Honey No. 23

Feat. a clunky confession of attraction and a trip to the Antiques Roadshow

Spaghetti squash is such an easy, reliable meal for me. Do you ever make it? My preferred method is to slice the sucker in half, scoop out the seeds with a spoon, and then microwave each half for about 10 minutes. You could do this step in the oven I suppose, but I’m kind of like, who has the time? After 10 minutes of nuke-age the “noodles” are cooked and ready to be scraped out via fork, but after years of burning my hands with impatience I now like to let each half cool on the counter for a while as I sauté up the add-ins. Last night I was cooking from fridge scraps- frozen spinach, frozen peas, ground turkey, tomato sauce and seasoning- and it was delicious, but with more time and resources you could roast up a whole array of vegetables- broccoli, zucchini, toss in some black beans, whatever else you’d like with noodles!-and have yourself a real feast.

My obsession with this meal started when I was 20 years old- about to be a junior in college and juuuust starting to figure out how I could make vegetables taste as good as my mom did (a challenge I’m working on to this day). I was still stove-shy so I would microwave half of the squash, then microwave an incredible amount of spinach that boiled down to nothing, and top the whole thing with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese that would melt into gooey heaven (RIP dairy days). I was so obsessed with my new creation that no day felt complete without it, to the point that when Hurricane Irene blasted up the East Coast and knocked out our power just days before I left for my semester abroad, my mom and I made a pit stop on our way to the airport, stopping by her best friend’s house with a raw spaghetti squash in hand to nuke my final feast.

During my time in Dublin my proficiency with vegetables improved only marginally- one time my roommate and I roasted and ate butternut squash with the skin on and were like, I don’t remember it being so sharp?-but the rest of my life was in full bloom. I was attending a program with 10 other Americans who were integrated into a two-year theater conservatory chock-full of Irish students. The accents! The attitudes! The crushes to be had! Every morning my roommate-turned-best-friend-to-this-day Lizzy and I would walk 30 minutes to school talking about theater, or life, or silently watching the city wake up as we sipped our americanos and hustled to voice and speech. We would spend 8 hours clad in all black, learning how to analyze text, appropriately use our voices, dance, sing, cry, and most importantly mime, then shuffle home as the sun was setting so we could wake up and do it all again.

The last night of our program was a high-octane explosion of emotions, confessions, and teary farewells. If you’ve ever been to a cast party, you’re familiar with the dynamic. If you haven’t, imagine dozens of the biggest feelers and most dramatic people that you know commemorating a landmark event and preparing to perhaps never see each other again; it’s fun, it’s beautiful, it’s intense as hell. For our final celebration we had taken over the basement of a pub and were taking turns dancing, crying, and making outrageous proclamations to each other over pints of Guinness. I cornered a second-year student to tell him how much I admired his devised work. A boy from Belfast drunkenly insisted that I was “the Barbra Streisand of our generation” (...). And then finally a boy named Keith strode over to my table and began pacing back and forth with a knuckle between his teeth, the perfect embodiment of his new character, “man who wants to tell you something, but isn’t sure he’s ready.” After several long moments of this performance, of which I was a captive and solitary audience member, he stopped mid-pace to blurt out:

Fuck it, I’m just going to say it. I always thought you were the hottest one….of the Americans.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, am I remembering correctly? That there were only 11 Americans in this program of a few dozen? And the answer is yes, yes you are. So you might be wondering, surely this admission of quantified attraction in a remarkably small pool of contestants didn’t work on you, did it? And this is where you would be wrong. I was swept off my feet, and suavely responded with something to the effect of, “Well then we should…do something about that?” And we made out on the streets of Dublin for one hundred hours until Lizzy and I finally tore ourselves away from the party and teetered back to our house, giggling about our love for our friends, for each other, and for a night that could lead to a confession of such magnitude and honor.

The next day was filled with teary, bleary goodbyes and before I knew it I was back home in New York, eating spaghetti squash in my mom’s kitchen. But after those four months I came back equipped with a life-changing friendship, the experience of living on my own in a foreign city, and the bolstering knowledge that out of a very small selection of individuals and with very few actual social interactions, someone thought that I was a little bit cute. That, of course, and the ancient wisdom of mime.

In a pile of Irish friends.

Remember The Apple

I met Noah Prestwich when we were tiny little babies in college- his school would come to the comedy festival at my school, and we hit it off right away. We both moved to Chicago after graduating and were on a short-lived but impactful two-person improv team called “Eggs.” He is now a TV writer who most recently wrote for Carol & The End of the World on Netflix, which is a natural next step for an Eggs ensemble member.

This month, my wife and I went to Vegas. We weren’t there to gamble. Or see the Magic Mike show. Or even step foot on the strip at all. 

We were there for the Antiques Roadshow. 

A woman discovers how much her silver horse is worth.

We are not antique collectors in any serious sense. But we do have a habit of accumulating strange little knick knacks and treasures of dubious value to anyone in the world but us.  

There’s our ever-growing collection of Toby Jugs.

The pine cone fish that hangs in our kitchen.

Whatever this is.

So when deciding which of our tchotchkes we wanted to submit to the appraisers at the Roadshow, we had a lot to choose from. But one object stood out from the pack. A recent acquisition, given to us on our wedding night by my mother-in-law’s cousin. An 80 year-old apple.

The apple, age 80

The octogenarian apple, which had somehow been preserved by hundreds of cloves, had lived in the same house in Minnesota for all its life. Cousin, who was just a few years older than the apple herself, had grown up alongside it. Watching as its interior withered away, while retaining a remarkably sturdy shell of still fragrant cloves. For all that time, she kept it under a glass dome. A curious emblem of endurance and decay. Or at least a conversation starter. 

Of course we had to take the apple to the Vegas Roadshow.

One of the best parts of the Roadshow is seeing all the people walking around with the most special thing in their house. Some lady hauling a chandelier in a Radio Flyer wagon. The line of old folks waiting to get their antique muskets appraised looking like they’re off to fight the world’s saddest war. Every kind of antique you can imagine is present at the Roadshow. And it’s up to their expert appraisers to determine the value of these artifacts. 

So what appraisal category does an 80 year-old apple belong in? The woman at check-in was not exactly sure. Pretty clearly, it was not furniture. Nor was it an antique weapon. Ultimately, we all determined that the folk art appraisers would be best positioned to examine our apple. After all, the apple was art that had been made by folks.  

You gotta understand, these appraisers are looking at hundreds of objects a day, most of it boring old junk. They’ve seen it all, so pretty much nothing gets them excited. But the second we presented the folk art appraisers with our apple, they immediately started singing its praises. 

Our apple was “incredible.” It smelled “amazing.” They demanded to know its story. How it had survived the ravages of biodegradation and at least one World War to arrive here at the Roadshow in Las Vegas. 

Beaming with pride, we told them. About cousin. And Minnesota. We told them all we knew about our apple. Finally, they handed it back to us, remarking once again on its “fabulous” quality. They did not, however, tell us how much it was worth. So we asked them. 

“In order for this to be worth anything, it would need to be three hundred years older or one of you would have to become President.” 

So there it was. In spite of all the apple’s exceptional features, it was, in the end, just an old worthless apple. Though, truthfully, you’d be hard pressed to make the case that it even was an apple anymore. It was more like a bunch of cloves held together by the desiccated sinews of what had at one point in the 1940s been an apple.  

The Antiques Roadshow is a celebration of value. From one person’s stunned reaction to finding out their rusty bicycle wheel should be insured for no less than $25,000, to another’s defiant insistence on the sentimental worth of their witheringly appraised lamp shade. It reminds us of all the myriad ways in which our stuff can be so much more to us than just stuff. How an 80 year-old apple can be both “incredible” and worthless at the same time. There’s a kind of magic in that cognitive dissonance. The kind that keeps us coming back to the Roadshow, and filling our home with more and more stuff.  

When Cousin gave us the apple on our wedding night, she also inscribed the guest book with this message. I’m pretty sure she was just literally reminding us to not accidentally leave the apple at the wedding venue. But I like that it has the whiff of sage wisdom. No matter what happens in life–in sickness and in health–you must always, always…

Have a wonderful long weekend my friends! My brother is in town (so much hosting of my favorite people in May!) so we are trotting him around to all of our favorite spots, hoping to woo him into moving into a shed in our backyard. He’s welcome to live inside too but, you know, privacy! Fingers crossed!!

xx Olivia