Bezjian: Madam Lucy's Green Peas
Pilaf, simmered in sheep butter, a handful of chickpeas, and sprinkles of black pepper, if you are Armenian. As I fill my cheap non-degradable black plastic bag, I recall two things (as I always do when I see green peas, be they fresh, canned, jarred, or frozen in plastic bags of corporate brands)—that is, my mother’s recipe, perfected thoroughly from macho criticism, and Madame Lucy’s servings as the only alternative to my mother’s home-cooking years ago, when I was just an observant little boy.Madame Lucy was an Armenian woman with a helmet of dark brown hair. She wore dark eyeglasses in white frames, was short and husky, her fashion insignificant, her lips always painted bloody red, shouting and yelling, smiling and charming, always waiving her right arm and trying to control her left, which had a mysterious history and was replaced by a prosthesis that extended into a skin-toned yellow leather glove. She had an iron-fist control over her troop of cooks, busboys, waiters, doormen, chaperones, shoe-shine boys, coat girls, bartenders, musicians, and clients. They all obeyed her as the goddess of lust. At times her artificial arm moved on its own, and the right one had to force it down to its place, much like Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (which, incidentally, I saw in the Bleecker Street Cinema near New York University years ago).
1991 Firestorm Remembered At 20th Anniversary Ceremony
Southeast Berkeley was full of fear and chaos October 20, 1991. People poured down Tunnel Road, evacuating from the fire above. Emergency vehicles chugged and sirened in the opposite direction. Homes along some of Berkeley’s most charmed streets—Alvarado Road, Vicente Road, Roble Road—were ablaze, along with hundreds of residences in Oakland. For hours, it looked as if the Claremont Hotel would become a gigantic torch.
Twenty years later, Saturday, October 22, 2011, that affluent edge of Berkeley could not have been more tranquil. Dog walkers, recreational cyclists, and strollers populated the streets in the bright, warm, weather. There was a faint on-shore breeze, but mainly still, balmy, air.
The brief business block of Domingo Avenue had its usual mid-morning chaos of Rick and Ann’s brunchers, Peetniks, and Bread Garden patrons. Across the street, tennis players practiced on the courts below the Claremont.
The drivers going fast were presumably late for some petty appointment or excursion, not fleeing a fire.
