National Ice Cream Day

I've been taking a mental poll recently of most-talked-about subjects in the O.R. (not pertaining to patient care or medicine). So far the top three items seem to be

3. The Red Sox / celebrities / other news items

2. What to do when we're NOT in the O.R.

1. FOOD.

We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking and talking about food.

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Happy National Ice Cream Day, everyone!

After the last couple of posts, I need to write about something a little frivolous. Like ice cream.

On our recent vacation I noticed that on the two occasions we visited Ben and Jerry's for ice cream, we all chose the same flavors for ourselves.

Me: Chocolate Therapy

My husband: Crème brûlée

My daughter: Lemonade sorbet

My son: Vanilla with Gummy bears

So I thought, can I read ourselves into those flavors at all? ("If you were an ice cream flavor, which one would you be?")

My son is definitely vanilla with gummy bears. Sweet, reliable, tried and true, with a sprinkling of fun and some delightful, hidden treasures, spiritually and intellectually.

My daughter could be lemonade sorbet - sweet but a little tangy, too, slightly off-beat but with a style of her own, yummy and refreshing all in all. I think the best metaphor for her, though, would be rainbow sorbet, with its exuberance and festiveness.

My husband does happen to be French (or at least, half-French), like crème brûlée, smooth and sensual but also comforting. But the "fancy" name fails to convey his earthier side, the part of him that would build a log cabin for his family by hand if he had the time and resources.

As for chocolate therapy, perhaps it's too dark, multilayered, and mysterious to represent me, but I'll take it anyway. In truth I'm probably more like one of my other favorites, cookie dough.

My husband and I are as different as chocolate and vanilla, but Cookies & Cream is an ice cream flavor we agree on. How fitting - a marriage of both chocolate and vanilla, complex in texture, gritty yet oh-so good.

John Harrison, the official taste tester for Edy's Ice Cream (where can I get a job like that?!), was on the radio last Friday morning talking about his invention of Cookies & Cream ice cream (a claim disputed by Blue Bell Creameries and also by the dairy plant at South Dakota State University). He said if it hadn't been for a hail storm that wiped out a pre-purchased crop of peaches that the ice cream company was going to use for a peach ice cream, they might never have taken his Cookies & Cream concoction off the back shelf of the freezer and trialed it.

This story reminded me of a saying that was passed down to me during my training and that I often repeat to students: luck is more important than skill! :)

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Another "list of the week," in honor of National Ice Cream Day: My Favorite Ice Cream Flavors:

10. Toasted coconut ice cream from Main Street Sweets in Tarrytown, New York tied with Philippine ube ice cream (ube, pronounced "oo-beh," is a purple yam - VERY purple)

9. Ben & Jerry's cinnamon bun ice cream.

8. Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

7. Mango ice cream if made with Philippine mangoes, which are the best in the world.

6. Selecta mocha ice cream (in the Philippines).

5. Hazelnut ice cream, especially the nocciolo gelato you can get in Italy.

4. Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Therapy - anyone seen this in grocery stores? Ate it in the parlor...

3. Häagen-Dazs Tres Leches ice cream - is this gone?

2. Häagen-Dazs limited edition strawberry shortcake - bought it once, then couldn't find it again; love their limited edition Belgian chocolate, too

1. J.P. Licks Oreo ice cream.

If the shoe fits...

I think being steeped in ballet music for years set the stage (so to speak) for this oboe love. Ballet music is filled with GREAT oboe parts. Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, and Katchaturian wrote GREAT oboe pieces. Before I got to the point where I could say, "Gosh, I wish I could play the oboe," I first filled up with a deep love of those passages that I found haunting and beautiful, or perhaps exotic, or at times even witty. I devoted so much energy to dance that by the time I shifted my focus, which was in college, I probably subconsciously thought I was too old to start anything so daunting as a new INSTRUMENT and honestly never even considered the possibility.

Plus, college put enough on my plate. There was a huge buffet of knowledge and extracurricular activities before me, and I feasted. And there were challenges: I went from being a big fish in a small pond to a decidedly average fish in a large pond. I had study-skill issues that have only recently been better elucidated. Then after college, there was grad school, marriage, parenthood, med school, residency...My (post-)dance card was full.

Throughout those post-college years I would say wistfully when I heard great music, "Boy, I wish I could play the oboe," but with so much to do, I thought of it as a castle in the air, pie in the sky. Never did I think I would decide to stop saying "I wish!" But the time and opportunity finally came, and here I am - an adult student taking up a new instrument with no wind experience whatsoever. All those piano and ballet lessons made for an amazing journey in and of themselves, but they also helped me launch this whole new adventure. Just goes to show, even trees that took root ages ago can bear fruit now.

I danced ballet for about a dozen years. Between the ages of 12 & 15 I went to New York every summer to the Joffrey Ballet School's summer program. I also took class with Wilhem Burmann, whose classes were fast and scary and wonderful and, at that time, not overcrowded. He coached me privately, too, and was one of the most incredible teachers I've had in my life - you know, one of those few you can count on one hand that really made a difference. He believed I had talent. During adolescence, however, I also came to have bulk. I put on extra weight once the hormones kicked in, and my formerly slim dancer's body became an uncooperative mass of adipose tissue that would only stay under control if I ate about 1000 calories a day. My parents must have been relieved when I decided that enough was enough and I was going to go to Harvard instead of trying to starve myself to be a dancer. Now I'm huggably plump and Willie Burmann's famous. All the hottest ballet stars crowd into his class, which I can't believe I had the guts to take on pointe (that is, in pointe shoes), routinely.

After a while in his class, dancing on pointe became easier than off. With experience came increasing versatility and virtuosity. But none of that would have been possible without the dancer's equivalent of an oboist's reed: a great shoe. Dancers are obsessed with a lot of things - body image, certain warm up moves and clothes, and shoes, to name a few. Everyone has shoe practices and shoe rituals. As a child I was trained in the British Royal Academy of Dance system, and we were taught to darn the ends of our pointe shoes. Later, American efficiency kicked in, and most of us just lopped the slippery satin tips off. Some dancers bang their shoes on the floor, some hammer, some break the shanks in half, some cut them, some sew elastics and ribbons on, some just ribbons, some treat shoes in ovens or freezers, some scrape repeatedly at their shoes, all to get just the right fit and feel. Inside every dancer there is an embryonic oboe reed maker.

I'm sure every art or profession has its share of rituals created by its practitioners. I've seen tennis players with their racquets and doctors setting up their central line kits get pretty particular about what they do with their instruments and how they do it. I think ritual even at its most mundane is valuable. It sets a rhythm. It defines the mind's foci of attention. It enacts meaning and infuses physical acts of work with the desires that underlie the work.

I started out my pointe shoe career with Capezios, which were ultra-hard and heavy, and then Freeds, which were a little lighter. Each shoemaker of Freed of London would stamp his individual symbol onto the sole to mark the particular shoes he had made by hand. As far as I remember, dancers got pretty attached to their particular shoemakers. Ballet feet need accuracy to the millimeter. Otherwise they hurt. (Actually, they hurt anyway, but much less so in shoes that are a good fit.) I imagine if I had continued in ballet and continued with Freed shoes, I would have been beside myself with anxiety if Mr. Upside-down-triangle had DIED or something. I had a brief flirtation with Schachtners, which felt pretty good, but when my mom's friend, the late Margot Fonteyn, observed me doing a variation from Le Jardin Animé in them, she thought the shank wasn't quite right for my foot. My quest for "just the right shoe" continued. The moment I tried my first pair of Turning Point shoes by Gamba, size 4 1/2 M, I knew I was home. Each pair fit my feet so well and were so comfortable I didn't even need to try them on after a while and could just order them by mail. No need for nips and tucks. Finding "my shoe" set me free to enjoy my rehearsals and performances with one less thing to worry about. In college I did a lot more modern & jazz dance, and the shoe thing was less of an issue. Now I wonder: is there an oboe reed out there that's a REALLY great fit for me? That would be even better than anything I could hope to make myself? That would emancipate the musician inside that's hoping, with time & learning, to be able to come out?

I have no idea if those Gamba shoes are made any longer. I left the ballet world and all that shoe obsession behind and for all I know these have been discontinued, like two other things I absolutely loved - the milk chocolate-coconut-macadamia nut bars by Godiva, which USED to be available at Barnes & Noble just like the plain milk chocolate and dark chocolate ones, and the White Christmas scented candle at the Yankee Candle Company (they say Snow Angel is almost the same - ok, ALMOST, but not quite). I bet MAC will discontinue Delish lipstick just because I love it. I infrequently wear make-up, so I guess that wouldn't be as bad as the Godiva and Yankee Candle losses. But to discover a reed maker who makes super reeds that play consistently well in all registers, then find oneself unable to get more of those reeds? THAT would be a total bummer! I've ordered a couple from local makers my teacher recommended, so we'll see - the quest for the Holy Grail of reeds is afoot.

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P.S. Happy Star Wars anniversary! The fact that I saw it in the theaters when it first came out boggles my mind. I have many a happy childhood memory of playing Princess Leah to my Lukes and Han Solos, invariably played by schoolmates who had to duke it out between themselves as to who would be Luke and who would be Han. And yes, my yaya did do the hairdo on me a couple of times...

Oboe Consolation Pudding

"Hautbois, ta vie est pleine de mystères;
Un temps lointain a chanté ton pouvoir;
A tes accents les esprits des clairières
Autour de toi venaient errer le soir."

(apparently a traditional verse, pulished by Alfred Guichon in an 1874 article, 'Le Hautbois,' in Chronique Musicale, and quoted by Burgess & Haynes in their book The Oboe)

The mystère of the week is how a reed can work so beautifully for a few practice sessions, then just DIE. It must be something I'm doing wrong, a big beginner's blunder that's wrecking the reed. I sounded like a honkin' goose yesterday trying to do my long tones in the doctors' lounge at the hospital where I was on-call for the night. What a total bummer! And I think I was getting a headache from the vibrations of trying to get it to work better. I have a lesson today and I don't think she'll say what she said last week about showing a lot of improvement in a week...

On the up side, the reed-making stuff I ordered arrived, so when I got home from my call night, it was like mini-Christmas opening up the packages. I'm a little kid at heart, what can I say.

This was previously called Oral Board Frustration Pudding, but now that that's over, it's Oboe Consolation Pudding. Yes, I know, the worst eating offense is self-comforting with food, but it's so much FUN to use bread, chocolate, butter, & sugar this way once in a while, so everybody back off, lighten up, and join in:

Oboe Consolation Pudding

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Crumb 5 slices of white bread.
Place crumbs in a square baking pan or loaf pan.
Melt together
-4 oz semisweet baking chocolate
-1/2 c butter
-1/2 c sugar
-1 c milk or half-&-half or (yikes) cream.
Add 2 beaten eggs.
Add mixture to breadcrumbs and stir together.
Dot with pieces of a Godiva 1.5-oz dark chocolate bar (the kind they have at the Barnes & Noble counter where you're about to spend your last extra dollar on BOOKS).
Bake @350 for 45 min.

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Addendum: just got back from a really enjoyable lesson. Thank God for patient teachers, the kind that allow beginngers to be BEGINNERS and don't resent them for it (a new experience, having come out of the medical world where you're expected to have leapt from the womb knowing how to be a doctor and people actually get physically MAD at you if you don't know everything the very first moment). After solving my reed problems (by simply replacing the two I was using), my teacher Kyoko and I did a couple of one-line duets together and even played through all of O Come O Come Emmanuel. I was shocked - this is going ok!

Kyoko, you're da best!