Back Story: Wine & Spirits or My Tumultuous Love Affair with Emeril Lagasse by Kathleen Gerard
It all started when I was 24-years-old. I had been stuck in a tiny bedroom in my mother's house, mired in an odyssey that would later become five years of unsuccessful surgeries on my feet and ankles for bone and joint problems. After the first few months of casts and splints and confinement, I vowed not to spend all my recovery time watching brainless TV sitcoms, talk shows or soaps. So I shut off the TV and the radio and took to reading all day. Once a week, I'd send my mother to the public library with a list. She would go on something of a scavenger hunt to pick up books for me in every genre imaginable—including cookbooks, my favorites. At night, usually after dinner, I allowed myself a few hours of "fun" time to watch movies and TV. I tuned in mostly to the then, new-fangled Food-TV network. I had always loved good wine and food (the bathroom scale is testament to that fact!), and cooking was in my blood. Can you imagine how thrilled I was to discover a whole broadcast network devoted to satiating all my virtual, gastronomic impulses and pleasures from the confines of that tiny bedroom? However, after a year or two, I found that the cable channel was suddenly becoming inundated with Emeril Lagasse programming overload. Spending every night with him while I was prostrate in bed—my feet perpetually elevated on pillows above my heart and packed in ice—was breathing new life into the adage "captive audience."
It was a combination of all of the factors I've stated above, along with my having a need to entertain myself, that served as the launch pad for "Wine and Spirits.” Skewing the facts of my reality in a fictionalized world proved liberating—especially by finally barring Emeril Lagasse from my bedroom via a stunning (imagined) pyrotechnic display. But all these years later, I sorely miss his presence on Food-TV. That network hasn't been the same since he left!
Kathleen Gerard writes across genres. Her writing has been awarded The Perillo Prize, The Eric Hoffer Prose Award and was nominated for Best New American Voices, all national prizes in literature. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have been widely published and reprinted in magazines, literary and commercial journals, anthologies and also broadcast on National Public Radio (NPR). Kathleen is also the author of the recently released woman-in-jeopardy novel, In Transit. To learn more visit intransit-thenovel. Read "Wine & Spirits" in the spring 2009 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.
BAM!
Reply to this