11.6.22
Last week Jamie told me that the blogger Julie Powell of the movie and book Julie and Julia died of a heart attack. He told me this after I said that a family friend from my temple growing up had died of a heart attack that week. He was the father of a kid my age and good friends with my parents so I had spent quite a bit of time with the family. I remembered their cool second floor apartment in Noe Valley in San Francisco. It had a breakfast nook in a turret with windows, one wall of the kitchen was painted a deep red and another turquoise, and the living room was lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves. I told Jamie that he was the kind of adult who talked to kids like they were adults. He would squat down and look me in the eyes when he talked to me, really get on my level literally and symbolically.
"Usually a heart attack is Iike the last straw that breaks the camel's back." Jamie said. I agreed and said that I didn't know if my family friend had been sick and Jamie said that he didn't know if Julie Powell had been sick either. We agreed that the next night we would eat spaghetti squash with pesto and watch Julie and Julia. I had been trying to get Jamie to watch this movie with me forever, so I was thrilled by the plan.
The next night we cuddled up with bowls of pesto spaghetti squash with tomatoes and spinach that were about to go bad, parmesan and a dollop of Trader Joe's ricotta. Food tastes better to me when it uses up ingredients that are on the fence of rotten, almost moldy, maybe even a little moldy. What is lost in freshness is won back by knowing I am saving a food from being tossed and wasted.
Julie and Julia really held up to my loving memories of it. We both deeply enjoyed seeing New York depicted in 2002 and felt the time was represented accurately, of course neither of us were actually there at the time, but it seemed right. It is funny to judge the representation of a time period as authentic without having actually experienced it myself. Perhaps many aspects of reality are formed through making judgement calls about the authenticity of things that you can never understand.
I felt satisfied at the end when Jamie said he was sorry we hadn't watched it sooner. I said I loved the relationship between Julia Child and her husband. Jamie said they were really two peas in a pod. I said the conversations between all the characters were pretty believable. Then we started talking about those podcasts that are just a recorded conversation between two people. "Oh my god, Two Peas in a Podcast," I said. Jamie agreed that was the best name ever for that kind of podcast. I suggested we look it up to see if any podcast with that name already existed. We found over 20 podcasts with that exact name and cracked up. Of course.