Make More Pie

Audio version of this article, for the 2 hopefully many people who like to listen. Speaking of listening, one of my three tattoos.

Attentive readers may wonder if the windows in the background have anything to do with the 100 Windows Project I launched last week. Let’s say, they give a girl ideas.

Today is the day!

Buy Evan Wright’s Bad Therapist. Gauging by the number of people contacting me about their nightmare experiences on the Rehab Riviera, and kicking drugs in general, it’s an evergreen read.

Thank you for being here xx

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Good morning. Many times in the past few years, including the dark times of 2020, I have thought how easy it is to turn your face to the sun, if you remember it is there and if you choose to. I watched the sunrise just before I recorded this for you. My mother had died two days earlier, there is always a lot to do in the wake of someone’s death, and it was the first time I was alone and thinking of her, and also how much she would have liked the hot tub I was in at that moment and which we bought the year before, how she for sure would have been getting in and out of it and insisting on doing so naked and not caring who saw her. Mom, she had a thing for being naked, to wit:

Mom [around 1998]: Nancy, I am going to a nudist camp, why don’t you come with me?

Me: Oh my god mom, no…

Mom: It will be fun! You can write about it.

I declined, with prejudice. Mom of course went. She never flagged in her commitment to walking around without her clothes on.

Anyone following along here knows my mom has been leaving us for several years, what I have come to think of as the long linger. At least a half-dozen times I drove away from the property thinking, that is the last time I will see her… But it never was, she was the unsinkable Kathy Hayes until this past Monday. As my friend Deb later said, “She found her way home.” I am taking a lot of comfort from that.

As you will hear in the audio, I was given a sign the day before…

Cross-posted at Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em, where I write a weekly, subscriber-only Pie Talk. This one’s a freebie - Mom says!

I started seeing hawks as messengers just after Tim’s dad died. We were with him when he passed, in a hospital in Houston, which I wrote about in a “Modern Love” essay. I would be running in, say, Griffith Park, thinking about something difficult, and there a hawk would be, circling above me. Since Tim’s death in 2019, he’s taken over the messengering. At least that’s what I think. Anyway, this hawk was going at it all day last Sunday. There are a gazillion birds upstate but a hawk’s cry is very distinct.

On Monday afternoon, I was just coming back from a visit with Jon Ronson—whose latest book, The Castle: Adventures in the World of Unraveling Me, drops next week so go get that—when I pulled into the driveway and saw the hawk sitting there. It was a red-tailed hawk, in no hurry to move. It eventually did, keening as it flew north, then came back in the early evening, while I was sitting on the front steps soon after learning about my mom’s death.

Cooking for me is comfort and a solace. I don’t think it was that way for Mom, she was too hyper, a get-’er-done cook as opposed to a lingerer, read all about it, and her.

I gave you all the recipe for her red sauce on Pie Talk #4, in March 2023. Many changes since, including the featured image of the Melania painting now hanging in the studio where The Fifth Column guys record, and the Chinatown apartment being no more, or no more for me, though it has passed on to someone in the extended chosen family, which makes us all happy, it’s a rad pad with very, very good juju.

For now, I leave you with Mom’s Red Sauce. Please do make it, her gift to you. Let me know how it turns out xx

“Your Mom’s Red Sauce”

I’m calling it this because that’s how people always ask me for it. You are making a lot of sauce here, enough for several meals and several quarts for the freezer. This is also enough for one honkin’ big lasagna, and about that: When making lasagna, go for full-fat ricotta and mozzarella. How you make lasagna, you say? Like this: In a very large baking pan, layer sauce, al dente cooked lasagna noodles, egg-size globs of ricotta, slices of mozzarella, repeat and repeat. The finished product will weigh about 8 pounds. Bake it at 350, loosely covered with foil, for about an hour, then remove foil and bake another 30 minutes, until top layer of cheese is all melty and browning. This will feed at least 10 - 12 people, who as the years go by will ask you please to make it again x

* Olive oil, 4 - 6 T.

* 2 large yellow onions, chopped

* 2 cloves garlic, chopped

* 2 pounds hamburger meat, 80/20% fat

* 5 cans (29-ounce) Hunt’s Tomato Sauce. Yes, I know some of you want to use an Italian brand, or something organic. You do you but that’s not the sauce, and if I had a nickel for every person I’ve given this recipe to who later said,”It didn’t taste like yours...” and then admitted they did not, as specifically instructed, use the Hunt’s, I’d have about 65-cents. Try it this way first and then go fancify!

* 2 T. dried oregano, 1 T. dried basil if you have some, 2 bay leaves

In a large heavy-bottom sauce pot (not “sauce pan” as I repeatedly said in the audio), heat the olive oil over medium-heat. Add the onion and cook until translucent and with some brown bits, stirring occasionally. Add garlic and cook about a minute, stirring. Try not to burn the garlic (... she writes, often doing so herself.)

Break up hamburger with your fingers and drop into the cooking onions. Don’t break it up too much; you want some hunks the size of whole walnuts, and don’t stir too much. Cook until the meat loses its pink and there are some brown bits.

Pour in the sauce, crunch in the oregano and basil between your fingers, and add bay leaves. Stir the meat up from the bottom and bring the sauce to a simmer. Once it simmers, turn the flame as low as it will go, cover the pot but leave a tiny crack for steam to escape, and simmer, at least two hours, stirring from the bottom every 20 minutes or so, to avoid meat sticking to the bottom and scorching. Depending on your burner, a flame-tamer may be in order. The sauce originally called for three hours of simmering and by all means, go for it, but two hours is also fine.

Remove from heat, eat some right away on hot pasta, let the rest cool and freeze or otherwise save for another day.

Things people have added to good effect: Italian sausages for last hour of cooking (my mom), a splash of red wine and red pepper flakes (my former husband).

Things people have put this sauce on other than pasta: bread in a bowl (everyone), salad (my late stepfather).

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By 7:30 this morning, I had to get out of the house and walk it off, “it” being the Democratic primary wins last night of three Mamdani-backed candidates: Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier (whose full name I did not know in the audio) and Claire Valdez.

Chevalier and Valdez are backed by the DSA. Lander is not directly but was Mamdani’s man over Dan Goldman so, same-same-ish.

Speaking of Goldman:

Mamdani’s opinion on the matter:

My response to Mamdani:

Do you see why I needed to walk things off? I will remind readers that I have seen Portlanders smash the windows of a Jewish-owned restaurant and spray-paint another with swastikas. That I have seen young people cheer murder in the streets.

You can see why I needed to walk things off this morning, and sure, maybe I extrapolate, play out the string, wonder if the city—so hot on the heels of the beautiful collective effervescence bequeathed by the Knicks—is in for some very bad times.

But seriously, why are people chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” to their chosen candidate winning a local NYC primary? Could it be, as I tweeted, that theur “chosen candidates' stump speeches slipped in anti-Israel rhetoric with the subtlety of your gross uncle trying to slip his tongue into your mouth?”

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I am not the only one with concerns. My Fifth boys were, per usual, on the tip, yesterday hosting Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam.

At one point, Salam speaks about downwardly mobile elites being part of the push behind DSA-backed candidates (a feature the New York Times wrote about last fall). Part of this is that the Democratic party as we once knew is unable to find its ass with both hands (as my late father used to say); does not know how to appeal to its usual or any base. Meanwhile, DSA et al shout about being for the working people, who, well, are just not that into them.

Can you finds plenty of what some might see as indicting tweets from, say, Chevalier? Sure. My friend Liz Wolfe cites a few in today’s Reason Round-Up:

Chevalier is sort of standard fare in the category of extremely online, unhinged DSA 32-year-olds. She has, in the recent past, referred to former President Joe Biden as a "rapist" and "war criminal" during the 2020 election, referred to the U.S. as a "f*****g disgrace," and described interracial relationships involving white ladies as "fetishizing ugly colonizer women." Now she'll be in Congress, because we apparently have no standards….

The whole Mamdani/DSA playbook has been about finding solidly blue areas and outflanking from the left, painting the existing guys as parts of the establishment (frequently using “AIPAC”—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—as a slur). It’s an open question as to whether these new radicals in Congress will even support Jeffries in his bid for speaker at all.

And that brings us to the deeper dynamic I’m worried about, once I get past the frustration that these DSA clowns candidates won at all:

This is not a stable coalition. This is a city getting swept up in the Mamdani fever dream; downwardly mobile upper-middle-class elites believing that the DSA pitch is far more persuasive to the average Democrat than it actually is.

I take comfort in what I see to be two immutable facts. First, Mamdani appeals to people’s feelings, which almost always fizzle out before they become useful building blocks. DSA is good at forming coalitions, but as for grokking what is actually behind the shortage of available housing in New York City? Not so much. From “Zohran Mamdani, Slumlord” (WSJ Opinion):

“New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last month issued a housing plan that calls for building more—what else?—public housing. So it’s startling to hear even some progressive elected officials complain about the appalling conditions at the city’s existing housing projects….

“Perhaps the Democratic leaders could file a complaint with the city about this slumlord. Oh wait—the city is the slumlord. And a months-long gas outage isn’t unusual in Nycha building. Tenants regularly endure leaky pipes, mold, rodent infestations and furnace breakdowns. Perhaps Mr. Mamdani considers this “the warmth of collectivism…”

See also “Why New York City Has 50,000 ‘Ghost Apartments” (Free Press).

Second, we’ve all seen the “Downfall” bunker scene. Any coalition that promises peace and plenty while insinuating you will only be helping the cause by scapegoating certain people will, whether to further amass power or to look for other scapegoats when things don’t work out, turn the knives on each other.

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Arkansas-native Max Steele came to Portland in 2005, responding to the city’s siren song of cheap rent and progressive politics and art you could make on the fly. “All the really DIY stuff was going on in Portland,” says Steele. Until it wasn’t, until certain portions of the population, many of them newbies, felt they were being denied their piece of the Portland pie, dissatisfaction expressed most strongly during 2020’s summer of rage, the downstream effects of which hobble the city to this day.

Video I shot two days after Biden was elected

I’ve found it hard to get clear-eyed reporting out of Portland—Steele and I each mention here how one of the city’s alt-weeklies (oh, okay, the Portland Mercury) likes to dox reporters whose reporting they disagree with. I’ve found Steele to be a straight shooter, with several of my readers shooting me the posts he writes on Recalibrate Portland.

Discussed in this episode:

* Portland media: trustworthy or nah?

* Rose City Antifa mission creep

* Antisemitism in Portland public schools

* Commies ‘R Us

* Lloyd Center, RIP

* “If you join the DSA, you get a whole social circle. You get a bowling league.”

* The fire-hosing of cash “at any random Instagram account” in the post-George Floyd moment

* “Portland was huge—huge—on the cancellations.”

* “How do I step on your neck on the way up this social ladder?”

* “I don’t know what kind of cult you’re in, but you just put yourself out of a job.”

* Lynsea Coy, the “antifascist” florist who keeps lists of Jews

Plus, the Portland editor-in-chief who told Steele he needed to get laid more, the city bans foie gras (again), Steele might have punched a Nazi back in the day, and much more!

When Portlandia got it right

Putting the “ID” in identity politics

Portland’s new “cludgy” form of government is a disenfranchisement machine

Anti-Zionist threats of violence from your neighborhood florist. Oh Portland.

Want the whole episode? You know what to do

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Nancy speaks with war correspondent James Verini, who reported from Ukraine about the devastating 2022 bombing of a theater in Mariupol housing 1500 refugees. James (and photographer Paolo Pellgrin) made his way to survivors of the bombing, and later tracked down every survivor he could find. The result is The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War, a new book that tells stories of ordinary people—students, actors, metal workers, a doctor, a cook—called upon to do extraordinary things.

The Theater is cinematic (calling Christopher Nolan!) and horrifying, beautiful and essential, a battle between freedom and authoritarianism that Russia is determined to win—and Ukraine more determined not to lose.

“You had the fact that this theater represented Ukrainian culture and the dream of an independent Ukraine,” says James. “On the dark opposite side of that, it represented what Putin and Russia were trying to wipe out, the idea that there is such a thing as Ukrainian culture, that there is such thing as a Ukrainian language... The theater was, if not exactly a metaphor, then the perfect setting for this kind of story, of a young republic now barely more than 30 years old that was fighting for its life.”

(Sarah was unable to sit in on this episode, but she’ll be listening!)

Also discussed:

* On why first-person war books should be under 200 pages

* A “glandular nostalgia” for the Soviet Union

* When you’re reporting overseas, “someone is always going to think you’re CIA”

* One advantage to not speaking the local language

* “You can’t do what I do and care about money”

* Nancy gives thanks for Reason’s editorial freedom

* How James covered up the smell of pot smoke back in the day

* Nancy: still not Jewish!

* The Nazi high command was “a cabal of mediocrities”

* Salad days at Vanity Fair

Plus, props for reporters William Langewiesche and Evan Wright, what to eat if you want to be a competitive eater, a great audiobook on New York City excesses in the ‘90s, and much more.

Pre-order The Theater, out on May 19. Also on May 19, James will be in conversation with recent Smoke guest Sebastian Junger. Tickets here.

Nancy note to self: Less ambition when flipping salmon will forestall another armpit burn

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Jake Siegel talks about his new book The Information State, which explores how government and technology joined forces over the past century to squash dissent. Siegel is an editor at Tablet, an original thinker with great writing chops (our kinda guy), and he talks with Nancy and Sarah about the tools of information warfare he saw while serving in Iraq …

Hello readers/viewers, and for those in the eastern half of the United States, thank you for checking in between trips to the supermarket to stock up for the coming Snowpocalypse. It is yet to be seen whether this one will one hit big or be another predicted “storm of the millennium!” that isn’t, in either event, I hope you and yours stay safe and warm.

“I don’t feel the cold,” my dad, pictured above, used to say, while blowing on the wet mittens of his daughter, who definitely did and does. “It’s mind of over matter.”

For those who read the most recent Night Nurse, you know my dad did not have it easy; that no one ever gave him a nickel; that he was an entirely self-made man who would go on to support his mother, two wives, and provide for his children and grandchild. He was not without fault - maybe sometime I’ll tell the story of his trying to walk out of a restaurant with a purloined steak knife in his sock (guess I just did) - but as far as showing up in a crisis, he was the man. If I have one bedrock principle, for myself and others, it’s showing up when you are needed; that you know you can call the person and say, “I need help” and they are going to get you help any way they can. That was my dad.

A clip from “The Fall”:

He played street hockey on Hudson Street, played basketball on the public courts on West Fourth. The Enola Gay dropped the first A-bomb on his 10th birthday. Wally Cox lived in a walk-up directly across the street on Barrow with his roommate Marlon Brando, who gave the neighborhood kids, including your dad, rides on his motorcycle. By age 15 your dad was the Boy Friday at the Cherry Lane Theater, taking the tickets and popping the popcorn and raising the curtain and sweeping up after. At 17, he got a scholarship to Fordham and became a starter on the basketball team. But he could not make enough money to support his mother and go to school. He dropped out. He became a bartender at the Blue Mill Tavern on Barrow and Commerce. Johnny Mathis was a regular. He met your mother they moved into the apartment building next door. The rent was $54 a month. A year later you are born at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Your parents did not have the money to get you home. An elderly neighbor named Manny loaned them the $50 to do so.

You do not know for sure but think this may be when your father promised himself that he would never be in that position again, would never have to rely on anyone else. He kept the promise. He put himself through night school at City College. He studied after midnight at a fold-down desk he made, a desk across from your crib in the smallest room of the railroad apartment. He will later tell you, many times, how he’d be mid-study when he’d feel your eyes on him, and when he turned, you’d be standing in your crib, making no sound, just watching him, and that every time he would have to pick you up out of your crib and walk you in a small circle and tell you all the good things that were going to happen.

You can read the rest here. Or watch me read (most of) it!

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Narrating “Musings of the Night Nurse” pieces the day-after they run. Is this photo of my mom with Elton John that fell out of a book I was putting away meant to snap your neck? It is.

A clip from yesterday’s piece, “The Accountants”:

What you do not know when taking over the affairs of a loved one with dementia: the people your loved one has dealt with are fitting you with a jacket they’ve been making, sometimes for decades. Maybe its contours have your mother’s trusting nature. Maybe they count on family members confusing the situation and using this confusion to their advantage. Bill paying services, reverse mortgages, life-alert lanyards, things meant to provide security come with a complementary clarion call: “We’ve got an old one here, we have someone who is susceptible.”

I’ve been told that some people, women especially, feel they have to be nice, to not speak up, to not make waves. I am not one of these women.

I also do I forget to pay bills, including, in January 2023, getting a sweep from my mother’s investments into her checking, in order that I could pay her land taxes. When I checked her banking, to make sure the money had hit, I saw there had been a $25,000 check written, wiping out the account. The check was in three different people’s hands: my mother’s signature, someone writing in her name, another the amount. Aside from my mother’s, I did not recognize any of the handwriting, and the only clue I had as to where it was deposited was a generic banking stamp on the back...

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Narrating “Musings of the Night Nurse” pieces the day-after they run.

The opening of yesterday’s “The Wanderings”:

“A weird thing happened to me today,” your mother tells you over the phone, and goes on to explain how she got up that morning, got dressed and, as she had just about every morning since moving to Brooklyn Heights in 1963, went out to grab The New York Times.

“But it was still dark out,” she said, and she thought this was kind of strange, seeing as it was 10:30 in the morning. Nevertheless she continued the four blocks to Montague Street, thinking it would be light by the time she reached the paper stand.

“And there really weren’t any people on the street,” she says, sounding completely chill as she comes to what she thinks is the punchline.

“It turned out it was 10:30 at night,” she says. “Isn’t that funny?”…

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Taking a page from my pal Ethan Strauss over at House of Strauss and narrating published pieces the day-after they run. Yesterday’s article is here.

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