Introducing Beale Street Cafe (or How does JBOLC measure success?)

How does JBOLC measure success? Can we measure it by the length of the line to our booth at last Sunday’s Fungus Fest?

Ok, ours was the only mushroom related food being offered at the event; still, we witnessed a long line at the Fungus Fest on Randall’s Island start to form as we began to set up. We were late on arrival but got right to work. We knew what we had to do – didn’t have time to think too much and before you know it, we were into “the zone.” Femi said I was moving like a robot – I’m sure he was as well - and indeed I was in that humming place – in a rhythm of joyful labor. The pizzas were coming out about every 3 minutes with rolling and stretching, dressing, and paddling pies in and out of the oven at a steady output. Sung at my side cutting and serving. Babafemi, Juju and Joyce had their own momentum and system in place and meanwhile Japanese TV is looking through a camera’s eye over our shoulders. A line of people began forming and because they were mushroom lovers – foragers – either aspiring or practicing walkers and observers of the forest floor - they were perfectly calm and patient – just like at a church service awaiting an offering – a blissful sight to behold. It all lasted about two hours, until we all ran out of dough! We are grateful to the New York Mycological Society for inviting us to the First Annual Fungus Fest and agreeing to produce our inaugural Beale Street Café banner – illustrated by my daughter Ahna Pultinas and displayed for the first time at the Fest. When you see it this weekend at the market hanging from our tent or near our Welcome Table it might appear small, but in my mind – it is an enormous step! With this banner we are also expressing our desire to take it further – we imagine the JBOLC Beale Street Café becoming a mobile food prep operation – a food truck! We dream of being able to pull up at the invitation of any community garden in New York City – to help gardeners and their community utilize their harvest for community suppers and gatherings. That’s roughly the concept and with the introduction of the Beale Street Café banner– another seed has been planted.

I also want to stress that the joy I feel from labor – whether it is cranking out pizzas or digging trenches in the garden or chopping food scraps to make compost – is part of who I am, my roots so to speak. As a child of Great Depression-era children who themselves were the children of Lithuanian immigrants, I grew up respecting labor. I had better. My father clearly prided in the accomplishment of laborious tasks: shoveling the driveway, building sheds and furniture, and what have you. He worked as a pressman for Eastern Color Printing Company for most of his life – remember the Sunday Funnies insert in your newspaper? Well, if you were on the East Coast, it most likely came hot off the press in the presence of my father. My mother and her sister were waitresses who eventually started their own successful catering business in Connecticut. I was working parties, washing dishes and serving hors d’oeuvres from age 13. That’s where the pleasure of serving food comes from in my background. My parents were working class through and through – neither went to college and my father’s only degree, an 8th grade diploma, was granted to him at 17 years old. His widowed mother had relied on all her 3 children – who would have had a better grasp on the English language - to help provide for their household. My mother’s parents were farmers, and my mother would often tell the tale of when, during the Great Depression, my grandfather could not find a single nickel to pay the milk man. It took 3 generations for our immigrant family to begin earning college educations. But then each of us six children went to college and my parents were exceptionally proud of that fact. Though, even after I graduated UCONN with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Fine Arts (Printmaking) my father still held out that I might finally choose a more practical occupation that paid well (something he himself dreamed of doing) – drive a truck! [br] Inspired by my Professor Maxine Greene in my days at Teachers College and her readings and teachings of her own professor and mentor, Hannah Arendt, I began to feel that for my life to be most fulfilling, I would aspire to lead an active life or “Vita Activa,” (as outlined in Arendt’s The Human Condition). Perhaps at that point in my life, in graduate school, I had been aiming towards a Vita Contempativa or Life of Contemplation. Nowadays, I don’t believe that an active life and a contemplative life are incompatible. Nonetheless, I aspired in my life to manage a perfect synchronization of the components of an active life: labor, work and action. I will elaborate more on what this means in a subsequent blog, but I will say for now that the Beale Street Café banner appears as a sign to me that a Vita Activa is once again within my grasp. Please share your comments