Alice Waters

My long-awaited (long-awaited by me, the author) LA Magazine story on our school's experience with the Edible Schoolyard is on the news stands now. I LOVE those glossy pages.

As soon as there is a link, I will post it here. In the meantime, parents and teachers are reading it in dribs and drabs. And, as always, everyone reads it through a different filter.

The wonderful and thoughtful hot lunch coordinator found it inspirational. Our principal looked shocked after reading it (I love her, so that was not a good feeling.) Others thought it was an accurate portrayal. Still others lust to have the problem at their school and thought the story showed heart. As always, I sort of want to hide until the flurry passes, but I am taking it on.

Writers write the truth (or try) and then you just have to stand with your head held high and let the readers give it to you on the chin. You will hurt people you never meant to, and make people love you who never would have given you a second glance. These intense emotions lasered at you from all around are the nature of the beast, but still a feeling I never quite get used to. (After big stories ran in the paper I would often just not answer the phone for the first part of the day, and instead cower as the phone ring. Later, when I had regained my composure, or knew the blast of vitriol, or the shower of praise that would greet me, I would return the call. Ready.)

In that spirit I took my story down to Alice Waters, who just happened to be in Los Angeles this weekend, perhaps for the LA Bookfair, But even more incredible she was signing copies of her latest cookbook right down the street at my favorite boutique, Lost and Found.

I decided to take a copy by for her perusal. The woman meets a hundred million fans a week. She is a rock star in the food world, and I passed through her life with a notebook for only the briefest of moments. She sat in a store at the end of a long wooden table, with two helpers shelling mountains of fresh fava beans and tossing them into a beautiful hand-carved bowl. Alice herself sat radiant and green, like a shimmering garden vegetable or a magic elf. I approached her. Again. She said she remembered me. And she looked like maybe she might. I gave her the magazine. She said someone had already given her a copy.

I said I wouldn't sign it, but I wanted her to have it--from me. It was a personal essay about our school's experience with the Edible School Yard and I was grateful to have been a part of it. Dutifully she took it and put it behind the curtain. And then she got it. "You are the author!" she said.
(Yes, why else would I be there?)

Then she said she loved the picture, said we were doing the work on the ground, and she couldn't wait to read it.

Oh, boy.

I hope stories of life on the ground are refreshing, not frightening.

But then, that is my job. To tell the truth. Even to Alice Waters.