June 6: "The Soul of a Chef" book

Given to Marie from Chimadika.

One in purgatory works at Rally's

You won't see this in print very often, but I'd take Marie to be my grandmother, spouse, sister, mother, niece, aunt, cousin (nothing beyond first), or more-than-close-quirky neighbor. That probably sounds like an Oedipus complex cross-fertilized with a bad Match.com experience set in the context of The Beverly Hillbillies, but it's actually grounded in one idea: Marie is an Italian cook. You don't find them just any old day. If it means I get myself adopted into her family in some way, so be it. Nice knowing you cousin Lynne, but when's the last time you made me a cannoli? Huh? [I'm waving my hands in the air.] Huh?

She also loves to garden and, as we chatted over lunch today, she listed the contents of her garden, items ranging from tomatillos to invasive, yet tasty strawberries from the neighbor's yard. She's getting chickens. You love it, right? She wondered why I kept looking down on the table and around the area where we were sitting, but I was too embarrassed to tell her I was trying to find the sign-up sheet.

Marie
-Profession: Editor

-Favorite onomonopia: Squish

-How do you think Marie and Pierre Curie celebrated the discovery of radium?: They travelled around the world in a radioactive hot air balloon shaped like a giant jellyfish.

-Do you and your family go to The Olive Garden for the unlimited breadsticks or the family atmosphere?: We actually go for the cheap iceberg lettuce salad with shitty Italian dressing.

-Would someone else's irregular capitalization cause you to take to the bottle?: Absolutely! I also would drink for misuse of punctuation, sentences that end with five exclamation points, punctuation outside of quotation marks, and using the wrong there/their/they're. I don't judge, though.