Eating is Believing

Barakat, the movie, poster Mauritz and I met Mortimer Williams at a party at the end of last year. And we both fell in love with him immediately. He is one of those rare people who can look right through your eyeballs and see what you would find funny. He has a voice that was handed out by Apollo himself and we could see that he loved food as much as we do. After telling him about Eating is Believing , he invited us to his house, just like that, and  sommer so.  We usually invite someone inspirational to come and eat with us. Sometimes that person is dead. Like when we travelled to Lithuania to visit my long gone oupa. Other times its a book or a writer or a violinist. We have been to Finland, Mexico, and down the Cape Malay route... We've been to France, Lebanon and Italy. (And for those of you who don't know the previous blogs, we can't really go to these place folks. Because of Covid mos . We imagine that we go there and we cook 'n   storm los around this person'...

I have to admit that it was hard to write this blog. At first I blamed it all on Tom Waits. Then I thought I was tired. Or even depressed. Maybe a bit lazy? After mulling things over, I think it was because this ostrich had her head plucked from the sand by The Fourth Wave.     This one is for Tom Waits The thing is that Tom Waits couldn't really join us.  Even though he was invited. He said yes. We paid for his ticket. We got ready. We listened to his music over and over again. We flooded instagram with his quotes and his looks and his wisdom. We plastered our pages with his pictures and we admired his offbeat spirit. We bowed to the way he tried to keep his personal life from the media. We remembered his voice on the farm once... The night sky was alive with stars. The silence was loud, and Tom Waits' voice was soft as it rang into the night. Begging himself not to fall in love with a beautiful woman in a bar.  But then the world said no. Tom Waits could ...

  " Welcome" in both Lithuanian and Yiddish (or so we hope!) These 550+ days of lockdown has me obsessed about a few things: One of them   is  Making do The other is  thanking Gary Sussman  a million times And lastly, to keep on  looking for the spaces in between , the grey areas, the places where darkness and light might exist in the same spot. Places where the stereotype might be turned on its head.    Making do : This Heritage Weekend we visited The Farm again. Yes, that one. The one our friends left behind when they emigrated to England. We keep on thinking that it is  our farm , a humble farm with something like eight sheep and a small patch of mielies and a brick dam next to a decaying  kraal muur .  A make-do farm for a make-do travel through food club.  Last time we were there, there wasn’t any hot water, and we braved the outside shower. This time we made do. We stayed dirty.    We stayed dirty like our ...

Prayer flags, for our sanity and our country " Speak to us of good and evil.... Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil, but good, tortured by its own  hunger and thirst?" Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet This blog is about pretending that things are okay, even if they are not. It is about imagining flight when you are stationary and bound, mostly to your own home. It is about escaping the harsh reality of feeling like a hostage of your own mind. If I could, I would have invited the whole of South Africa to this Lebanese feast. Because hell knows, we needed it.  I promised myself not to linger on reality, but I need to say that our country has just been through quite a harsh struggle. The looting and destruction of property last month showed political shades of grey we didn't even know existed. What was real? Who are we? Truth is, that no matter how you argue the unrest,  there were only losses, fear and the dismantling of the last little bits...

Front cover of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston le Roux We were sitting under a billion stars when Rebecca told us she wanted to invite Gaston le Roux to the next Eating is Believing. He wrote The Phantom of the Opera (I found out later) and it is filled with gothic mystery, dank and dark dungeons and the love between Christine (an opera singer) and Erik (a phantom who initially appears as a ‘voice’)     I was excited about this, because it could be a gloomy Eating is Believing and a little on the horror side of things. Something we haven’t had before.   What I liked even more than the doom&gloom, was that Erik the ghost was actually just a deformed man, that had to hide from public view. My cup of tea for sure. I so wanted to write about the ghost we all fear, only to discover a darkness inside of us. A darkness we had to make peace with. My mind went wild, especially after I heard that there might even have been some real prisoners under the Parisian opera house. ...