Word: gussow
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...When Mel Gussow, the New York Times theater critic who was Pinter's most assiduous American promoter, asked the author, "Do your plays have more to do with your life than we know?", he replied, "They have more to do with my life than I know." In other words, an artist, no matter his aim, is always writing his autobiography. He could also have said that each production of a play creates its own unique meaning. When Old Times had its premiere in London, with Colin Blakeley, Vivien Merchant and Dorothy Tutin as the threesome, it seemed the story...
...knighthood rather than align himself with the British government once acted like a baron: David Baron was his stage name. (He would keep acting, off and on, for the rest of his life.) It allowed him to prep for the stage characters he would create, since, as he told Gussow, "I always played the sinister parts." In 1956 he married Merchant, an actress whose acute rendition of spiky hauteur made her the perfect interpreter of such Pinter women as the "wife" in The Homecoming. In 1980 he would leave her for the novelist-historian Lady Antonia Fraser. Within three years...
...favorite definition of local comes from Columbia's Gussow, a reporter for Time in the 1950s who went on to become a local-eating pioneer. For 25 years, Gussow has lectured on the environmental (and culinary) disadvantages of relying on a global food supply. Her most oft-quoted statistic is that shipping a strawberry from California to New York requires 435 calories of fossil fuel but provides the eater with only 5 calories of nutrition. In her memoir, Gussow offers this rather poetic meaning of local: "Within a day's leisurely drive of our homes. [This] distance is entirely arbitrary...
Windflower Farm is in Valley Falls, N.Y., 185 miles northeast of my apartment. Mapquest calls it a 3 1/2-hr. drive, but if you leave on a weekday at 5:30 p.m., as Windflower's Ted Blomgren and I did, it can take closer to five hours. That meets Gussow's definition of local--"within a day's leisurely drive"--although our drive through Manhattan wasn't leisurely...
When asked years ago whether she preferred butter or margarine, Gussow famously remarked, "I trust cows more than chemists." For my part, I do not. I will still go to Whole Foods to buy the mass-produced Organic Food Bars I eat for breakfast when I don't have time for eggs. I am happy that food scientists are finding ways to produce everyday products like cereal with organic ingredients. (How about organic Froot Loops? I have a weakness for Froot Loops late at night.) But when it comes to my basic ingredients--literally, my "whole" foods rather than...