Soup & Bread: Seattle Doubleheader

Last week Sheila stayed in town to celebrate Lincoln’s Birthday while I headed west for some R&R. For the most part it was very chill: I went to the movies with my mom; my niece and I puzzled over fractions. But, of course, what’s a week of domesticity without some soup as well?  On February 12 Seattle got not one but two Soup & Breads. Each was distinct; but they produced a common joy.

The first was a bookstore talk and soup tasting at the Elliott Bay Book Company, which recently relocated from storied digs in that city’s historic Pioneer Square – digs where I learned to pull espresso as a teenaged barista and prep cook in its basement café – to a space on Capitol Hill that once upon a time housed the dance studio where I sweated away at ballet until punk rock dyed my hair and hid my pointe shoes.

So I was already discombobulated, wandering around memory lane, when the room filled up with the rest of my past. Down the stairs they came: My former babysitter and her husband; my long-ago next door neighbors, brother and sister. My mother’s indominable posse of friends. The once-homeless woman who now sits on the vestry of my parents’ church. My sister, trailing small boys. My uncle’s second wife, flanked by sister volunteers from a women’s shelter. Rob, long-lost from high school, and then Josh, from college, and Erica, from last year, who came bearing chicken matzoh soup. Knox, of Soup Swap fame, with his own pot of pumpkin-chipotle puree. When my best friend from preschool materialized – accompanied by her long-divorced parents, and after 25 years – I swear, there was something in my eye. Said my mom, “Talk about community — this is community building right here in this room.”

There’s little documentation save these blurry iPhone pix (and thanks for staying on the job, Josh) but I think the afternoon was a success. I gave a little talk, people asked lots of good questions, and then they cleaned the bookstore out of its inventory of cookbooks. Along the way we raised $187 in donations for the Jewish Family Service food pantry. I was flying high, mainlining adrenaline. If I wrote something preposterous in your book, forgive me!

I could have hung around in the Elliott Bay basement all day, but soon enough it was time to throw everything back in the car and run home to wash the crocks, so that I could get down to Radar Hair & Records in time to meet Suzie Strait and gear up for phase two.

Suzie (orange skirt) was the mastermind behind last year’s terrific Soup & Bread at the Funhouse, and the unstoppable force driving this year’s event, a benefit for Radar co-owner Betsy Hansen, who was recently diagnosed with cancer. Once again, I got few photos — but this one, shot before the lights dimmed and things got rolling, only hints at the scope of this night.

We had soups from a dozen or more Seattlites, from fancy restaurants like Sitka & Spruce, which donated a ridiculously rich sunchoke soup, to freaks like Chicago’s own Derek Erdman (in the cap), with his “accidentally vegan” vegetable soup. We had mountains of bread from Macrina, from Russ Battaglia, from Whiting Tennis, from who knows who else. My friends Greg and Charlie, who brought an amazing tom kha kai last year, collaborated again on a soup – this one a sweet potato, peanut, and chicken concoction. And by “collaborate” I mean Charlie cooked, and Greg paid.

This event was PACKED. I knew almost no one — but it didn’t matter. Everyone seemed happy to eat soup, drink up, and dig deep. When Suzie texted me the next day to tell me that the event had raised almost $3500 for Betsy, I was stunned, but not surprised. I hope it helps.

By 9 pm the soup was gone and the Coconut Coolouts were taking the stage — and I was exhausted, loopy on cheap white wine. I packed up the car and snuck away. By 10 I was at home with my (painful, impractical, torturous) boots off, watching Downton Abbey with my dad.

That whole day was a glorious blur, but in soup-free days that followed I kept coming back to one part that really stuck with me, from the Q&A at Elliott Bay.

I had stopped being stammeringly nervous by then, and the questions from the crowd helped me clarify and better articulate something tumbling, over and over, lately – namely, the odd sense that, for all this talk of soup and community building, there’s less than a common vocabulary at work.

I’ve been working on setting up a gig at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the exhibit Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art.  And I mentioned that it seemed funny that that “radical hospitality,” a coinage and concept that pops up a lot lately in progressive Christian quarters, has been taken up by the art crowd.

The heads in the crowd, young and old, religious and not, started bobbing. Later, several people singled out that moment as something to take home and ponder. What does it mean that soup can be one group’s art practice and another’s act of ministry? That artists, activists, and church folk are all practicing the same simple act, with distinctly different scaffolding, communicating meaning to those speaking the language of their own communities, but obscuring, if gently, meaning for those without?

Is it a problem? Maybe, maybe not — but it sure is interesting, at least to me. Thank you, Seattle, for helping me start to pound it out.

Posted: Friday Feb 17,2012 01:31 PM In Soup Wrapup