There’s exactly one TV show that Jane and I make
it a point to catch every week: Good Eats. It’s a cooking show on the
Food Network, and it’s funny. The chef, Alton Brown, is a regular kind
of guy; he wears hornrim glasses and he’s got bad hair and he usually
wears Hawaiian shirts–or sometimes bowling shirts. The show is filmed
inside of a house the purports to be his (nice Craftsman-style kitchen),
and it’s all about cooking well–not just how to prepare a particular
dish, but the secrets, the gotchas, and why it all works the way it does.

And it’s funny. The show is rife with weird camera angles (it often looks
like you’re looking out of the oven or refrigerator), weird props (a
Magritte-like painting of a roast turkey floating in mid air), and odd
story lines.

For example, there was the show where Butter was on trial, complete with
an English judge in a wig. There have been several episodes of Food
Gallery (a take-off on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery show); one of them
was on how to do souffles, and another was about cheesecake. There was
the Scrap Iron Chef show. There was the show about crepes, where
Alton’s psychiatrist insisted that he get in touch with his French side.
There was the Thanksgiving show on how to properly cook a turkey–and
the following week’s show which purported to be a documentary that was
originally about the making of the Thanksgiving show but turned into a
documentary of the horrible things that happened when the cast and crew
were snowed in together after the Thanksgiving show. There was the show
where Alton’s wife sent him on a vacation to the Pacific Northwest to get
some enforced rest and relaxation with absolutely no cooking; he caught
a salmon and smoked it in a large cardboard box outside his hotel room.
There was the Oats show in which Alton and a partner, both dressed
in kilts, showed (more or less) how to make haggis with a claymore and an
outrageously bad Scottish accent.

You get the idea. It’s on at 6 PM and 9 PM PST (9 PM and 12 PM EST)
Wednesdays and Saturdays on Food Network. The Saturday show is pretty
much always a rerun.

“From what I just read, she was enough.”

“Enough to be getting started with, I guess. You can’t run a sideshow
with only one attraction.”

“But what an attraction!”

“That’s true. She was the foundation of his fortune, right enough.
‘Course, she ruined him too.” Hank leaned over and spat in the can by
the wood burning stove, then tipped back in his chair, front legs off
of the floor. “You never saw her, I collect?”

“You know I never did, Hank. That was all before my time. Hasn’t
been a carny through here since I was a boy.”

Hank nodded. “Has been a long time at that. Used to be we’d get ’em
three times a year, spring, summer and fall, like clockwork. All us
boys’d skip school to watch ’em set up. ‘Cept in the summer, of
course, there was no school in the summer in those days. We’d sneak
into the sideshow to see the geek, and have nightmares for days. I
recollect how Bobby Hill terrified our entire boyscout troop with
a dead chicken head after that. But I’m rambling. It gets that way
after a while….”

“So go on about Bolinda, Hank.”

“Oh, yes, Bolinda of Bolivia, the Living Atlas. ‘Course, she was
really from Brooklyn, but it’s not like anyone was paying to hear her
speak. They had this booth, d’ye see, a big booth with canvas all
round, open to the sky, and a little stage at one end, with a curtain
behind it. You’d pay your nickel to get in, and then she’d come out
from behind the curtain wearing a few inches of cotton. ‘Tain’t
nothing to what what you see on TV these days, like that Pamela
Anderson, but let me tell you back then it was hot stuff, with North
and South America curving down one side, and Africa on the other. All
us boys knew that after supper they did a special show, where you paid
50 cents and got to see the Azores, and maybe even Australia. We
thought a lot about Australia in those days. Never met anybody who’d
actually seen the special show, though some boys liked to claim they did.”

“So how did she ruin him?”

“Well, it was the drinking, wasn’t it.”

“She was an alcoholic?”

“‘Twasn’t so much that as the beer. You throw back enough sixpacks
while sitting on your little stool behind the curtain, and it’s bound
to have an effect. Got so she’d come out from behind the curtain in
stages, like the phases of the moon, and then she’d be so tipsy she’d
kind of sway. We’re not as scientifically backward out here as the
cityfolks like to think, but I guess twarn’t no one wanted to see
continental drift up close and personal.” Hank spit into the can
again. “I finally got to see Australia when I was in the Navy. It’s
a fine place, but it didn’t have a patch on old Bolinda.”

Someday there will be a child in your life. It
might be your own; it might be a niece or nephew; it might be the child
of a close friend. And you will need to buy them a birthday or Christmas
gift. And you will be at the music store or the book store or even
(quite possibly) at Costco, and you’ll see a Disney song book with a
plastic recorder attached to it. And you’ll think (especially if the
child is not your own), “Music! How lovely! I’ll help them learn to
love music.” And you’ll buy them the Disney song book with the plastic
recorder attached to it. And yea, there will be wailing and gnashing of
teeth when the child opens the package and the child’s parents see the
Disney song book with the plastic recorder attached to it.

For what you have just done is given this child an extremely high
pitched, badly tuned whistle. The chances of the child learning to play
the songs in the song book without help from an adult are slim and none.
The chances of the child even learning to blow properly by his or herself
are slim and none. And even if they did, the plastic recorder attached
to the Disney song book probably isn’t worth the plastic it contains.

Jane and I were at Ikea today. And in their children’s section, they had
a selection of toy musical instruments. One of them was a black plastic
recorder–the usual size, a soprano. They wanted $4.95 for it. We were
buying a number of other things, and I was curious how bad it was, so I
nabbed it.

Oh, dear. The tone is awful, to begin with. The high notes are simply
not to be listened to–if you can play them at all. Clear and crisp and
clean and pretty are not words you would associate with the sound of this
recorder.

And the thing that makes this so sad is that for $4.95 (mail-order from
Courtly Music Ltd., among other places) you can buy a plastic recorder,
made by Yamaha, of truly outstanding quality. I’ve got a number of
recorders, including a bass recorder for which I paid more than I like to
think about, and the soprano recorder I play the most is a $4.95 Yamaha
recorder molded in translucent plastic with an evil green tint. My
friends tease me about it mercilessly–but only about the appearance, not
about the sound.

So if you’re bound and determined to buy that child a Disney song book
and a recorder, at least buy them a decent recorder to go with the song
book. Their parents won’t thank you–an overblown recorder sounds ugly no
matter how nice it really is–but on the hundred to one chance they
really have what it takes to learn to play it on their own, at least they
won’t get discouraged by how bad it sounds.