117 - Blue Plate Special - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster.

Happy Holidays everyone! In this special episode of Edacious - Food Talk for Gluttons I go off-script. But no worries, there’s still food. Everything starts over food.

When I was a young woman with big dreams, travel was a requirement. Still is. So I worked three jobs, saved some money, and lived on a friend’s couch in Glasgow until the only thing my bank statement showed was enough cash for fare back to the airport. I had a lot of time to write. To think. I brought my favorite books for inspiration, one of which was Paul Auster’s Moon Palace. My favorite book by my favorite author. In a fit of crazy WTF I wrote him a letter of gratitude. To my utter astonishment, he wrote back. My happy tears covered the note and to this day I still use his monogrammed notecard as a bookmark. The day my father told me over a very staticky, barely audible, public phone box line that my favorite author had taken the time to encourage me in my work was one of the happiest in my life.

So this holiday, I want to share Auster’s brilliant storytelling with you. I first heard Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story in the movie Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang and written by Auster. Harvey Keitel does an amazing job. I can’t even pretend to approach that but it felt important this year to share my favorite Christmas story with all of you. To actually TELL a story. Out loud. Because all of the best stories are done that way. Oral storytelling is a lost art and one my father does so well and has all his life. This Christmas it felt important to do that too. To carry on family tradition. To use this podcast to share Daddy’s legacy, where a simple joke can take 20 minutes and involve standing up and using a lot of gestures in an attempt to bring the listener into the action.

I hope I’ve done that here in some small way. If not, search Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story on YouTube and watch Keitel in action along with Wang’s brilliant direction. Couldn’t include Tom Waits in this, I’m probably already in trouble with the Copyright Police, but I hope you enjoy it wherever your travels take you. I wish you much peace, good food, and of course, heaps and heaps of BIG LOVE.

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