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Dining at Hell’s Kitchen

Posted on September 21, 2024 by Sarah Beach

Back in June this year, just after our triple digit temperatures had arrived in Las Vegas, friends from LA visiting in town treated me to lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen restaurant. Two years previously, they had treated me to lunch at Ramsay’s Pub and Grill. They knew I’m a big fan of Ramsay’s TV programs. The first experience at the Pub and Grill introduced me to the Chef’s legendary Beef Wellington, and it proved to be everything legend said it was. So, the prospect of dining at Hell’s Kitchen definitely excited me.

Entrance to the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas

Alas, I am not enough of a foodie to remember to take photos of the dishes. Instead, I was focused on absorbing the sensory experiences as they happened.

Since I had already had the Beef Wellington, I wanted to try other things on the menu. So, ahead of my lunch I spent time studying the menu online, thinking about what I wanted as a lunch meal.

Now, please understand I had a really lovely visit with my friends. Although we communicate on Facebook fairly regularly, it had been two years since we had been face-to-face. So, it was great to catch up on things in our lives, they having more events to describe than I with my small, quiet existence. But I want to wax rhapsodic about food.

For my first course, I chose the Carrot Soup. The menu said the soup is served with Greek yogurt, a pinenut granola, and vadouvan. Now, vadouvan is a spice mix sometimes called “French curry.” It’s a blend of spices that is a derivative of masala. Although the mixture can vary, it should at least contain garlic, pounded onion, mustard and cumin seeds, and the herb fenugreek. Since really hot spices don’t go through my system comfortably, it was fortunate this mix was – according to the Matre d’ – on the mild side. He was right.

The soup was actually served at the table. The bowl was set before me with the dollop of yogurt artistically placed in the center of the otherwise empty bowl, more piped like frosting than dropped from a spoon. The pinenut granola was sprinkled on it, with the sprig of the herb crowning it. Then the soup itself was poured into the bowl from a small pitcher, carefully circling the yogurt. It was actually beautiful, a consistent color of a thick, creamy smooth soup. The soup by itself would have been very satisfying, with just a touch of sweetness to it. But blending in the yogurt and granola added excitement to it. The spices gave a distinctive flavor, but not so much that they took over the show. And the pinenut granola added a tasty little bit of crunch. Over all, it was so good, I fell in love with it and would have been happy to eat it all day. I even thought vaguely of asking for a second serving, but restrained myself, since I was also looking forward to the Salmon.

The menu indicated the famed Crispy Skin Salmon is served with spätzle, mushrooms, and a citrus beurre blanc. I had never heard of spätzle, so I had looked it up beforehand. It’s a Central European noodle, given a small roundish form. I was very curious about it. When the plate arrived in front of me, the salmon sat on top the spätzle and mushrooms and it all looked inviting. I’m not usually one to rave about mushrooms, but these were prepared in a tasty sauce and well suited to the spätzle.

The prize, of course, was the salmon. The skin on the top was indeed crispy and the citrus beurre blanc was just the perfect touch: there was not so much of it that it drenched the fish, and instead it burst on the tongue with a quick spike and then gave way to the perfectly cooked salmon. I’d once had salmon at a far more ordinary restaurant that had been so over-cooked that it tased like paper. The Hell’s Kitchen salmon belonged in a totally different world. Moist and tasty. The whole dish was satisfying dream. The portion was perfect, enough to feel like a proper meal, but not so much that I felt stuffed and incapable of facing the dessert. Instead, I looked forward to the last course.

For dessert I had chosen Coconut Three Ways. I was very curious about this one, since I love coconut. The dish is described as a coconut sorbet, with a passionfruit caramel sauce, served with coconut croutons in a fresh half coconut. It came to the table with the coconut shell set in a bowl filled with ice – dry ice, as it turned out. The waiter placed it before me and then poured some water on the dry ice for the dramatic fog reaction, rising up and over the table. This would continue as I ate the dessert since the melting ice would produce more water. I suspect the waiter may have poured too much water into the ice, because the melt water rose up over the brim of the bowl and spilled over the table. Well, actually flooded. We used several serviettes to mop it up Not what you expect in a high-end restaurant, but still somehow fun.

Anyway, back to the food.

The coconut sorbet was very delicately flavored, not so heavily sugared that it would taste like a candy bar. The passionfruit caramel sauce suited it well. The passionfruit has a distinct but pleasing taste. It combined well with the familiar coconut. The coconut croutons were delightful and crunchy. I would love to sit down with a package of those croutons. I don’t know about other people, but I love fresh, raw coconut. After scraping some from the shell, I decided it was coming home with me and requested a box (I ate it sliver by sliver over the next two nights).

All in all, the meal was an ideal delight. Watching so many Gordon Ramsay programs, I have, of course, become aware of his obsession with perfectly balancing the flavors in a dish. Finally getting the opportunity to eat food prepared to his standards was a revelatory experience. It changed what I expect from a dish, of flavors, of seasoning. I know I have eaten at some excellent restaurants before, but the combination of learning from Ramsay in what he says about cooking in all his programs and in actually tasting what that mind produces has made me appreciate what can be done with food.

If you ever get the chance to dine at a Gordon Ramsay restaurant, take it. Hopefully, it will delight you as it has me.

Posted in Friends, Personal | Tagged Beef Wellington, Carrot Soup, Coconut, Food, Gordon Ramsay, Hell's Kitchen, Salmon, Spice | Leave a comment

What Is Easter About?

Posted on April 7, 2024 by Sarah Beach

Image Source from iStock

So, on Easter Sunday afternoon, while surfing through YouTube, I happened on a MSNBC segment (I’m not sure which show) where the three people on camera were discussing some of the implications of Donald Trump hawking Bibles (over-priced ones, at that). I don’t recall who the host was, but one of the speakers was the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis.

I’d never encountered her before and knew nothing about her background or general approach to theology. Something she said in passing caught my attention, and I’m not sure I understood her correctly, because what I thought I heard her say threw me off the track of the discussion. It seemed to me that she had said she did not talk about Jesus’ crucifixion in the context of redeeming sins. She quickly moved on to focus on the Resurrection, because, she said, it was about Love; how the Love of God endures, rises again, lives on. How Love is how we should respond to each other totally, not being divisive, or hateful, or rejecting others.

Now, it’s not that I object to this focus in the general sense. It is certainly true that God is Love and that He desires us to reach for the ability to love each other as He loves us. But I am troubled by the implied bypassing of the point of the crucifixion and the sacrifice of Jesus.

My thoughts on her passing comment were mingling in my mind with some comments made by another YouTuber who on Saturday had done a podlet segment about Trump’s bible-hawking. He began by making clear that although he no longer believed in the faith he had been raised in (a very conservative, strictly scripturally guided denomination, by his description), he respects that others did believe it, and he respects the Christian principles. He said what had put him off Christianity is that God would let His own son die the horrible death on the cross: he made it clear that he understood that the Roman practice of crucifixion is one of the more horrible tortures humans have come up with. So, the idea that God would let his son die that way — in fact, require it — put him off not just Christianity, but also believing in God. Basically: what kind of God would do that?

Encountering these ideas close together made me consider two main things that seem to have settled into social thinking — or at least American social thinking — about Christianity. The first is about the humanity of Christ: most people seem quite accepting of that, even to the point of agreeing that even if they are atheists, they find the teachings of Jesus to be, for the most part, worthy of being considered as ethical guidelines. In fact, they frequently point out how poorly professing Christians fail to live up to those guidelines.

But for so many, the concept of the humanity of Jesus is completely disconnected from the idea that Jesus IS GOD; God With Us. “The Son of God” is an idea they can sort of grasp, even if they find it weird to believe in (How does a non-physical deity inseminate a physical woman?). The Son is, in their minds, a separate entity from the Divine Father. Now, of course, this has always been a difficult concept and Jesus knew as much! Even those who saw Him face to face in the flesh and saw the miracles He performed, found His statements that He and the Father are One very, very difficult to accept. Dorothy L. Sayers speculated that when the people asked Jesus on the steps of the Temple if He was the Messiah, they asked it in Aramaic, and that when Jesus answered, “I am,” He said it in Hebrew. The people then wanted to stone Him for blasphemy, because He said the Name of God (I AM THAT I AM) out loud, which was considered sacrilegious.

But not only was He going against custom of not saying aloud the very Name of God, He was using the Hebrew to grammatically answer the question in the affirmative. Those two elements of His response were enough to enrage the seriously religious people in the crowd He was speaking to.

So, socially speaking, we have been getting lax about acknowledging that Jesus and God the Father are indeed One.

And this is the answer to the question “What kind of God sends His Son to be killed in the most horrible way?” The answer being: The kind of God who does not ask anything that He will not do Himself.

The Almighty did not send a “separate entity” to die on the cross: He came amongst us and did it Himself.

Which leads me to the matter of why I feel Rev. Dr. Lewis shied away from the crucifixion. It’s not just that it isn’t dealing with the Son of God being sent to die, but why it was deemed necessary.

And that why is the Holiness of God.

We have lost our sense of holiness, of sacredness.

Do we even understand what the essence of holiness is anymore? What is the physical manifestation of holiness? Do we even think about that? We seem to no longer have much sense of “holy places” – or at least, the general society does not. This leads to a lack of understanding why the general society does not comprehend the nature of indigenous tribes to their sacred lands. To most of us, the land is just the land; it is mundane, and of value for its merely physical nature. We do not have a sense of it as a sacred place, endued with an essence of holiness. We may be willing to “respect their beliefs”, but rarely do we succeed in feeling the sacredness of the place.

Even in our churches, we have drifted away from the sense of the actual sanctity of the sanctuary. The altar (if there is one) has been reduced to a place where we set emblems of our faith: candles, perhaps a cross and/or an open Bible. It no longer speaks to us as the place where we submit our sacrifices to the Almighty.

As I was growing up, my father was an usher in the church we attended. During the offertory, the collection plates where passed where the congregation’s offerings were collected. At the end of that, the ushers would carry the plates to the front of the sanctuary (while the congregation would sing the “Gloria Patria.” The plates would be placed on the altar and remain there for the rest of the service. That ritual served as the reminder that we were offering sacrifices.

Years later, I also served as an usher for several years in the church I attended in Los Angeles. We also did the job of collecting the offering; but instead of the collection dishes being taken to the altar afterward, we took everything back to the church office and locked up everything collected so the church treasurer would attend to it the next day. Of course, it was a Presbyterian church and did not even have an altar in the chancel of the sanctuary. The central cross was a large one hung over the choir loft, and remained a center of focus, but even so … not a specific spot representing the holy presence of the Lord God at a humanly accessible point.

Anyways, the point of this digression into “holy spaces” is to point to our detachment from the physical aspect of holy things. I’m using it to lead into what the Holy Presence of the Lord God must be like. The holiness of Omnipotence must be of such great intensity that I cannot imagine that we would be able to endure it. How could we become so perfect that we would not be utterly destroyed as His presence burns away all our remaining imperfections?

That is why He came among us as Jesus: that we could learn of His love (Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is correct about that). But also, the sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross is to put forward the offering upon the altar of the world in order to enable us to come into the direct presence of the Almighty. Jesus pays the price for all the wrongs we commit against the holiness of God. By taking Jesus upon ourselves in earnest, we take on some of the very essence of God (since Jesus IS God), which allows us into the Presence of Ultimate Holiness.

So that is the answer to the atheist gentleman who asked, “What kind of God would send His own son to die such a death?” The answer is that He did not send a separate entity: He came Himself, and died Himself, to enable us, His children, His creations, to draw near to Him, even into His very Presence.

This is what Easter is about.

Posted in Musings | Tagged Christianity, Dorothy L. Sayers, Easter, Holidays | Leave a comment

Who is the Audience?

Posted on May 20, 2023 by Sarah Beach

Often when a writer starts out on a writing project, one they have conceived of themselves rather than had it requested from an instructor, editor, or employer, they write for themselves. Or perhaps I should say we write for ourselves. It is certainly true of myself, though I won’t claim to do it with the humorous condescension that Gandalf uses in The Lord of the Rings: when answering the question of why he was talking to himself, he says that he chose to “speak to the wisest person present.”

When we tell stories from our hearts, the first draft, at the very least, must come from our own heart. If the author doesn’t love the story, why would anyone else?

In fact, Robert Frost wrote: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader” (from “The Figure a Poem Makes”). The power of any story, no matter what type it is, comes from that inner driving insistence of the heart that this story must be told, no matter what.

Now of course, in an Ideal World, that would be true of every piece of writing one tackles. But it isn’t. As mentioned before, we also have to write for instructors, editors, or employers. That is when we have to consider the audience. Who will be reading this piece?

In his book Win Every Argument, Medhi Hasan gives the following quotation:

Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it “to who it may concern.” -~~~ Ken Haemer, design expert.

I recently was hired to revise a booklet of eight pages, designed to assist social workers in dealing with clients with a particular condition. As I reviewed the original version of the booklet, what I found was that the layout of the information – much of it conveyed in graphs, charts, and checklists – was challenging to read. But the challenge was not because the information was difficult to comprehend. What was making the booklet difficult for users is that although the layout was esthetically satisfying, it was difficult to read left to right, and top to bottom. Explanations that should introduce points in the graphic were on the right when they would have been better on the left, before the reader’s eyes went to the graphic. The design of the layout did not take into account the intended audience: social workers who need to quickly evaluate something.

This attention to the need of the particular audience is much more important in non-fiction than fiction. With a non-fiction work, the writer should consider who will be reading it. Social workers dealing with a stressful situation, trying to help clients in turmoil sitting in front of them is a very different audience than a symposium filled with academics and medical professionals dealing with developing treatments or discovering causes. The vocabulary and presentation will be different.

With fiction there are different factors to consider in presentation. What is the age group of the intended audience? If it is youngsters, that calls for a slightly different vocabulary than what an adult audience can absorb. But writers should not stunt the vocabulary too much when writing for kids. If the context and usage of the word is clear, they can absorb it as easily as adults might. Just consider the made-up vocabularies of science fiction television shows, like the rebooted version of Battlestar Galactica or Farscape: did anyone need an explanation that “fricking” or “frell” were substitutions for an overused English explicative?

I was recently in a screenwriters’ group where we would do table reads of about 8 to 10 pages of someone’s script. When my turn to be read came round, I had brought in 10 pages from the beginning of a thriller/detective story I had begun several years ago but not completed. I still have the original outline and notes, so I was using the group read to restart myself. After the read-through, the notes were pretty good: I’d overlooked some things in introducing my main character, and I’d over-written scene descriptions (a hazard for screenwriters who are also novelists). Then one of the other members of the group, who is also an actor, asked, “Who is the intended audience?” I just stared a bit blankly, thinking, “It’s still the first draft! I’m the intended audience! Right now, I’m writing to please myself!” When I am writing a first draft, I don’t think about a broader audience.

Later, I realized the person was referring to the “four quadrants” of movie audience demographics: male and female, and both over and under the age of 25 (those desiring to write a hit blockbuster aim for all four quadrants). I don’t worry about that element until later in the process – usually.

But let’s go back to Ken Haemer’s quotation, because the key thing for any piece of writing should be to remember it is a love letter to the audience, whether it is a fantasy adventure for youngsters or an academic thesis on the mechanics of quantum physics. You will need to consider who your audience is before you say “I’m done” with your final draft. Have you conveyed your love of the subject? How about your love for your audience? Both of these need to be blended into whatever it is you intend to write.

Posted in Writing | Tagged Audience, Robert Frost, Screenwriting, Writing | Leave a comment

Catching Up With Life

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Sarah Beach

I have been neglecting my website for far too long, and so I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things. I started by doing some minor tweaking and cleaning up of links and such. I still need to make sure that my various links are still active.

One of the first things I’ve updated is the Works by Clients page, where visitors can see the titles I’ve had the pleasure to do editing for.

One of those works is a history of animation and anime, a very thoroughly researched book.

Other works include: a science fiction series (actually a long, single epic tale), The Ark of the Chimeron; a psychology book about dealing with being the child of poor parenting, Free to Run the Race; a supernatural thriller titled Dark Lenny.

As noted in a previous post, I’d written a satirical short story The Siege of the White House in November, and immediately put it up on Kindle, since the window of applicability was short. At the time, I was more concerned about my ability to handle dark satire. It was distressing to have reality turn far more dark and dangerous. The compensation (to a certain degree) was the ceremony of Inauguration Day, and the surprising, but wonderfully joyful, arrival of Amanda Gorman on our national artistic horizon. Her poetry inspired me to a bit of poetry as well — a poem which can be found elsewhere on my website.

Happily, I’ve come through the Year of Covid in good health, even recently getting the vaccine. It was a bit of a financial challenge in the last quarter of 2020, but this year, I’ve been fortunate in getting more editing work, in particular for Michael Wiese Productions. It’s been agreeable to bring my years of experience in Hollywood to some editing tasks.

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One of the benefits of the increased work this year is that I finally decided to stop using a small folding table as a desk (with the assistance of two side tables as some additional space). I wanted a nice L type formation, but couldn’t find anything quite what I wanted. Then it occurred to me that two desks (of slightly different types) would give me that large amount of work surface that I desired. The combination actually turned out to be less expensive than several of the L shaped desks I looked at.

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The additional work space is as inspiring as I’d hoped it would be. Instead of feeling that all my editing and creative writing was make-do and make-shift, I now feel as if I truly am serious about my writing pursuits. After so long in the nomad make-do mentality, I feel so happily settled in my current living circumstances that many things seem possible.

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Another purchase was something I’ve been wanting to get for years and years: a Wacom Cintiq. Admittedly, the glorious Cintiq 24 was quite out of my price range. But the government’s stimulus payments made it possible for me to get a Cintiq 16. I haven’t been able to do much artwork with it yet, but it turned out to be quite useful in doing a red line proofing edit on a PDF recently. Almost as good as working with a red ink pen on an actual paper printout of a manuscript!

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In any case, although I’ve taken these steps to make my work situation more efficient and satisfying, the rest of my life proceeds at a slow pace. I continue working on physical and mental health, living quietly, and trying to get in creative writing time between the bread and butter editing jobs. So, that’s things more-or-less up to date.

Posted in Personal | Tagged Cintiq, Editing, Michael Wiese Productions, Short Stories | Leave a comment

Satire for the Political Season

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Sarah Beach

Over the last four years, I’ve made no particular effort to disguise my dislike of Donald Trump as he has occupied the highest elected office in our land. I have felt that whatever policies of his administration that I might agree with (and there have been just a few) have been unfortunately tainted by his own motives and lack of character. Which is to say that although he has “character” in the sense of being a notable personality (good or bad), the quality of that character I have found dubious. This outlook of mine has created some tensions with the very conservative leaning folks among my friends, people whom I dearly love.

But as the campaign drew to its end, and the Trump wagon seemed to wobble a great deal, and the man himself said many times that if the voting went against him he would not leave the White House, a major “what if” story idea started bubbling up in my mind. In the last week before the election itself, I actually started a short story about what might happen on January 20th, if he had lost the election. Then came a few days when things seemed like they might go either direction, and I sort of lost some steam. I didn’t really want to contemplate another four years like the last four years. But as the votes were counted, I got my steam back.

What I wrote is entirely intended as satire. It is NOT about political philosophies on any issue, other than the effect of a leader’s character on those around him or her. I wrote about the extreme versions of personal traits I have observed in a Certain Someone. I don’t pretend to know or prophesy that my take is actually likely, but I got a deal of amusement in speculating on “what if he really wouldn’t leave?”

So I had my amusement. And I feel that I crafted a pretty good tale (for this moment in history). I hope the writing is good enough to withstand reality catching up with it and shining that bright light on it. That is, even if things fall out differently, I hope it remains an amusing bit of froth.

In any case, that is what lies behind the minor opus I titled “The Siege of the White House.” I felt I should record its origin and the intentions behind it, to make it clear to those same conservative friends who are dear to me that I am not mocking their political stances, but rather only the poor leader who has (badly) represented them while occupying that famed office.

And if you are interested, as a writer friend of mine has said at times, since “there is no shame in shameless self-promotion”, the story is available for Kindle on Amazon for less than a dollar (by a penny, but… that’s their pricing structure).

Posted in Writing | Tagged Satire, Short Stories, White House | Leave a comment

Question: Who is Alex Trebek?

Posted on November 9, 2020 by Sarah Beach

Answer: This Canadian born U.S. citizen became the longest running game show host in American TV

That’s how the clues and responses would be formulated for the game of Jeopardy!, the popular quiz show. I had the fortune of working on the show for 18 years, as a researcher. My job was to fact check and double source the clues our writers came up with. The integrity of the material was and is a big deal for the show: our fans take it seriously. (I’ve been away from the job for 12 years now, and I still identify with it, hence the “our”. It’s a big chunk of my life.) And Alex always took that integrity of the material seriously. I joined the staff in May of 1990, and the syndicated version with Alex had been on for 7 years at that point.

Starting on the show was interesting for me as a writer. I loved doing research, so the job was ideal for me. But working behind the scenes, I became aware that the Image of a notable person in Hollywood is often at odds with the private person away from the cameras. This isn’t to say that Alex wasn’t smart or gracious to people: he was, always. But that beautifully suited gentleman who read out the clues on the show was “public Alex.” On tape days (yes, it’s recorded digitally now, but the lingo holds on), he’d arrive early, driving himself, wearing well-worn jeans, a comfortable sort of pull-over shirt, obviously comfortable loafers, and usually a baseball cap to keep the sun out of his eyes.

The tape day routine for him began with him settling into his office to read through the day’s scripts (Standards and Practices would have already made the game selections and order from the prepared pool of games). He’d make notes of things he questioned, or pronunciations he wanted checked. After he’d done his personal read-through, the morning meeting happened, where he sat down with the writers and the producer, and went through all the games. We researchers needed to be on our toes at this point, because someone at the table might request a double check of some fact, or Alex would want the correct pronunciation of some place name. He always took care about that. He once made the observation that the fans of a particular location get really piqued when their hometown’s name or local feature is mispronounced. That’s why I kept a personal copy of Webster’s Geographical Dictionary at hand. But there were times when I had to call a foreign consulate to check on a pronunciation. Some viewers considered this snobbish showing off on Alex’s part, but truly, for him it was always about “It’s someone’s home town. Respect that.”

Now, don’t get the idea that he was all stiff and fuddy-duddy about all this. He was smart, there’s no doubt about that. Every season, he made a point of taking that season’s Contestant Test, for his own satisfaction. It was his way of staying on par with the contestants. But don’t ask me how well he’d do on it, I don’t know. Pretty well, I’d guess, though. And in spite of his decorum on camera, he could get pretty salty off camera, and off the leash. It was even an issue at home for him, when his children were still small. (I recall a rumor about a Swearing Jar, with a 25 cents fee for each bit of profanity. At home, that is. He didn’t censor himself in the office.) But for all that, he never used dubious language to insult anyone present. He always treated the people around him with civility.

He tried to be as “uncelebrity” as possible, although given the popularity of the show, that wasn’t easy. When he finally became an American citizen, he was very proud of having made that choice. And as it happened, very soon after he did become a citizen, he got that notice of civic participation: a call to jury duty. At that time, the jury system had people show up at the jury room for the courts for 10 days, sitting in the jury room waiting for any trial that needed a panel. He actually did get placed on a jury. I happened to get jury duty the very next week after his jury duty was finished, and I recall sitting out in the corridor with the pool I was in waiting to go in for selection, and I overheard down the hallway some guy in another group, also waiting, talking about how Alex Trebek had been in a jury group with him the previous week! There was someone who had a cool celebrity story for the rest of his life. But Alex was proud of being “just another citizen,” answering that civic duty.

One thing that viewers of Jeopardy! only got to see flashes of on the show was Alex’s sharp, witty sense of humor. Being as smart as he was, he was quick with comebacks, and he delighted in getting out the sly response. One of my favorite memories of him was when he guested on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect the same evening as Jerry Seinfeld. My friend Jennifer Oliver O’Connell, in her obituary for Alex, reposted my earlier comments about that evening. What I didn’t say in that version was … (okay, I’m not a big Seinfeld fan) I was amused by the quiet, slow burn from Jerry as the program progressed, while Alex not only got his witty retort to Maher in faster than Jerry, he was also getting more and bigger laughs than Jerry. No, Jerry didn’t say anything about it, but there were a number of smoking glances cast by the comedian at the game show host who was upstaging him.

But Alex wasn’t one to make things “all about him.” In February 2001, the staff and crew of the show all headed to Las Vegas, where the International Tournament of Champions was going to be taped at the Las Vegas Hilton (now known as the Westgate). We all piled into chartered buses at the airport for the jaunt to the hotel. As we pulled up, the big marquee out front splashed in HUGE letters: JEOPARDY! STARRING ALEX TREBEK. Alex promptly went straight to the management and made them change the wording to “hosted by.” Many times while I worked on the show I heard him say “I’m not the star of the show. The contestants are!” And he really, really meant it. (And yes, the hotel changed the marquee as quickly as possible.)

Still, there’s no denying that he was a star and he’d earned that status. For the staff of a long running show like Jeopardy! when the holiday season came round, there was the challenging question of “what do you get him?” After all, he was pulling in a hefty paycheck, and it wasn’t like we had to cater to his vanity. The early years I was on staff, we thought up some nice gifts, but quickly ran out of ideas. We did know that Alex liked do-it-yourself handyman projects at home. So someone brilliantly came up with the idea of getting him a gift certificate from Home Depot. Turns out, it was the best choice possible: a five year old kid with a red wagon could not have been happier than Alex Trebek with a nice big gift certificate and free run of Home Depot.

He was always gracious, and tried to be as accessible as possible, without making scenes. At one Christmas party for the staff, held at a brewery restaurant in Burbank, he’d been making the rounds of the room with his wife as everyone was getting seated. I happened to end up at a small four-top by myself, and Alex and Jean asked to join me. Of course! I enjoyed their low-key company and how down to earth both of them were. That’s the way Alex wanted to be in public when he could. When the show taped a College Tournament at the university in Atlanta, as soon as we finished the taping, we all had to rush back to the airport to catch our scheduled flight. I and one of my friends on staff, Jeff Pierson, happened to be sitting along a wall with our carry on bags on a seat between us. I happened to glance up and noticed Alex slowly wandering into the passenger waiting area for our flight. I realized he didn’t want to disappear into some celebrity lounge, but rather to be seen out in public like everyone else. But he also looked a little wary about sitting just anywhere, because he didn’t want to be mobbed after an intense two days of location shooting. I told Jeff to clear off our extra seat and leave it open. I figured if it just looked like Alex had taken an “ordinary” empty seat, it would satisfy Alex’s desire to be “just like ordinary people,” and yet know he actually had two staffers to play buffer if needed. The general public wouldn’t know Jeff and I were staffers, since neither of us had anything with the show’s name on it visible. Sure enough, Alex took the seat (no, I didn’t have to signal or say anything), and waited like the rest of us for the trip back to LA. Like I said, there’s no denying he was a star, but I understood his desire to stay connected with the ordinary folks.

He also did not like to make a big deal out of his charity work. One of my church friends was a professor at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, and one Sunday he caught up to me (not difficult, as I was an usher) and mentioned that he’d been at a World Vision banquet the night before, and had been surprised that Alex had been the guest speaker. He hadn’t known that Alex had been so involved with the organization prior to that. But even though Alex didn’t want to have a fuss made about his celebrity for his own sake, he used it for others in some ways. He would take part in USO tours, visiting military personnel stationed overseas. But he would tell USO to send him places where they don’t usually get celebrity visits (contestant coordinators for the show would usually go along, looking for possible contestants among the troops). He liked making those trips and meeting the men and women serving in our armed forces.

These are just some highlights from my years working on the show. They glow bright in my memory, with a lot of satisfaction of working on such a high quality program and with such an agreeable colleague.

Sunday morning, I had slept in a bit, as I’d been working late on a challenging editing job for a client. My landlady requested my help in dealing with a situation with one of the other renters. She’s from the Philippines, and when she gets agitated her English gets a bit more tangled. Just at that moment, I got a message on my phone from a friend simply saying “I’m sorry to hear about old boss.” That was the first I knew of it, but I knew exactly who my friend meant. But the household situation made it difficult to react to the personal news just then. I really needed time to process the loss, and reflect on all the good times I’d seen Alex in action.

Smart is cool. Smart can be funny. Smart can be civil. Being civil can be cool. And Alex Trebek was all that. I’m so glad I had the chance to work with him, knowing him that long. My thoughts and prayers go out to Jean and all his family and friends, and people who have known and worked with him in all his areas of interest. Farewell, Alex, and God bless!

Posted in Personal | Tagged Alex Trebek, Jeopardy! | Leave a comment

Mental Health and the Broken Mirror

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Sarah Beach

The summer after my grandparents died (that is, my father’s parents), we traveled from Michigan to Calgary, Alberta to wrap up things concerning their belongings and other affairs. I was only ten at the time. We used to travel to visit them every other summer, and that would have been a “visit” summer. It was a summer of many changes. My paternal grandparents had died, my older sister had just gotten married, and my brother was about to start college at the local community college. So the trip to Calgary was a marker for changes and memories. There were many small things that came from that household that would remind me of my grandparents. For instance, I eventually inherited a lovely Windsor arm chair that had been my grandmother’s favorite seat.

I like sitting in it, for not only is it a lovely chair, it brings back memories of my grandmother. It needed reupholstering by the time I got it, so I selected fabric that was “me” (black and gold with dragons in the weave).

But among the things from that household, I gained a hand mirror that had been my grandmother’s. An early plastic frame and handle, but the shape was nice, a wide oval that gave one a good view of one’s face when putting on make-up. It has been my preferred mirror since that time, even though the quality of the reflection had actually deteriorated.

But I’m not ten any longer, and I expect I have had it considerably longer than my grandmother did. To her, I expect it was just a nice mirror. But to me it was my grandmother’s mirror.

Then recently I dropped it, and the bakelite plastic handle broke.

Broken hand mirror — The broken hand mirror

Now, when I mentioned “mental health” in the title, I do not mean to imply I have any superstitions about breaking mirrors. I don’t. (Besides, as you can see from the picture, the mirror itself isn’t broken any way – heh.) It’s about how a deep seated depression in my psyche has handled objects of meaning as part of my mental defenses.

Depression is no easy thing to talk about, even when you are talking with people who are sympathetic. Depression is a complex combination of both personal mental factors and biochemistry of the brain. The brain is a very adaptable organ, and if you get the neurons and synapses used to responding in a certain way, using certain chemicals, it’s hard to break that pattern. And if certain reactions are begun and set when one is a very young child (in my case, while I was two years old), it isn’t easy to change them. A bit of chemistry and a lot of counseling are required to make changes in those patterns.

In my case – the short version – I was not ready at age two to gain a younger sibling. I couldn’t yet understand the change in attention I got, going from the favored pet of the family to a child left to my own devices, because the baby needed attention. So that two year old developed some defenses against the emotional turmoil of changes. Part of that was developing a strong attachment to physical objects, because they wouldn’t change on me, especially if they were significant in some way. (This is one way a hoarder is created.) But another one of the defenses, and one that has sabotaged me many times in my life, is Avoidance. Putting off dealing with things, putting off making changes even if they were changes I wanted to make in my life. And it was a problem created by that Avoidance pattern that finally propelled me to get counseling. I finally admitted to myself that intellectually knowing the causes of my depression was not enough to actually deal with that depression and overcome the effects of it in my life.

I’ll be upfront and admit that my mental health concerns are not as dangerous as what others may suffer. But that’s not the point: the point is that I was letting my depression and its reaction patterns hinder me in living a fuller life. Once I finally admitted to myself that I could not change those patterns by myself, I was ready to commit myself fully to digging in and healing that wounded two year old in me, and discarding her now-useless defenses.

Early in counseling, my counselor asked one question that brought me to a full stop. I had been describing how I resisted change, and procrastinated about things, and how frustrating I found it when I tried to kick that habit. He asked: “What purpose does the resistance serve?” It never had occurred to me that there might have been a purpose to the behavior – at least at some point in the past. Realizing that has made all the difference, and has helped me on the way to a healthier (and, ideally, more consistently happier) mindset. I’m still a work in progress on that front, but progress is being made.

Which brings me back to the broken mirror.

The day I dropped it, and the handle broke off, I looked at it with regret. It was still caught up in my memories of my grandmother, and I didn’t want to lose the combination of object and memories. I even tried fixing it with superglue, but the break was at the weakest point in the handle, and the glue on the bakelite wasn’t strong enough to handle the weight of the glass. The handle separated again.

I sat there looking at the two pieces and mulled over memories of Grandma, of the satisfaction I’d gotten from the service of the mirror (like I said, it was a nice useful shape). And I thought about how, if that break had happened even a couple of years earlier, I would have been very upset about it. The tangle of emotions, memory, desire for the security of symbols of affection, all that would have distressed me a lot, I think. But by the time it broke, I could separate out those things in my mind. I’m not going to lose the memories of my grandmother (God willing!). The mirror really did need to be replaced, because the reflective backing was aged and cloudy and not really effective. I can let it go. And silly as it might seem to someone else, that’s an achievement for me. The mirror had served its purpose, long beyond its best service in fact.

It is this complex mix of the significance of things that makes it difficult for people to talk about their own mental distresses. It’s not necessarily just the circumstances that the person may be facing, circumstances that everyone agrees are stressful. It’s that there are so many seemingly small things (to an outsider) that have taken on great significance to the depressed individual: trying to explain to someone why the broken plastic handle of a hand mirror was a big deal would have just raised strange looks and questions of why it would have upset me (that is, if it had happened several years ago).

Mental health is worth striving for. Nobody should fear setting out on the quest for it.

Posted in Personal | Tagged Calgary, Furniture, Grandparents, Mental Health | Leave a comment

Life Lessons Learned from Chef Gordon Ramsay

Posted on September 18, 2018 by Sarah Beach

During my time in Oregon, I got into watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay’s shows on Hulu (Kitchen Nightmares, Hell’s Kitchen, Master Chef, even the British version of The F Word (“F” meaning “food,” in case you didn’t know)). Hulu had multiple seasons of the shows, so I definitely binge-watched the programs. I found him very intriguing. But the more I watched, the more I noticed that there are certain principles that he holds to for cooking and running a restaurant that make for good metaphors about how we should approach our life and work.

Keep It Clean

The first one, which shows up in many, many episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, deals with the state of the work space.

How can this apply outside of the kitchen, though? I mean, it certainly makes sense inside the kitchen, because the residue of past grime getting into the current food preparation. But what about other areas of activity?

There’s an on-going debate about messy-desk versus clean-desk, and the effect it can have on the quality of the worker. As one who often has let my home desk get cluttered, I’ve been willing to join the party of “Messy Desks are a Sign of Intelligence.” But the fact of the matter is that clutter often made working difficult, because I didn’t have enough space to have all my resources available. Did that make my work “crap”? Not necessarily, but it didn’t help.

Fresh, Fresh, Fresh

The second principle Chef Ramsay often mentions is making sure you are working with fresh ingredients.

In particular on Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay would be appalled by food that had been allowed to rot in the back corners of walk-in refrigerators. One shudders to think of the toxins that can get into food made with rotting ingredients. But again, how do you take this principle beyond the kitchen?

For artists, at least, this point combined with the first one, makes a lot of sense. You want to keep your paint brushes and work surfaces (whether paper or canvas) clean. Dirty paints are no help at all, as well. In offices that have to generate paperwork, they certainly don’t want grimy paper for official documents. If you are sewing clothes, you definitely do not want to work with dirty fabrics. The advice sounds like plain common sense, but it’s easy enough to get lackadaisical about keeping work materials in their best conditions.

Keep It Simple

One of the things that Chef Ramsay has to tell various contestants on Hell’s Kitchen is that the aspiring chef has over-complicated the dish they are presenting. If one element of the dish is supposed to be the “hero” of the dish, he’ll tell them not to over-whelm it with too many other distracting factors.

In one episode of Hell’s Kitchen, the contestants were to create an “amuse-bouche” – an edible treat that is a surprising taste in one bite. And the “one bite” aspect is a crucial element. Yet one contestant came up and when describing his offering, went through a rather long list of the things he had added to that “one bite” – to the point where just when you thought he was done, he added another two or three elements to the list. It was, basically, the farthest thing from “simple.”

As a writer who went through my own “purple prose” period, I had to learn the hard way that keeping things simple is the best way to tell the story. By “simple,” I don’t mean bland and boring, but rather most immediate and direct. Emotional impact comes not through complicated, twisting sentences that make you wonder where they will end, but rather by aiming straight for the heart. I’m sure this holds true for other areas of endeavor as well. Music that is over-complicated to the point where you cannot tell where it is going is mere noise.

Let the “hero” of your work shine.

Take Pride in Your Work

One of the things that shows up time and again on Hell’s Kitchen, when the teams are doing a dinner service, is Chef Ramsay’s insistence on high standards of food preparation and presentation.

Chef Ramsay frequently reminds the chefs about, both on Hell’s Kitchen and on Kitchen Nightmares, is the importance of keeping high standards. But he takes it a step further than simply having high standards for the quality of the cooking and presentation. He urges people to take pride in their work, that if they are pleased with what they have done, they will also take care in giving it the best presentation possible. You don’t love something and then slap it down in front of someone while it looks ugly or messy.

There’s a big difference between taking pride in the high quality of your work and having the egotism to think that everything you do is automatically perfect. The problem with thinking everything you do is perfect is that you have no standard to measure it against. Your satisfaction with the work depends only on your own feeling about it: if you’re content, that’s enough for everybody, right? Well, no. As an editor, I’ve encountered writers who think they don’t need an editor (not any of my clients, thankfully). But when I look at their prose, I often find that not only do they need an editor, they need to run the spell-check and have a proof-reader.

Having objective standards to evaluate your work is a good thing. It gives you a target to aim for, and you can actually measure how close you are getting to hitting the bull’s eye. But also, taking pride in the work and how you present it means that you are at least hitting the target and not having your arrows bouncing off it.

Clean the Work Space

On Hell’s Kitchen, at the end of a dinner service, you often hear Chef Ramsay telling a team to “clear down” after they have finished serving all their tickets.

This principle circles back to the first one, about starting in a clean space so the food doesn’t come out crap. But it also addresses a pragmatic factor of human nature. If we leave a mess “until tomorrow,” the chances are that when we face it the next day, we still won’t want to tackle it. Putting off tidying up after you’d done some work, doesn’t help anyone.

Of course, this principle easily translates outside of the kitchen. Leaving messes behind oneself helps no one. It gives other people (if there are such around) a bad opinion of you. Coming back to a messy work space the next day can throw your rhythm off for whatever work you have to do. It’s just better all around to clean up after yourself when you finish a job or task. Clean work spaces are more satisfying to come into than messy ones.

Other Principles

There were three other points that occurred to me after watching so many of Chef Ramsay’s programs. But they don’t boil down so well to images. But they are still worth considering.

Do the work with passion.

This easily applies across various work fields, but is especially notable in the creative arts. If the person doesn’t care about what he or she is doing, it shows up in the work. Something is lacking and people often cannot figure out how to pin down what is wrong.
It definitely applies to writing. As Robert Frost once wrote,

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

It is the best thing in the world to love your work and to perform it with that passion of love. It is something to strive for.

Encourage the good work of others.

This principle doesn’t actually affect your work itself, but rather your self-perception. When you do your own work with pride, you have no need to belittle others. Instead, you have the opportunity to encourage others when their work shows excellence. When you are confident in your own work, you are not undercutting yourself by encouraging someone else. Too many people hold back from giving such encouragement, because they fear competition—which betrays a lack of confidence in their own work. Encouraging the good work of others just helps improve the world over-all.

It’s not how you start but how you finish that matters.

Chef Ramsay often says this to people who are struggling to improve. Many people trap themselves in a cycle of depression and frustration by clinging to how badly they did when they started out. Because it is difficult for someone to clearly see how much they are improving, it is easy for them to fall into thinking that improvement isn’t happening at all. But Chef Ramsay constantly tells the contestants on Hell’s Kitchen, “It’s not how you start but how you finish that matters.” Finish strong. Pick yourself up and head for the finish line, no matter what. Don’t be afraid, and don’t worry about how you began. Just do the best in how you finish the work.

Posted in Musings | Tagged Food, Gordon Ramsay, Television | Leave a comment

Inspiration for Scholarship

Posted on June 1, 2018 by Sarah Beach

Lately, I’ve been mostly focused working on client editing or on various writing projects either for a client, or my novel Godiva (which you can read in-progress if you become a patron of me on Patreon). It’s been a few years since I last was motivated to tackle some literary scholarship. I do enjoy literary analysis, but my daily activity with written materials doesn’t depend on doing such analysis a lot. But every so often a stray thought or a discussion with friends will spark an idea.

That’s what happened recently. My friend Janet Brennan Croft posted a question on Facebook about Grail lore in the Arthurian stories. As the discussion progressed, it turned out that she was particularly interested in the questions asked of the questing knight when he encounters the Fisher King. As comments were made, I realized there wasn’t a whole lot written about that specific aspect – at least not that I could recall.

But it also became evident in the discussion that there are variations on what the questor gets asked. My interest was piqued! Oooo! A topic to look into, either for a blog post or possibly even a paper. Janet’s interest was in relation to a specific story. My interest is in the motif of “Questions” itself. They obviously are part of testing the worthiness of the Hero, but given variations in questions, I started thinking they are even more significant in describing the meaning of the quest and its object.

So I scribbled down a note for myself, for “future research.” But sometimes, ideas just take on a life of their own. And for me, this one is rather pushy. It’s no good for me to tell it, “Get in line, I’ve got three other projects on the stove right now.” I think it’s going to push itself forward, so I’m going to have to work on it sooner than I expected.

What amuses me about it all, is that I’ll actually have to use libraries. So many of my things are still in storage, I don’t have easy access to the scholarly works I’ll need to read. I’ll have to get a local library card, at the very least (as well as probably seeing if I can use the UNLV library).

I suppose for many people, the idea that one could be excited about doing some literary scholarship is very odd. But I love analyzing things, and especially the shapes of stories. It’s like venturing into a new territory when you are out hiking. You’re not sure what you will find around the next bend, what wonders will be shown to you. It is adventuring in the mind – at least for me.

Posted in Musings | Tagged Arthurian Stories, Books, Friends, Holy Grail, Scholarship | Leave a comment

Watching TaeKwonDo

Posted on February 18, 2018 by Sarah Beach

At the beginning of February, having gotten myself at least a little bit settled into my new residence, I took some time to attend the ATA Spring Nationals tournament at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The ATA is the largest taekwondo organization in the world. My reason for attending was that the daughter of a good friend (Vicky Morris) was going to be competing. I’ve been following Ashleigh’s progress over the last several years, so the opportunity of seeing her compete was compelling.

Ashleigh Morris prepares for competition

There were many rings holding matches at the same time in the convention center Hall. Ashleigh’s group (13-14 year olds at the same level) had so many competitors in it that the girls were divided into 3 rings by height. These girls were second and third degree black belts.

The competitors have four types of activities to compete in: Forms, Weapons, Sparring, and Combat. In Forms, the competitor performs a set pattern of moves that shows their control and ability to move smoothly from one stance to another. In Weapons, the competitor performs another routine in a fashion similar to Forms, but which shows their control over a particular weapon. The competitor has a number of choices to work with: a Japanese sword, eskrima sticks, nunchucks, a bo staff, kama knives, sai knives.

In Ashleigh’s ring, there were a couple of girls doing their Weapons exercise with swords, another couple with nunchucks, several with bo staffs, while Ashleigh chose eskrima sticks (the only one in her ring to do so).

The remaining areas of competition, Sparring and Combat, were the ones that Ashleigh is particularly eager in. She’s a fierce competitor. In Sparring, the competitor is using hands and feet to score points on an opponent. In Combat, each competitor uses a cushioned stick, rather like a bat, to score hits on the opponent.

In the Combat bout, the opponents square off, touching weapons before the bout.

In this bout, Ashleigh is the one with the small red flag attached to her back. The flag helps the judges distinguish between the combatants. Ashleigh tends to be very intense in competition. And she can move very fast.

Combat action in the tournament

Ashleigh is a leftie, but she’s worked at wielding her weapon with both hands.

She won a silver medal in Combat in her ring, giving the first place girl quite a run for her win.

After competition, Ashleigh (in the foreground) gets comments from her mother and one of her mentors.

One of the pleasures of my adventure to the tournament was meeting Master Tim Plaid (at the right in the photo above). He’s taken a particular interest in Ashleigh’s progress in taekwondo, and Vicky has spoken frequently of him.

After the competitions, Ashleigh changed to street clothes, picked up her medal, and then the four of us went off to a relaxed dinner at Olive Garden.

I enjoyed watching the competitions – although the white noise of the hall with so many yells and chatter gave me a bit of a headache. That might have been also because I had not had much for breakfast and had nothing but a banana (thanks to Vicky) during the day. Some ibuprofen helped cut the headache, though.

All in all, a good day.

Posted in Events | Tagged Friends, Taekwando, Victoria D. Morris | Leave a comment

Dining at Hell’s Kitchen

What Is Easter About?

Who is the Audience?

Catching Up With Life

Satire for the Political Season

Question: Who is Alex Trebek?

Mental Health and the Broken Mirror