THE CIRCLE OF MEAT

I stopped eating red meat after a trip to the Grand Canyon.

My girlfriend at the time was either a vegetarian or just opposed to red meat specifically (I can't remember which), and she had been actively lobbying me to quit the stuff for years to no avail. Things changed in the summer of 1991.




My parents had just split after 25 years of marriage (popularly known as the "silver" or "divorce" anniversary), and my mother entered a phase where she wanted to travel to all the places that my father never took her. She decided that I would be an acceptable stand-in for my old man. It was the beginning of the surrogate role I'd unwittingly step into for the rest of my life.

Top on that list was Arizona and the Grand Canyon.

We tried to do the trip on the cheap, and that meant eating at a lot of fast food places on the way up there. I referred to the whole venture as the "Burger King Tour 1991." We ate at every Burger King from Los Angeles to the South Rim and back.

And when I finally arrived home, my colon had made the decision for me: I will eat no more red meat forever.

(I thought my then-girlfriend would be happy about it, but not so. It wasn't enough that I gave up red meat — it was that she wanted me to do it specifically because she told me to.)



I didn't really touch beef again until the day I moved back to LA from Denver in 1996. For some reason, as soon as I hit the first In-N-Out Burger over the California state line, I pulled right in and got a Double Meat with pickles, grilled onions and ketchup.







I've eaten red meat in limited doses since, but over the last month I've had a few notable run-ins with it, starting with lamb chops at my favorite Santa Monica restaurant, Jiraffe.




Then I ate at Wilshire with Katy where I learned that she enjoys her filet prepared exactly the same way I do (cooked to a precarious point in between medium and medium well), and further learned that the chef at Wilshire did a spot-on job of cooking said filet to perfection.






And lastly, I had lamb chops yet again. This time made by chef Mom.

Ah, the Circle Of Meat.

TOMORROW

My TiVo added the movie Annie to its TiVo's Suggestions folder (how did it know I was Theater major in college?), and I watched some of it tonight. I would guess that most people have heard the song "Tomorrow" — though far fewer have ever heard it in context. Out of context, "Tomorrow" is a relentlessly positive song, almost unbearably cheerful... which is why many people despise it.

In context though, it's an entirely different matter. Annie was abandoned by her parents in 1922. As we start the show, it's 1933. Eleven-year-old Annie still refuses to hate the parents who left her at the Dickensian orphanage that is her home, singing first a heartbreaking song called "Maybe" where she imagines her parents as loving and smart (adding sweetly that "their one mistake was givin' up me").

Annie has tried to run away numerous times, and she finally succeeds only to find herself out on the streets of New York City in the depths of the Great Depression. That's where she runs into a stray dog she names Sandy, and in order to cheer him up, she sings about "Tomorrow."

To review: a child abandoned by her parents... escapes the horrible orphanage she's been imprisoned in her whole life (which is run by a cruel drunk)... and now finds herself homeless in Depression-era New York... still finds it within her to sing "The sun'll come out tomorrow, so ya gotta hang on 'til tomorrow come what may..." in order to cheer someone else up.

The context radically changes the meaning of the whole thing.

(By the way — in the end, Annie finds out (from FDR of all people) that her real parents are, in fact, dead. Take that, Cats!)
 

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