STONED SOUL PIZZA

Hold the pepperoni!

Pizza may be no more than snack food (or, worse, junk food) to you. But to the six extraordinary craftpersons featured in the Netflix series Chef's Table: Pizza, making pizza has become a life-altering ritual at the intersection of Life, Art and Identity.

The long-running Master Chef series profiles renowned chefs from around the world in tasty one-hour docu-bites. In its current (seventh) season, the focus is on maestros of the pizza arts, not only in Italy, but from such unexpected regions as Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Kyoto, Japan. The notion of what pizza is, can, or should be (along with an amazing diversity of ingredients, from flower petals to Korean kimchee), varies wildly from one pair of flour-encrusted hands to the next. But all agree that pizza is the ultimate soul food, expressing not only the soul of the pizza chefs themselves, but of the people and community that inspire them. 

Bonci: Revolution on a plate

That may seem like a lot of symbolism to heap on top of a humble pie, but every pizza tells a story — of drama, displacement, family, culture — and the stories are fascinating.

Native New Yorker Chris Bianco left the city trying to find his place in the world. From his first boyhood job hauling flour sacks up out of the basement in a pizza joint in the Bronx, he landed in Phoenix, selling home-made mozzarella out of his apartment to Italian restaurants and finally graduating to pizza chef. At his own restaurant, he concocts a signature pizza, the Rosa, made with hardy wheat grown in the sandy soil outside Phoenix, red onions sliced as thin and curly as potato chips, pungent rosemary, and crushed pistachios, that "tastes like the desert."

Hailed as "The Michelangelo of pizza," Gabriele Bonci became a celebrity TV chef in Rome (with his own irritatingly bouncy theme song), until he realized the TV persona was devouring him. Painstakingly weaning himself off of fame, like any other addiction, he shed a great deal of physical weight while also streamlining his purpose in the pizza kitchen, promoting the ethics of sustainable agriculture and thoughtful food consumption. He buys all natural ingredients from small farmers, raises his own sheep for cheese, and only buys the meat of animals that have "lived well."  He says, "I decided that pizza would be my weapon. On top, I could put a revolution."

Kim: Trusting herself

On her first day of school in Minneapolis, Ann Kim, daughter of Korean immigrant parents, saw that the bento box lunch so lovingly packed by her grandmother did not look or smell like the other kids' lunches; embarrassed, she threw it away, and spent years being ashamed of her heritage. Vigorously assimilated, she took a detour into theater to submerge her identity, but grew disillusioned with the limited roles offered to Asian women. 

 At a bleak crossroads in life, she thought, "Either you can live in the unhappiness, or you can change it. You just have to trust yourself." Impressed with the melting pot vibe in New York City, from her student days at Columbia (summed up in her first slice of sidewalk pizza), and realizing the one constant joy in her life had always been cooking with her mother and grandmother, she decided on a new direction. "I  said, fuck it," she laughs, "I'm going to put kimchee on a pizza!"

Franco Pepe and his brothers grew up in their father's pizzaria in Naples. All three sons had different career paths lined up until their father's death brought them all back to run the family business. Conflict arose when Franco left to open his own shop featuring his own innovative ideas. His Margharita Spagliata (Margharita Mistake), literally turns the classic pizza upside down, with the layer of mozzarella cheese on the bottom, and infusions of crushed (not cooked) fresh tomatoes and basil striped across the top.

Yoshihiro Imai came from a family of dentists in Kyoto, Japan, but a chance encounter with a library book on breadmaking prompted a passion for dough and pointed him onto a new path. He was in training to become a master chef in Europe until news that his girlfriend was pregnant brought him home. Miserable working in a fast-food cafeteria to support his new family, he opened his own pizza restaurant, foraging for wild mushrooms at dawn and fishing for a lowly species of river trout to invoke the flavor and serenity of his beloved forest. "The path itself," he says, with Zen-like aplomb, "is the meaning and the goal."

Pepe: Vats of bubbling alchemy

Trained as a painter, Sarah Minnick discovered the joy of cooking when the work-study program at art school landed her in the campus kitchen. Deciding food was more fun, and inspired by the DIY, pop-up restaurant scene in her native Portland, Oregon, she turns her artist's eye to pizza with a pallette of "weird weeds," wild edibles, colorful flower petals snipped from her garden, and other impressive  "veggie-centric" concoctions.

All of them share a common passion for locally sourced ingredients, and each has forged close relationships with the small farmers, ranchers, foragers, herbalists and millers who provide them. All of them craft their own dough from scratch, by hand, growing the living dough from regional, stone-ground wheat every morning for the day's pies. Their immersive relationship to the dough is irresistible, gleefully plunging in elbow-deep to massage, roll, tweak and shape their humble ingredients into great vats of breathing, bubbling, alchemy.

Stepping up my pizza game

Of course, pizza is the stuff of ritual in my house too, a way for me to commune with my Art Boy over the pizza board he built and painted so lovingly for our Monday night pizzas. He estimated he'd made a thousand pizzas on the broken, blackened (and beloved) pizza screen I still use. Ridiculously inventive and intuitive with his own toppings (leftover Thanksgiving mashed potatoes and stuffing; razor-thin lemon slices), he never met an ingredient he couldn't put on a pizza, which is why he would have loved the Chef's Table series. Whenever I get too melancholy wishing he was still here to watch it with me (reason #4972 on my list of Why I Wish James Was Still Here), I remind myself to Be Like James and get inspired instead.

Encouraged by my Spirit Guide, I'm stepping up my own pizza game. Yes, I'm still buying one-pound dough balls from Trader Joe's, but I'm trying to approach it less like a fearful supplicant, afraid of messing up, and more like a confident explorer, establishing a partnership with the dough, not a contest.

My efforts may not yet be vat-worthy, but the journey of a thousand pizzas begins with a single slice.

PS: Do NOT watch this show hungry!

RANT, REFLECT, REPEAT

 On Turning 70

Just like Halley's Comet, tearing up the sky every 75 years. Or Cicadas, emerging every 17 years to blanket the Midwest with their irritating noise. I'm on a similar schedule: every 20 years I subject readers to the ongoing soap opera of my advancing age. 

(Way) back in 1982, I wrote a cover story for Good Times about the angst of Turning 30 — the age after which no one was to be trusted, according to the '60s pop culture I grew up in. In 2002, when I was writing a biweekly, non-movie-oriented column for GT, I wrote Vintage 1952, grappling with the surprising revelation that I had somehow become an official Golden Oldie at age 50. 

It hadn't really occurred to me to continue the saga in print this year — possibly because it hasn't quite sunk in that I'm on the cusp of yet another scary birthday that ends in a zero. Well, let's not say scary, but momentous. At the close of one decade, you're supposed to take stock of The Story So Far, while advancing glib strategies on forging ahead into the next one. 

My first two articles were determinedly upbeat in tone, genial pep talks for embracing the ongoing adventure of life. They seemed to resonate with the vast Boomer demographic of which I am smack in the middle. But life has thrown me a few curve balls since then, including a surprise diagnosis of MS at age 62, and a sudden, unexpected plunge into widowhood. I wondered if my experience had become too specific for readers to find "relatable." 

Then I was messaged by a reader who remembered Vintage 1952, and asked point blank if I had penned any further reflections on turning 70. 

So. On further reflection, I realize you don't get to age 70 without a few battle scars, visible or otherwise. (Unless there's a portrait of your glamorous youthful self crumbling away in an attic somewhere.) In the immortal words of Gilda Radner, it's always something. At this age, everybody has issues — that's part of the deal. Besides, given the global upheaval of these last two years — not to mention the previous four — maybe my sense of personal upheaval isn't so unique after all. 

Still, how deeply did I want to plumb the roiling murk of my psyche at this turning point in my life? Did I have the insight, the courage (the gall?) to produce my personal McCartney III? 

As I noted in Vintage 1952, age alone does not necessarily confer wisdom and dignity on a person, but the very fact of your persistent existence earns you a few perks. I know several women my age who have joyfully stopped wearing bras, mostly retired professional women (as opposed to hobbyists) whose jobs required a dress code. Unlike me; when your workplace is a dark movie theater, who's going to see? I still wear a pull-on sports bras most of the time, but they're mostly decorative, since time and age have so radically realigned what used to go in them. Glimpsing myself in the mirror, I'm astonished to see how far south their contents have descended, taking my cleavage with them. 

The only parts of my upper body that are still nicely rounded are — surprise! — my biceps, accidentally toned in the daily act of gripping my rollator as I drag myself around. 

But I'm not here to take inventory of my mutating body parts — isn't that what "old people" do, drone on and on about their ailments? I promised myself I was never going to be that kind of old person! But the truth is, none of us ever expects to actually be an old person at all, despite all evidence to the contrary. And it's funny how our concept of what constitutes "old" recedes like a bad hairline the closer we get to each chronological milestone. 

Meanwhile, our inner 17-year-old (that imaginary friend no one else can see) assures us that old age only happens to other people; if we take spin classes, do crossword puzzles, go gluten-free, we can beat the rap. 

The calendar, however, does not lie, and no bribes, threats, or claims of executive privilege can slow its inexorable course. Age sneaks up on us when we're not looking, so the question becomes not if we're going to age, but how we're going to do it. 

 Let's face it, getting older is ridiculous, so maintaining a sense of humor about it is more essential than ever. The more you can laugh at it, the less power it has to terrify you into submission. Of course, at this age, not even the most delusional among us can pretend that the best is yet to come. But tempting as it is, you can't stay mired in the past, or you risk becoming a relic yourself, like pay phone booths or videotape. 

Back when Gloria Steinem turned 50, someone tried to compliment her by saying "You don't look 50." To which she replied "But this is what 50 looks like." 

No one else gets to tell you how to look — or act — your age. That's your privilege; if you've made it this far, you've earned it. It's up to you to show 'em how it's done. At fifty, I joked that thirty had once been the absolute dividing line between fresh, hip youth and the "vast nothingness that came after." But what's out there now, looming in the darkness after this particular milestone? 

Ask me when I'm ninety.