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2001-03-07
I�ve taken to watching Martha Stewart�s half-hour cooking show on the Food Network every day at 6:30. Yesterday I thought of Kurt Russell, as his first Elvis, when she made that crack about using canned chicken stock �if you must,� but by this evening I�d forgiven her and watched her while I cooked (a Molly Katzen recipe�lima beans tossed in a casserole dish with garlic, herbs, olive oil, and olives, and roasted at 375 degrees for 50 minutes or so; stir once or twice during cooking�oh, and I use frozen lima beans, because I must), and during commercials they happened to show a "promo" for an upcoming "Eat Spain" special which afforded me my first real, hard look at its host and star, Salman Rushdie�s companion-in-exile, Padma Lakshmi.
A couple of years ago, my mother and I were crossing Fifth Avenue a block or so south of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when in the very middle of the crosswalk we crossed paths with Chrissie Hynde, accompanied by a photographer on one side and a man holding up a tape recorder mike on the other. She was wearing the single most expensive man-style suit I have ever seen in life. Meanwhile (perhaps at that very moment), several blocks away, my sister, who had been business-lunching at the Plaza, found herself face to face by the lobby doors with Salman Rushdie. When we all compared �sightings� afterwards we were all unanimous in wishing we�d seen the other�s celebrity instead�despite having heard a million man-hours of her voice, my mother hadn�t recognized Chrissie Hynde in person, while I had long since come to recognize her as Gina Gershon, before overpopulation.
Furthermore I had a special wish to see Rushdie at that time, because I was so furious that The Ground Beneath Her Feet had been so bad. It is really the only book I�ve read which I thought as bad as The Witching Hour by Anne Rice (in which the author �merges� a pornographic horror story with a house renovation journal she happens to be keeping elsewhere on her hard drive). I had a real wish to say to Rushdie, �Hey bud. What the. . .?�
Of course it�s impossible to think too badly of Rushdie and still feel CIVILIZED; it�s impossible not to feel heartsick over his plight (I�m reading The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux and he writes of having spoken to Rushdie by phone in 1995, and having told him he should move to Fiji, where he�d be safe; and when Theroux gets to Fiji he asks some Muslims there if they�ve heard of Rushdie and they all say, Yes, Rushdie is a devil, he must die). . .but the fact remains that he inflicted an absolutely dreadful novel upon his readers, and while I don�t think he deserves to die for this, does he really deserve Padma Lakshmi? A woman so aptly goddess-named, so totaliciously divine in feature and in limb, that she causes me to quote my sister�s cat, who whenever he�s about to cough up a hairball makes a noise that sounds like this:
Lordylordylordylordylordy!
Anyway, my beans are done.