Food by SCAD DISTRICT QUARTERLY

Food Vol. 2 / Issue 2 Winter 2011

Death as a Housewife Molly Dimefski Rochester Hills, Mich.

KATELAN CUNNINGHAM editor-in-chief MYRRIAH GOSSETT assistant editor BEN WRIGHT copy editor CAILA BROWN art director DEANNE REVEL publisher ALLISON BENNETT DYCHE adviser GLEN OSTERBERGER adviser KIM HERRINGTON ad manager Special thanks to District Photo Editor Jessi Gilbert and Graphics Editor Tom Rogers. CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Kristen Baird Amy Paige Condon Molly Dimefski Jeffrey Garris Anna Geannopoulos Shannon Gentry Jessi Gilbert Christen Gresham Emily Harding Hannah Hayes Cleonique Hilsaca John Hughes Erica Kelly Sam Rayburn Langford Jacob Menache Blakely Miller Lisa Miller Jeremy Nguyen Deanne Revel Cait Sanders Scott Welsh DISTRICT QUARTERLY KEYS HALL, ROOM 116 516 ABERCORN ST. SAVANNAH, GA 31401 OFFICE: 912-525-4713 FAX: 912-525-5509 QUARTERLY@SCADDISTRICT.COM WWW.SCADDISTRICT.COM/QUARTERLY

Top Row: Katelan Cunningham, Caila Brown. Second Row: Ben Wright, Myrriah Gossett, Deanne Revel

photos by Jessi Gilbert

I like to call myself a foodie. A couple of years ago I wrote a food column for District, “In Your Mouth.” I interviewed owners of local restaurants and they confirmed my assumption: food always has a story. In the same way that a storyteller has something they need people to experience, a cook has a taste they need people to experience. Chefs like Julia Child and Anthony Bourdain are the reason the word “foodie” exists. To these TV personalities and other foodies, eating is more than a survival strategy; it’s an event. From prep to plate, every dish has a beginning and an end. With a pinch of this and a dash of that, the stories behind recipes continue to get longer and longer. Food is comfort and hospitality. It’s the flavor of a culture and the groundwork for many traditions. As my last quarter as District Quarterly editor-in-chief, I wanted to go out with a theme that means a lot to me and that I thought would inspire people and bring them together. The SCAD artists chosen have submitted work to make even the non-foodies hungry. Enjoy,

Katelan Cunningham

28 Death as a Housewife / 2 Letter from the editor / 4 Contents / 5 The Best Burger in the South / 6

A road trip to discover â&#x20AC;&#x153;the bestâ&#x20AC;?

Butter and Toast / 7 Cauliflower / 8

A haunting childhood memory

Strawberry Jam / 10

A sweet memory of canning strawberries

Sweet Treats / 11 11

What is District Quarterly? District Quarterly is an award-winning, studentproduced magazine published through The Student Media Center at SCAD. Each quarter, students submit work that falls under the selected theme. The magazine features original work by SCAD students from any medium including fiction, non-fiction, video, sequential art, illustration, painting, photography and more. The theme and the submissions dictate the final product each quarter. For more information, e-mail District Quarterly editor-in-chief Katelan Cunningham at quarterly@scaddistrict.com.

How do I get involved? To get your work published in District Quarterly e-mail quarterly@scaddistrict.com, or attend our weekly District meeting held every Friday at 11 a.m. in Keys Hall at 516 Abercorn St.

Pizza Fairy / 12

Unmasking the finals savior at SCAD

Hungry / 14 Cutlery Cuisine / 16 Tablescape / 17

What really matters in a table setting

Ribeye / 18 Cassava in Columbia / 21

How an African refugee eats in Missouri

Things I Like About Cows / 24

The attractive qualities of the bovine

Les Oignona Verts / 28 Delicious Delights / 29

A man tries to mix up a recipe for love

My Everyone Else / 30

A lonely Black Friday in Lyons, Ga.

Cheap and Sugary Philosophies / 32 A new kind of pie

COVER PHOTO: Kiwi Lisa Miller Winston-Salem, N.C. 5

By Amy Paige Condon Fort Worth, Texas Image: Burger 1; Blakely Miller; Annapolis, Md.

I once planned a trip from Miami, Fla., to Fort Worth, Texas, based on the best places to stop for hamburgers. I mapped five-to-seven-hour driving intervals along the almost 1,400-mile trek, and consulted Southern Living, Coastal Living, Texas Monthly and other tomes for their expert suggestions. I carefully drew circles around the cities where a hunk of beef awaited my appraisal. Everyone in my family assumed I was just driving home for the holidays, so I let them believe what they wished. No one at the time knew the real reason for the trip. I set out, however, completely biased, thinking I had already tasted the gold standard in ground sirloin. I honestly thought no burger could ever top the one from Kincaid’s Grocery in 6

Cowtown’s Westside neighborhood of Arlington Heights. I grew up standing at their shoulder-height wooden store shelves, standing on a stool when I was too small to reach the mustard or ketchup. Their quarter-pounders were grilled to juicy perfection, slightly salty and crusty on the outside. You needed no more than a bit of lettuce and a slab of beefsteak tomato sandwiched between the toasted buns. Sometimes my mom and I would carry a white paper bag stained with grease to a nearby park and enjoy them in the shade of an oak tree. Then we would go back for a serving of Kincaid’s homemade banana pudding. It’s still there in the original Art Deco building on Camp Bowie Boulevard, but it’s no longer a grocery store with a lunch counter in the back. It’s a restaurant with tables and chairs, and it’s a chain now with six other joints in and around North Central Texas. They don’t taste the same as I remember them. Something got lost.

I got lost several times on the winding back roads between the Sunshine and Lone Star states. But, I finally found it — the best burger, the one that dethroned my beloved Kincaid’s — at a little fish shack on Panama City Beach, deep in the panhandle’s Redneck Riviera. Flamingo Joe’s nail polish pink and Caribbean turquoise bungalow offered outdoor seating and steamed shrimp. I was tempted to stray from the mission only 12 hours into the twoday drive. But I remained true and ordered a burger slathered with a spicy, creamy secret sauce that lived up to its Jimmy Buffett-inspired name — Cheeseburger in Paradise. Maybe it was the ambience, a glimpse of blue sky and white sand beach, that gave this burger an edge. No matter. It fueled me for the rest of the quest, which ended for old time’s sake on Christmas Eve at Kincaid’s.

By Jeremy Nguyen San Francisco, Calif.

Cauliflower By Jeffrey Garris Savannah, Ga. Image: Mystery Meat; Emily Harding; Greenville, S.C.

I was digging a hole in the red clay with my cousin when my fatigued Uncle Tommy came home. “Ding, ding, ding,” he said. “Dinner is served.” We jumped to see what would fill our bellies, and there in the back of his white Ford Ranger was a deer, its head hanging limp on the side. My brothers inspected it with manly awe and jeered while my cousin and I gazed into its eyes — black and gold microcosms dimming in the sun. Blood trickled from the hole in its head and streamed down the side of that dirty white truck. I swore it was alive. Dead things don’t bleed. But it was dead and there was no question. They pulled the bloody buck’s body from the truck, dragged it through the dirt and stained the clay with its blood. They hung it from chains and hooks in the shed, stripped it bare like a catfish that had been nailed to a tree. They offered me venison for dinner, but the slain beast made me sick. I cried silently at the sight of our perfectly packed freezer. Later, when my family had all fallen asleep, after the lights in the trailer had all dimmed and died, I smuggled cauliflower from the fridge, and ate tiny white trees under my bed.

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STRAWBERRY

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By Cait Sanders Blountstown, Fla. Image: Sweet Treats; Lisa Miller; Winston-Salem, N.C.

My mother’s mother has been canning strawberries for the last 50 years. It’s the best jelly from here to Virginia, mostly because it’s 30 percent strawberries and 70 percent wild figs. My mother’s mother had us grandchildren pick the sweet, ripe fruit for her from the fig tree, way out back. We wore straw hats that hung low down around our ears. T-shirts pulled out in front were baskets for the fruit. We ate half of what we picked and my mother’s mother blamed the sparse collection on the crows and blackbirds and she gave us rubber snakes to put in her fig tree. We sat under that tree eating fleshy fig after fig, staining our fingers, our faces sticky, with the juice and seeds that trickled down our chins.

@SCAD:

THE

Pizza Fairy

unmasked By Katelan Cunningham Arlington, Texas

Illustration by Tom Rogers

It’s the last week of finals and you thought you just had to make some finishing touches on your project, but alas, it’s 2 a.m. at Poetter Hall and you’re hunched over the same computer monitor in you’ve been staring out for hours. Your all-nighter is taking a less-than-victorious lap and you’re not sure if you’ve bathed in the past two days. And when’s the last time you’ve eaten? That’s when you smell the pizza. It’s him. A cheesy beacon of hope. Students have said to him, “I thought you were just an urban legend,” but he’s real. You’ll never see him on duty before midnight, but when you see him, you’ll know. He’s got a big red polka-dotted hat, and he’s got pizza. Lots of pizza. For one night during the week of finals, The SCAD Pizza Fairy takes flight, so to speak. He fills his van with 72 pizzas and spreads his magic through 2412

hour academic halls from midnight to the wee hours of the morning. For the other 69 days of the quarter when he’s not spreading joy and slices of pepperoni, he has a day job. The SCAD Pizza Fairy is counselor Patrick Mooney. He started working at SCAD as a counselor seven years ago. One year after his start, SCAD’s Counseling and Student Support Services (CS3) wanted to create awareness of their services. Mooney said, they wanted to let people know “The counseling center is not a crotchety bunch of gray beards.” Pizza can be therapeutic, whether it’s leftover and cold, fresh out of the oven or fresh out of the insu-

lated bag of the pizza fairy. He has walked out of the elevator at Montgomery Hall to a crowd of applauding students who had been awaiting his arrival. Montgomery’s windowless sectors of computers can look a little dreary after hours staring at a monitor. Mooney described Montgomery at 1 a.m. as “electronic.” Like “the Borg ship on ‘Star Trek,’” he said. No doubt, the SCAD Pizza Fairy wants students to be dedicated, but Mooney said, “During finals, people forget to eat. They forget to bathe.” “We picked food because it’s a friendly gesture,” Mooney said. He doesn’t linger for too long on his deliveries. With six buildings to

visit, he has to move fast enough so that the last students still get a warm slice. But for the time he does have to chat, he notices people getting up and talking to one another. CS3 tries to “break down isolation,” and this can start with an uplifting visit from Mooney’s alter ego. People recognize Mooney from the streets of Savannah to Washington and New York as The SCAD Pizza Fairy. He even got a mention in a recent article by the Associated Press about various therapy methods provided by colleges for students during finals. What started as just a large hat, the SCAD Pizza Fairy’s attire has become a colorful ensemble of tropical shorts and an orange shirt. It’s “sort of festive, sort of stupid,” Mooney said. But he’s not out to start a new fashion fad. “It’s nice to be able to take a mental break,” Mooney said. He’s out to lighten the dense, stressful mood of finals. CS3 tries to “de-stigmatize coming to the counseling center.” Long before the mental overload of finals, SCAD’s counselors can help. If you see the SCAD Pizza Fairy he’ll give you a flier advocating his motto: “The road to good mental health is paved with pizza.” With finals week ending on a Tuesday this quarter, the Pizza Fairy wants to know if students would like a delivery Sunday, March 6 or Tuesday, March 8. You can put in your vote on his Facebook page or e-mail him at pizzafairy@scad.edu. Before The Pizza Fairy’s delivery, if you’re interested in going to the counseling center, you can call 912-525-6971, e-mail counseling@ scad.edu or disability@scad.edu. The SCAD Pizza Fairy is no urban legend. He’s a counselor bringing a delicious distraction to finals.

Ring Pop Ring Kristen Baird Richmond, Va.

From the artist: Interaction with food is a normal part of everyday life. However, for those with allergies, such as myself, food is both a blessing and a curse. As part of my “Access Denied” sculptural ring set, the “Ring Pop Ring” is inspired by my complex love/hate relationship with food. I often find myself gravitating toward colorful, enticing sweets and candy, but because of my allergies, I cannot consume these delectable foods. Feelings of desire swirl in my mind as I

conquer my cravings for these foods knowing that eating them would be detrimental. For many people, food brings happiness, joy and delight. For others, while it’s sometimes hard to understand, food brings opposite feelings. With this piece, my goal is to have the wearer experience a feeling of unfulfilled desire, similar to that of a person with an allergy. As a jewelry artist, this piece is my way of expressing the often misunderstood side of food.

Cutlery Cuisine Erica Kelly Orlando, Fla.

Tablescape By Deanne Revel Helena, Ala. I’m taking inventory of all the prepackaged plastic silverware sets in the world; the tiny packets of salt and pepper like silica gel in new tennis shoes; the napkins that might as well be dryer sheets; the small morsels of plastic that break off of forks, get lost in food and are swallowed. I remember the first time I had a tea party with my grandmother. Of all her silver tea sets from past Southern dynasties to the white china sets from London She brought out a pink glass tea set from the 1800s. Big pink roses decorated each piece. I thought it was a toy but when my mother picked me up that day she was jealous. “She never brought that out for me when I was your age. It’s an antique,” she said. And then I realized that it’s not about what you eat, it’s about what you’re eating off of, what you’re eating with, what you’re staring at in the middle of the table while you eat. Does the hue of the placemat match the hue of the dominant flower in the floral arrangement? Is there an iced tea spoon at the ready? I once got in trouble for chewing on the straw of a plastic cup that had seen far too many cycles in the dishwasher. And even though I apologized, what I remember thinking is So what? It’s just plastic.

Ribeye Sam Rayburn Langford Dallas, Texas

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322 WEST BROUGHTON STREET

SAVANNAH GA

w w w. m a r c j a c o b s . c o m

l a r s e i d i n g e r ph o t o g r a ph e d by j u e r g e n t e l l e r

CASSAVA in COLUMBIA

How an African refugee eats in Missouri By Hannah Hayes Minneapolis, Minn.

Photo by Jessi Gilbert

Central Africans don’t do recipes. Case in point, the one on the side of the paper package of cassava leaves from Rwanda sitting on Caritas Habimana’s kitchen counter. It’s more of a glorified suggestion than a bulleted list of instructions. The lemon and lime-colored package says after boiling a kilogram of meat “or bones” and adding the cassava, to “add some ingredients and stir for a while.” The amount of salt, palm oil and groundnut flour is undetermined also (“5 to 8 tablespoonfuls as your taste,” it reads). Better Homes and Gardens wouldn’t be having any of this. “I don’t have a cookbook,” Caritas says. “It’s just in my head.” What she lacks in Pyrex, Caritas has in instincts. She feels the grains of rice and the chopped pieces of onion in her hands. She just knows. For Caritas and many other African refugees who have moved to Columbia, Mo. to escape genocide and ongoing civil crises, the U.S. presents bittersweet opportunities. It is a new home without the pillaging soldiers, but it is a home so unlike the ones they were forced to leave behind. There is food everywhere, but none of it familiar. There are more than 300 refugees from 21

Africa living in this town, according to Refugee and Immigration Services in Jefferson City, with more coming every year. Many are from Rwanda, the Congo and Burundi, the epicenters of the turmoil, and for them that is 300 other people who understand where they come from. People who understand that there isn’t only talk of the camps, of killings, of guns, of the sadness and loss that has plagued Central Africa. They know that there were good times too. Times when they could grab papayas from the trees outside their homes, and families and neighbors cooked together over big pots, times when finding cassava leaves didn’t take an hour and half drive to an international market in St. Louis or Kansas City. For Caritas, those times are as fresh as the mangos she ate growing up in the Congo. But in Columbia, she is reminded of the bad times everyday as she helps her fellow refugees begin again. She has become the matriarch of this community that has formed its own village in Columbia’s First Ward. Caritas is amazing grace in every sense of the phrase. She was able to survive the genocide of Rwanda in an abandoned house occupied by the maid. Caritas lived in silence; the maid brought her a little corn maize and some river water to drink when she could. While the crisis raged outside, 800,000 people, many from her Tutsi tribe, died around her. The bodies piled in the river where she would run to quench her thirst when she could. Now Caritas, who came to the U.S. 15 years ago, has become the life raft to which so many refugees cling. They appeal to her unending kindness and commitment to relocate relatives and to teach them English, to guide them through this American life. With her presence, they once were lost, but now are found. Caritas lives in a small yellow and brown house 12 miles outside of town. While the other refugees have set up near Columbia’s downtown, Caritas 22

wants to be in the country. She says it reminds her of home. When she drives down U.S. 63 to Columbia to take refugees to the doctor’s office or the grocery store, she passes McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Cracker Barrel, T.G.I. Friday’s, Lone Star Steakhouse and a rundown Steak n’ Shake. Sometimes she drives to Columbia to show a newly relocated refugee how to use a stove or a refrigerator. “It’s difficult. The elders have a hard time with it,” she says. Today, Caritas is driving some refugee women to use another appliance: the sewing machines at Fairview United Methodist Church. She makes two trips to make sure they all get to go. In the sewing room at Fairview, a coffeecolored sheet of cotton is stretched across a table. Plum and mustard-colored lines with red swirls on the s heet wrapped around one of the older women named Seocadie make the sickly beige wall behind her disappear. As the women grab their fabric from a closet, Caritas’ eyes look understandably tired while she imagines the smells and the tastes of food back home. “I miss fruits the most,” she says. “They just don’t taste the same here.” The women nod their colorfully wrapped heads in agreement. Seocadie misses her garden and the spices she grew on her farm. She stares intently at her knees as she talks about it as if she wishes she hadn’t remembered it. “They love to see the food and spices in the supermarkets but after they buy it and taste it, they are like ‘ewww,’” Caritas says, gazing over at Chantal Niyonkuru who is pushing yards of lime-colored fabric through one of the machines. Her baby, Victoire, is plastered against her back in a swath of magenta fabric tied tightly around her chest. “But, they get used to it,” Caritas adds as she pans the room, carefully

watching the women she is trying to guide to some kind of success or maybe just stability. “What can they do?” It’s tempting to say that if you didn’t know that these women and their families had survived the incomprehensible, you wouldn’t know it, but it’s not true. As you get to know them, you see that their faith and hope in the future, their community, their children and heaven seems unique to someone who has seen the worst of humanity. If anyone was labeled “victim” it would be these people, but they won’t allow you to see it. Juditha Nkongono is making mintcolored curtains. She has every reason in the world to feel lost and helpless; she speaks virtually no English, a common barrier among the refugee community, but Juditha smiles, always. “We love our own food, but we need to eat American food,” she says in Swahili. “I can eat American food, but not American food alone,” Chantal says over her shoulder to Juditha. “We have to learn how to eat like them,” Juditha reiterates. The determination in her voice transcends the talk of the stereotypical pizza and hamburgers. She knows that there is no going back. This is home, faults and all. But as Juditha goes on to explain her Americanized Italian favorites, the mood shifts. “I eat lasagna and spaghetti,” she says. “That food is good. But, when you eat it, you want to eat it again.” Though she’s speaking another language, the expression on her face when she says “eat it again” is universal. It is self-disgust. Taking more food than you need is a shameful act in the refugee community. But strangely, they also appear just as uncomfortable with the idea of storing leftover food. While Americans stockpile cans of soggy green beans and Campbell’s in their

“I miss fruits the most...

they just don’t

taste the same here.”

kitchen cabinets as if a nuclear apocalypse were happening next Tuesday, the refugees do not like pantries. If someone has extra food after dinner, it doesn’t go to the refrigerator. It goes to a neighbor. “I got two bags of rice. Who wants it?” the calls go out. It’s a defensive move against waste. Food uneaten conjures up the faces they left behind in Africa and how little they had. “We never forget about the starving people,” Caritas says. Caritas has the same look of loathing as she watches her leaky faucet in her kitchen. Each drop down the drain causes her a twinge of pain. Hunks of beef are simmering with onions, peppers and tomatoes next to her as she ties a rubber glove around the handle to the spout to stop the dripping. Tomorrow is the Agape Fellowship Church Revival Worship at the J.W. “Blind” Boone Community Center, an unassuming building near the Jiffy Lube and Douglass High School that has become the gathering spot of the refugee community. Caritas will be bringing her beef dish along with sambusas to the revival thrown in honor of the man sitting on Caritas’ couch, Pastor Willy Seba Kiyana, a former solider from the Congo who used his gun to steal money and drugs during the genocide until he found Jesus. She puts two cans of Fanta orange soda on a tray and brings them to Pastor Willy and his friend and floats back to the kitchen to stir the meat one more time. She puts the sauce from the primitivelooking wooden spoon onto the back of her hand to taste it and smiles. Caritas has a jug of palm oil that says on its label that it has passed the Ghana Standards Board Critical Examination sitting on the counter next to the cassava leaves. “For this meat I use a lot,” she says of the thick orange oil inside the jug. While Pastor Willy chatters in Swahili to his friend in the living room, Caritas’ kitchen has become a Food Network set. She pulls out a thin

plastic package of Mission tortillas While Americans live their lives like and starts the sambusas, which are a recipe and measure out the parts of small meat pies. “I just microwave it their day in precise time increments, like this,” she says as the refugees run by she throws the package internal clocks, “We don’t know any their into the microwave, her drifting into the room a more about where few at a time. The fufu smile growing wider as our own food is bread, the goat meat the tortillas spin round and round. and the linga linga vegfrom. I just “This is more like an etable dish are getting Arabic dish,” she excolder as Pastor Willy plains. “We don’t know gives his two-hour testiany more about where mony, but no one seems our own food is from. I concerned. Although just grew up making these.” the refugees gush over the cassava She takes the tortillas out, cuts them and rice from their home countries, it’s into quarters and glues them together clear that their faith is their favorite with flour and water into uniform little food. Prayer and hope was their suspockets and fills them with ground tenance through the bad times when meat, onions, peppers and spices. their food was gone. “You can put chicken or just vegeta“People are like the salt of the bles in them, and this is low-carb right? church,” Pastor Willy says as his serSo they can be pretty much not very mon winds down. fat,” she says with an almost uncanny, “You cannot get your food with Giada De Laurentiis kind of charisma. the salt on the side. When the food is Caritas taught Pastor Judy Hubgood you are saying that salt is good bard from the Imani Mission Center too. We need to be salty!” he booms. where she works part time how to The congregants chuckle and clap. make these. A woman wearing a muumuu and “I love them,” Pastor Hubbard says. black, patent-leather heels says “HalAlthough she will eat their goat lelujah. Thank you, Jesus.” stews and other dishes, she still can’t After the service, the back room get used to watching the refugees is opened, and people wind around drink warm soda at the center’s the white tables laden with mandazi events. doughnuts, beans drowning in palm “They don’t use ice, but I guess oil and rice. There are four trays of that’s how they like it,” she says with sambusas and all of them will soon a bemused smile. disappear. But next to the goat meat is The next day at the revival wora Crock-Pot full of spaghetti and meatship, women wrapped in asparagus balls. Juditha digs the serving utensil and jalapeno-colored print dresses deep into the nest of noodles and with silver and aquamarine sequinsmiles all the way to her table. Crincovered head wraps stream into the kle-cut french fries and fried chicken backroom with their slow-cookers legs have somehow made their way and foil wrapped trays. Toddlers and onto the table too and are promptly kids dressed in white suits, Spiderman carried away by the smaller churchgoT-shirts, shiny strawberry-red dresses ers. One of the little girls dips a french and candy-colored barrettes sit in the fry into the orange sauce from the back together. The service was meant beans and two others try it. Perhaps, to start at 11 a.m., but African time the making of a new favorite. prevails and Pastor Aaron Ruvugwa Gisonga finally starts the singing and dancing officially at noon.

grew up making these.”

• Cheeseburgers (and more milkshakes). • T-bone steak. • Flank steak. • Steak fajitas. • Steak stir-fry. • Beef tacos. • Beef empanadas. • Mac and cheese (with Hamburger Helper). • Leather bags. • Leather boots. • Leather shoes. • Leather jackets. • Boys in leather jackets.

Things I Like About Cows By Anna Geannopoulos Portland, Ore.

• Leather pants. • Leather shorts. • Leather skirts. • Leather mini-dresses.

Image: Milk & Cookies; Cleonique Hilsaca; Tegucigalpa, Honduras

• Leather jump suits.

• Dipping Oreos into milk.

• Wearing leather boots, pants and jacket while eating a T-bone steak.

• Cheese for breakfast, lunch and dinner. • Ice cream on a hot day. • Ice cream while watching “America’s Next Top Model.” • Ice cream because “Oh-m-gee” he asked me out. • Ice cream because “He ripped my heart out and I hope he dies.” • Ice cream because “I don’t care. He doesn’t deserve me anyway.” • Ice cream for breakfast. • Milkshakes. • Hamburgers and milkshakes.

• Boys in leather jackets on comfy leather couches.

• Ice cream while looking at leather accessories online.

• Boys in leather jackets making me milkshakes. • Trying to figure out what the song “Milkshake” means. • All the possible puns for the word “udders.” • Driving fast cars with leather seats. • Kicking ass in leather outfits. • Drinking milk to have strong bones to kick ass in leather outfits. • Chocolate milk. • Milk chocolate. • Cows jumping over the moon.

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GET YOUR JAM ON!

The District Quarterly theme for spring quarter is music.

Whether it’s tunes you love or tunes you hate, we want your art!

Photograph it. Paint about it. Write about it. Even send us some of your own music. Send all submissions to quarterly@scaddistrict.com

Send in submissions of any medium about what gets you grooving.

Deadline for submissions is March 15. Submission guidelines: visual content: 300 dpi written content: less than 1700 words videos: less than 15 minutes

Exhibit your work at Desotorow Gallery Desotorow Gallery offers two exhibition spaces at affordable rates. Our staff provides assistance with: • Marketing • Exhibit installation • Opening receptions • Catering options coming soon For more information, e-mail info@desotorow.org.

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Les Oignona Verts Scott Welsh Apex, N.C.

Delicious Delights A short film about trying to find the recipe for love.

“Stunning…that anyone would watch this!” Alberto Gonzalez, Out of Time Magazine

This year, if you have yet to see a film made just for you, this is it. If you can’t stand watching weird selfamputees with speech impediments who have strung-out brothers with perfection issues who have to cut a few friends to get famous, then this is your film. Alberto Gonzales from out of Out of Time Magazine calls it, “Stunning … that anyone would watch this!”

Rickey James from the Old Yorker had this to say “I give it five stars, now please let me see my family.” Matt Collins from Newsmonth gave a glowing review but I lost it. So if you have yet to see “Delicious Delights,” go now! It’s almost as good as eating a spring roll in the shower. Speaking of, I feel a bit dirty.

Watch the film at scaddistrict.com/quarterly.

A short film by Jacob Menache Alexandria, La.

Managing college expenses doesn’t have to be difficult

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12/8/10 10:09 AM

All I want is a BLT minus the look back at my empty place setting, lettuce and tomato. For 30 minutes a woman is making herself comfortthat stretch into the night, I wait in able in the blue vinyl booth in front this God-forsaken Lyons, Ga. diner of me. She arranges several paper on Black Friday. The dining room shopping bags on the table then sits is completely empty, except for the down with a sigh. Dark-headed, waitress and me — rows and rows of she’s maybe 29, and sort of pretty could-have-been blue-plate specials I guess. Her disheveled hair, toted and should-have-been sweet teas. belongings and mysteriously jingling I watch the waitress’ cigarette skirt remind me of a gypsy from the smoke curl up towards the ceiling adventure books I read as a kid. and wonder if the phone cord twistMy new mission is to avoid eye ed around her body contact — which “Those Cokes can get any tighter. might prove difficult She twines the cord because her seating have been on around her fingers choice, facing my that rack and twists her worn booth, makes it as if Converse shoes. we are actually sitting I plotted revenge. I at the same booth. I I’m just freeing one.” glance at the clock could dash out of the restaurant with the above the door; it’s B sandwich without 9:30. The woman gets paying. But I picture me, bolting out out of the booth, straightens her floor of the restaurant, leaving a trail of length skirt, and sashays over behind napkins and bottle caps in my wake: the counter to the cooler, returning me, Quincy McKenzie, a felon at age to her seat with one of the Cokes that 17. I wave at the waitress but she I’ve been fantasizing about. smiles and motions to her cigarette She pokes her bottle cap. “Hey,” at me, dismissing me. Even a waitshe says, “Can I borrow the bottle ress ignores me. I realize I’ve never opener?” I come to the realization felt more alone. that I’ve been fiddling with the I finished my bottle of Coke 20 opener since I got my Coke. I nod and minutes ago, but I know asking for reach over my booth to hand it to her. another one is out of the question. We both smile, vaguely. “Thanks.” The waitress clicks her tongue at She bites her lip and looks at my Mitch on the phone. Whoever Mitch hands cupping my empty bottle. is, he and the waitress should break “They’re like prisoners awaiting up because she clearly isn’t bringing execution.” She says, breaking the anything to the table — namely, silence again. my sandwich. “Huh?” Shifting my gaze longingly to the “The soda bottles. No one ever kitchen where there are no signs of comes in here. Those Cokes have sizzling bacon, I begin to doubt the been on that rack for months. I’m existence of a cook. I notice the lonejust freeing one.” ly order slip fluttering on the pick up The woman gestures to the glass window when the door chimes and I cooler neatly lined with bottles dressed hear someone enter the diner. I imag- in red, orange, and purple labels. ine it might be the Angel of Death “If they weren’t so cold, they’d be because I have died waiting dusty,” she said. for my sandwich. “Right,” I say. Curiously I glance around the We return to our own levels of restaurant in search of the café’s new loneliness, as I desperately flounder casualty, but I find no one. When I to find things to entertain my gaze

for months.

EVERYONE ELSE By Christen Gresham Savannah, Ga. Illustration by Caila Brown

with — anything except the person right in front of me will do. “You’re new at this,” she interrupts, letting out a breath of air. “New at what?” “Eating at restaurants alone.” “I usually eat with my family,” I confess, owning up to my age. “Have a nice Thanksgiving?” “Sure. My Aunt Harriet came to town.” “So why aren’t you eating sweet potato and turkey leftovers with Aunt Harriet then?” She plays with one of the handles on her shopping bag. “Salmon Balls.” She stops abruptly and looks me carefully in the eyes, “Salmon Balls?” “It a traditional dish my mom makes when Aunt Harriet comes, but really they’re like someone rolled a snow ball in the busboy bin, fried it up and put it on a plate. Except it isn’t snow, it’s fish.” “Oh.” My fish snowball imagery hangs in the air, mingling with the aroma of reheated fried okra that fills the diner. Somehow I can’t let the conversation end like this, not on a fishy note. “I hate fish. My mom tries to make me eat it. But I’m 17. I can make my own decisions. She’s bossy. My family drives me nuts.” I half replayed in my head the fight that led me to jumping into my car and speeding down the highway and ultimately arriving at this hellhole. “If you won’t eat them you can just starve. Alone,” mom had screamed. “I’d rather be alone than be here,” I had hollered back as I unlocked my truck. I was positive the whole thing was mom’s fault and unsure if I really wanted to come back. Ever. “Fish Friday,” I offer because the woman hasn’t responded. “Catholic?” “Yeah,” I say. I sense she’s already moved on, drifting back to her private reverie. The threat of silence

after a taste of companionship makes in the light of the orange and blue me feel emptier than I did before she “open” sign near the counter, then first spoke. I look at the distance between the “What about you, what did you do stranger and me; I think I want to for Thanksgiving?” I pull her back in. close it. “I made some “We could have our turkey salad.” She own Thanksgiving love did here, they’ve got turnods awkwardly. I nod back. not go somewhere key here,” I suggest. “Family come She smiles a little down?” and tilts her head “I left home when I me, “Really? But glass of tea at was 16. I don’t think you’re a perfect they want to see me.” and stranger!” harmonica She shifts her weight “I know, but it’s in the booth and swalall right, come sit lows some Coke. with me.” “How do you know?” She studies my face closely at first. The woman sighs, maybe a little As she crosses her arms and turns her irritated at the interrogation session, gaze to the lonely booths behind me, I which she technically started. know she’s already made her deci“They don’t write…you know… sion. She is going to spend the rest of they don’t call. I haven’t talked to my her night alone. mom in six years,” she offers. “No thanks.” “Honey, love did not go someIt occurs to me, while placing where green in Vermont with a glass a crumpled five-dollar bill on the of tea and a harmonica,” the waittable, that’s the problem with perfect ress interjects into the conversation, strangers — they’re perfect until you screaming at Mitch. “You left it in a get to know them, then they become laundry room in Lyons with curlers just like everyone else. and a terry cloth bathrobe.” For now, I put on my coat, get in “Do they know you’re living in my truck, flip on the headlights and Lyons? Do you write them?” turn onto Georgia State Route 29, She shakes her head, “I guess heading back to my very own everynot. No.” one elses. “So you spent Thanksgiving alone? That’s awful,” I blurt before I know what I’m saying. “Yeah,” she confirms, now digging in her shopping bag. I study my reflection in the melamine tabletop and I’m dissatisfied, so I look back at the woman, “But couldn’t you call your family or something?” She stops suddenly and shoves whatever she was pulling out of her bag back into its brown paper darkness, “Well, it’s just easier the way it is.” Easier, I think, but not better. I glance at the waitress who is moaning at Mitch, tears glistening

“Honey,

green in Vermont with a a ...”

CHEAP and Sugary

PHILOSOPHIES By Shannon Gentry Mount Airy, N.C.

Image: Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (2); John Hughes; Dallas, Texas

It’s funny how you can become so used to things the way they are. You just presume them to be as they should be. It happens all the time. For example, maybe you’ve had apple pie one way your entire life. Your beloved mother always used canned apples, a Pillsbury frozen pie crust and Cool

Whip to top it off. That, of course, is apple pie. Right? But, then, one day, someone says, “Hey, you should try my apple pie.” So, skeptically, you do. Your mind is blown away. “They’ve used real Granny Smith apples, cinnamon and nutmeg. The crust is buttery and flaky,

and you say, “This is apple pie? I thought it was something completely different.” Then you realize that you want your apple pies to be more like this from now on. This is actually how you want apple pie to taste. No one is insulting your mother’s pie. She thinks it’s supposed to be the way she makes it, like you thought, too. I’m not just writing about apple pies. I just really like food analogies. On a small scale, the apple pie could be anything. I imagine that the same old apple pie could be the same old bad relationship that two people stay in because they don’t know any better. Eventually, if they’re lucky, they breakup and find out that there are better fish in the sea — to fry. Another scenario could be the job you hate with every cell of your being, only to realize that you like the work, just not the place you’re working. The self-discovery goes on. It seems like pretty obvious stuff, but not really. If it were that obvious, then it would be obvious at the time, not after the fact. You wouldn’t have to taste new apple pie in order to realize that the apple pie you were used to lacked luster. You would already know. But we don’t already know. We have to constantly open ourselves to new persons, places and things in order to appreciate what we think we know. That’s why a lot of people travel, change jobs, move around or join the Peace Corps. They are looking for new apple pies, or maybe they’re tired of apple pie altogether, and want cheesecake. Or maybe it’s just me. That could be it, but I still believe that as soon as someone says, “This is apple pie. This is absolutely what apple pie is supposed to taste like, and I needn’t taste another apple pie again.” That is the moment that the person is screwed. Because he or she will either get stuck with a crappy recipe, or never know how awesome other apple pies are. What is my point? Isn’t it obvious? Eat lots of pie.

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