Community lunch today.

My department has this lunch lecture series on Wednesdays, where a prof or someone gives an informal talk on some random interesting subject, and this crew of students make an all-vegetarian meal (always new recipes!) that's $4 if you're a student and $5 for everyone else.

Anyhow, there's been this new head student chef this year, and she's been big on buying local goods to incoporate into meals, and since they had this really good dried-fruit-and-nut bread today, everyone was complimenting her on it, and she was saying that it was actually bought fresh today from this one local monk who has a great vocation for baking, and has pursued it despite having one arm.

"Oh, like Moonstruck," I was like, and when everyone was like, "What?", I had to be like, "You know, Moonstruck, Nicholas Cage, he's a one-armed baker and it's a love story, and Cher's in there too, she one an Oscar for that bullshit," which only made everyone more confused, since no one there (both students and profs and university people in their 40s and 50s) had somehow never heard of the movie.

Also, the talk was on the role of food in mainline Protestantism, and the lecturer passed around a book published from a church in Florida in the 1930s with ideas for 52 parties and events for kids in your parish, one for every week in the year. The 52nd and last party was for a Minstrel Show event, and my favorite part of the minstrel show script included in the book was this dialogue between the show's emcee and one of the kids in blackface:

Introducer: How are you today, Sambo?

Sambo: I feel like a pretzel.

Introducer: A pretzel!?! How is that?

Sambo: Like a cracker with the cramps.

Also, the book said the show was always a good fundraiser for the author's own church, bringing in over three thousand dollars every time they put it on.