when i worked at a healthy grocery chain as a chef one of my jobs was to keep up with the culls–food that made it to the back sanctum, to be cooked and sold, or donated to churches and hot food lines, or, if not so rescued, composted.
i would take a bunch of challah burger buns, and a case of too-ripe tomatoes, with milk that had two days left on it to sell, and so forth, and create a tomato-basil-mozzarella bread pudding.
right now, the text for Do Well of Must (the book for my grant project) is complete. i am culling thru hundreds of drawings for which to include in the book. i must show my progress, which means i need to feature early roughs. in my culling, i came across portraits i made of my best friend Stephanie King, who shot herself dead with a gun in March of 2014.
King befriended me, having read my memoirs. we were attached at the hip. she wanted to write, so i asked her to write something, didnt matter what–and show it to me. what she handed over was some of the most raw, poignant, poetic prose i have read. i had a visceral reaction to it. her grammar was on a sixth-grade level, at best. as an editor, i decided to leave the grammar alone. there are writers who strive for the dialect she naturally inclined towards. she was going to go to school to learn how to write….alas.
here are some portraits i made of my good friend, who never had a bad word to say about anyone. i believe her capacity for love and joy was an equal match for her endurance of pain, but in a moment one can have a snap in judgement. she will be recalled for the love she gave.
