coffee biscotti while women discuss books

Sharing Passion in Public

Karin Kallmaker Cheers & Chocolate

A new guilty pleasure has entered my life: The Best Thing I Ever Ate. This half-hour food orgy showed up on the Food Network recently, and I’m hooked. The basic format is familiar stars like Bobby Flay, Cat Cora, and Rachel Ray choosing dishes within a theme, like “fried,” and discussing where they had the best item ever in that category. Sometimes the star is at the restaurant and a little featurette shows how the item was made.

I always like watching shows about food and cooking. Sometimes I pick up a useful technique, and sometimes I just like to make myself miserable by looking at food I’ll likely never get to eat, and shouldn’t even if I could. Late nights, done with my allotment of nutrition for the day, you’d think I wouldn’t watch a show about gastronomic ecstasy, but I can’t help it.

How else would I know about something as decadent as tempura-fried bacon? How clever is it for a restaurant to serve all the ingredients for Smores separately, and you dip, slather, sandwich and crunch without the campfire or mosquitoes?

Not every feature reaches the heights of near orgasmic description, but when it does, it’s delightful. Watching Alex Guarnascelli lose her train of thought as she contemplates a hot dog, or Giada De Laurentiis‘s eyes roll back in her head describing donuts is really quite a treat. Maybe because I know just how they feel. Like Bobby Flay, I had these French fries once, and the memory renders me incoherent. They were the Best Thing Ever.

One of the things that is wonderful about the lesbian fiction community is the way readers and writers share their passion for books.

I’m looking forward to the GCLS Conference in just two weeks, because at some point, everyone has that moment of speechless enthusiasm for a book that was so good words fail them, and all they can do is glow with passion.

Yes, right there in public and the rest of us get to watch. It’s better than TV.

Copyrighted material.