Bread and Theater

...what else I'm probably thinking about

/ San Francisco Sourdough

Growing up in the Bay Area, I was raised on this stuff.

More accurately, I was raised on sourdough garlic bread, a last-meal-on-earth food for me. I'm in the Bay Area a couple times a year, through I live in New York now. There's great bread in New York, but I left my heart in lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, where I try to chase down great organic sourdough whenever I'm back. Some favorites? Acme in Berkley, Goguette in Santa Rosa, Josey Baker Bread in SF. I still have to get to The Midwife and The Baker in Mountain View, and Manresa Bread, and...?

I've also been making sourdough at home, on and off, for decades now. Making sourdough is a design process, no? Research and observation. Plotting a journey. Diagnosing pain points. Ideating. Prototyping. Validating. Iterating. It's a practice in patience. There are always wildcards. And when it all comes together, it makes life more delicious.

“How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like kleenex?”
— Julia Child
“You get a little obsessed.”
— Joakim Blomquist, an owner of RC Chocolat at Stockholm's Arlanda Airport, talking about their sourdough babysitting services
“It feeds the soul as much as it feeds the stomach.”
— Richard Bertinet
“In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.”
— Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939
“The difference between a bland tomato and great one is immense, much like the difference between a standard, sliced white bread and a crusty, aromatic sourdough.”
— Yotam Ottolenghi
“To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest—on behalf of the senses and the microbes—against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe.”
— Michael Pollan

/ Theater

This could take a while. If you're interested, we'll have a lot to talk about. Thought starters, in no particular order except #1:

  • Sondheim
  • RENT
  • Brandon Jacobs Jenkins
  • Disgraced (Ayad Akhtar)
  • Stephen Adly Guirgis
  • Jason Robert Brown
  • Small Mouth Sounds (Bess Wohl) at Ars Nova in 2015
  • Tribes (Nina Raine) directed by David Cromer
  • Clybourne Park (Bruce Norris)
  • Annie Baker
  • Tracy Letts (Bug, August: Osage County)
  • Fun Home (Alison Bechdel—of the eponymous test)
  • The Cherry Orchard (any day, every day)
  • The set of The Skin Of Our Teeth (Lincoln Center Beaumont Theater, 2022)
  • Brief Encounter (Noel Coward) at St Anne's Warehouse in 2009

  • Marianne Elliott and her brilliance with:

    War Horse

    The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

    Company with Katrina Lenk

  • Company concert from Avery Fisher Hall in 2011

  • Bernadette Peters (Not a Day Goes By 💀)
  • Macbeth from SET Collective (Julie Galdieri—geez)
  • John Douglas Thompson reading the phone book
  • Lauren Ambrose in Romeo and Juliet at the Delacorte (the best Romeo and Juliet ever put on a stage)
  • Hamilton
  • Book of Mormon
  • The Lehman Trilogy
  • The Inheritance
  • J. Michael Friedman
  • Phillipa Soo, aka the spokesperson for human heartbreak, in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 (and Hamilton)
  • ...I'll leave it there for now