. And here's the kicker: when the Little Red Hen asks, ''Who will help me do the dishes?'' Sturges writes: ''Now can you guess what the duck, the dog and the cat each said? They each said, 'I will.' 'I will.' 'I will.' ''And they do.

It's a great kid's book and it was a great reading. The kids who performed as the hen, duck, cat and dog took bows, and everyone applauded the reading and appreciated the use of extra virgin olive oil in the story.

On our way out, we caught an exhibit on the Leonard branch as the library that inspired young Betty Smith to be a writer back in the day when she was a little girl like these kids, living nearby.

There's that wonderful scene in the film version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when Peggy Ann Garner as Francie goes into the library and the librarian (Lillian Bronson), despite a stern demeanor, is helpful in suggesting books to the kind of girl systematically working her way through authors from A to Z. (It's very different in the novel, where the branch librarian is a monster who detests children.)

The Brooklyn Public Library was a really special place in our childhood, too. Our story, "Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn," was one of ten finalists for the 2005 Million Writers Award for best online fiction; one critic called it "a boy's love letter to the library." Like Betty Smith and us and the kids listening to the (updated) story of the Little Red Hen today, every child in the borough lives within half a mile of a neighborhood branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, something for which we're really, really grateful.

Saturday Evening Theater at the McCarren Park Pool: Woodshed Collective's "12 Ophelias"

We've been staying mostly in Williamsburg lately, enjoying its midsummer pleasures: the Feast parades which passed the Dumbo HQ twice (Ringraziamenti per il pane!); the annual Crest Hardware Art Show (OK, we actually went Friday, because we'd blown a fuse and needed a replacement but we stayed for the aesthetic pleasure while our veggie burgers defrosted); a visit to the Leonard branch library; and relatively painless trips to the dentist and post office (we nearly fainted when we got our package just four minutes after arriving at 9:30 a.m.). Also some Italian ices from Ralph's and stoop-sitting and checking the progress of the figs in the backyard.

At 7:45 p.m. we walked up Lorimer Street to the pool, where a small crowd of strangely non-hipster-looking humans had gathered. They were there, as we were, to see 12 Ophelias, a play with lyrics by Caridad Svich and music written and performed by the excellent bluegrass band The Jones Street Boys. This was a preview of the production conceived and designed by the Brooklyn-based Woodshed Collective and directed by Teddy Bergman, who also did the famous Hell House, about the agonies that await the unborn-again.

The gates to the pool were locked at the play's starting time of 8:00 p.m., but we were soon let in as a young man started checking our names from a list of those of who'd made reservations. We didn't have any, but after three people were checked off, they let in all of us groundlings -- and we even scored one of the white folding chairs, which along with blankets anchored by rocks, surrounded an elliptical performance area in the middle of the pool, with the band and their instruments set up on a platform on the perimeter with the audience.

We were told that the night was only their second preview and glitches were to be expected. The main ones were with the body mikes, which worked sporadically at times for a couple of performers, but their voices carried well enough so that we, at least, heard them at all times.

12 Ophelias is a surreal take on Hamlet in which Ophelia (Pepper Binkley) rises from her pond, undrowned, and tries to deal with her past in a backwoods Appalachian version of Elsinore. Hey, they do say regional Appalachian English is the closest today's Anglophones come to the early modern English of Elizabethan times.

In this shantytown-Deliverance setting, trashy-flashy but regal Gertrude (Kate Benson) presides over a brothel; Rosencranz (Grace McLean) and Guildenstern (Preston Martin) are an antic genderqueer pair of silly hillbillies; Horatio (Ben Beckley) is a brutal, coarse backwoodsman sexually involved with the hooker Mina (an engaging Jocelyn Kuritsky) - and apparently Gertrude herself; and then there's Rude Boy (Dan Cozzens), a slovenly Ozarks Hamlet in a filthy wifebeater with a black eye and a lot of attitude.

This sounds like it could be either really terrible or really wonderful. We were a little concerned at first, but soon the performances -- and the surprisingly haunting songs -- shot it over into the "really wonderful" category. Shakespeare's language is both mocked (R & G do a deliciously wicked parody of the final meeting between the prince and Ophelia in Hamlet) and transformed so that, even with all the countrified expressions and Appalachian diction, it becomes eloquent in conveying the characters' struggle to reconcile past mistakes and burdens and in exploring the line between madness and passion.

We knew playwright Caridad Svich as a translator of Lorca, and the influence of the Spanish dramatist, along with that of Maria Irene Fornes, shows here. 12 Ophelias is also an interesting companion piece to Svich's rave fable Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That was Once Her Heart, which we know from its production at our winter home, Arizona State University, where we've taught English and been a graduate student in journalism. (The two plays are collected in one book you can buy at Lulu -- the POD service that Dumbo Books also uses.)

The cast was uniformly outstanding, with Binkley, McLean and Martin having some amazing moments; the musical performances by the cast and The Jones Street Boys,

when not hampered by sound-system problems, were strong; in addition to Bergman's direction, the creative team also includes Nicola Bullock (choreography), Gabe Evansohn (set design), Emily Fishbaine (musical director), Jessica Pabst (costume design), Adam Rihacek (fight choreography) and Jerad Schomer (lighting design).

According to its website, the mission of Woodshed Collective is to "create a tangible, immersive world" for audiences, by creating interactive performance pieces in which all members of the Collective are involved in "all aspects of production, from concept development to direction and design."

The pool will be host to more performances of 12 Ophelias at 8 p.m. on July 16, 18-19, 23-24, 26 and 30-31. August performances include Aug. 1, 4, 6, 8, 11, 14, 16 and 20-22. Setting this production in the middle of the empty pool as dusk turned to night worked really well. Last night was breezy and cool, and ultimately quite windy, but the billowing sheets of the set's shantytown seemed to fit the mood, as did the occasional sounds of firecrackers by the junior high behind the pool and motorcycles racing down Leonard Street.

As we walked home under a gibbous moon, we felt happy that we'd gone. Plus this great play was totally free! Isn't life wonderful!