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Selected Shorts

Sunday, July 12, 2009
  • love food

    Memories that Define Us



    “Night on the reservation is like night nowhere else. They say flying saucers visit the Sioux lands—flying saucers and ghosts. When you’re out there, there’s a blackness that’s deeper than black…anything could happen." – Luis Alberto Urrea , “Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses,”
    One man’s longing for the foods of his native land; another’s abiding love for a lost wife.

In high contrast, the two works on this program deal comically and tragically with memory. Our first work is a funny essay about food and yearning by humorist Calvin Trillin, who tells host Isaiah Sheffer in an interview before his reading of the piece that he doesn’t write about food, but about eating, and what people really like to eat, as opposed to “fine dining” in generic restaurants that Trillin, with fine scorn, calls “Maison de la Casa House: Continental Cuisine.” “Dissed Fish” recounts the longing an ex-patriot South African lawyer experiences for a despised national fish, the Snook.

Luis Alberto Urrea dives into unfathomable grief in his beautiful tale “Bid Farewell to Her Many Horse,” the name of the dead woman remembered with love and anguish by her husband on the day of her burial. The reader is Tony Award-winner Robert Sean Leonard, now a regular on the television series, “HOUSE.”



“Dissed Fish,” by Calvin Trillin, read by the author
“Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses,” by Luis Alberto Urrea, read by Robert Sean Leonard.

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space We’re interested in your response to these programs. Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

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