doughnut hole

When Fleischmann’s is sucking hard on the tits of warm water in a small china bowl, the soft swampyness fills the air and I buzz about the kitchen drunk on it, feeling like I’m on my tippi-toes. I love the smell of yeast. I love the smell of yeast so much I wish there was a Fleischmann’s dry active perfume I could drench myself in. I realize that a yeast perfume may not be so desirable for females—who would want an olfactory reminder of candidiadis? (As pretty as it sounds, a yeast infection is still and always a yeast infection.)

Not having a vagina, I guess I would want to stink of yeast all the time. Though I kind of have a bread fetish, I always thought it was about the carb addiction, not the yeast (duh). I didn’t realize how much I love the fume of yeast itself until last week, when I made doughnuts:

1) Stir together the following in a big bowl: 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled; ½ cup of sugar; 1 tablespoon melted butter; a fairy pinch of salt. In a small bowl, stir 1 packet (0.175 oz) active dry yeast into ¼ cup warm water and let stand for 10 minutes or until till foamy-bubbly.

2) Stir yeast mixture into milk mixture. Blend in 1 beaten egg. Mix in 3 ½ cup of flour, about a ½ cup at a time, till a soft slightly sticky dough forms. Cover the bowl and let rise in a warm place (sunny veranda is ideal) until dough is doubled. About two hours.

3) Heat about an inch of oil in deep pan or skillet to 370 degrees. If you don’t have a cooking thermometer, then heat oil no more than 10 minutes on high heat: oil shouldn’t be too hot, because then the doughnuts will brown too quickly into burnt. Watch the oil...in 1997, I left heating oil while frying chicken and the whole kitchen caught fire. Fry pieces of dough in hot oil. Each piece should be about a handful, handrolled to a vaguely flat shape. With my handspan, this recipe yielded 20 doughnuts. Don’t make it too flat or the skin of the doughnut will pop away from its flesh. Turn once so it is golden brown on both sides. Do not fry for too long—about 10 seconds per side will do otherwise it will char. Have faith in the oil and dough to cook flesh of doughnut through.

Filling the kitchen with yeast-fume wasn’t me trying to become some regressive stereotype of a housewife; it was a weird act of remembering my father.

My father is still alive; we just haven’t spoken to one another for a few years. I don’t really want to go into the specific details of why my parents divorced, and why my sister and I are not particularly close to him. Instead, I’ll just give you a passage from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, in which Alcott describes the March sisters’ patriarch. This is what my father was NOT:

“A quiet, studious man, rich in the wisdom that is better than learning, the charity which calls mankind ‘brother,’ the piety that blossoms into character, making it august and lovely....These attributes, in spite of poverty and the strict integrity which shut him out from the more worldly successes, attracted him to many admirable persons, as naturally as sweet herbs draw bees, and as naturally he gave them the honey into which fifty years of hard experience had distilled no bitter drop.”

Let’s just say that the only thing my father and the father of the heroines of Little Women have in common was their being shut out from more worldly successes. When I used to read Little Women as a kid, I longed to be Meg (my sister is so Amy) and I longed to have a gentle honey-father like Mr. March. My father was not defined by his gentleness. But the best and softest memory I have of him is that of his making doughnuts for us. In Seoul, Korea, when I was around five or so, my father, though overeducated, was unemployed. So he would hang out and help out his younger brother, who at that time ran a gourmet doughnut shop in a fashionable district of town. My father would then come home and make us the yummiest doughnuts using the tricks he’d learned at his brother’s store. I talked to my mother about this memory recently, and she who never has a good thing to say her ex-husband brought out an unexpected sweet: “How did he make those doughnuts so delicious? Those doughnuts were so good. I ate so many of them.”

I’m not sure why I’m thinking about my father now. Maybe because Saturn is finally leaving Virgo after three years. Maybe because as I get older, I’m recognizing aspects of my parents in myself. Despite her bad qualities, I have no qualms about turning into my mother. On the other hand, I felt like I spent my twenties trying like hell to avoid becoming anything like my father. However, as my mother says, you cannot deceive blood. So as much as I want to deny it, I see parts of my father in myself. I did inherit, among other things, his slackness, his short legs, his nonchalance with money, his penchant for pacing, his love of frying yeasty batter. So maybe I am turning into a version of my father after all. But hopefully, a better version, because there is one all-important difference between us: I don’t hate women. All of my father’s bitterness and anger can be traced back to his deep-seated distrust and hatred of women. My father made doughnuts for us but he hated the hole in the doughnut. I can’t remember how yeasty his doughnuts were—I have absolutely no scent sense-memory of them. I just know that my doughnuts are super-yeasty, and that’s the way I like them.

i am shelby lynne

The singer Shelby Lynne shocked the hell out of us when she came out on stage. In person, her body was smaller than the voice on her records would lead you to believe, and her voice was much bigger (not louder—BIGGER) than the voice on her records. She does with her voice what all great troubadours do: drug you into wanting things that you thought, or been taught, you’d never ever want. Like when she sings a sad lyric comparing herself to an old mangy dog: you want to feel love so hard that you feel that depressed. You want to be the dog she turns herself into with that song.

The desirability she produced on stage was something I haven’t experienced in a long time. That smaller-than-the-voice-would-allow body: it’s not just that at 42 years old, Shelby Lynne is so thin and fit that she embodies everything that I want to be in seven years. (In an interview a couple years back, she famously declared: “I wouldn’t trade my life for what Carrie Underwood has. I’ll be 75, and someone will ask me to sing. And I’ll still be cute.”) As a woman artist working in an industry that prizes toothless girlishness or over-the-top “artsy” femme decadence (you know the cultural perpetrators I’m talking about), Shelby Lynne is, right now, the kind of girl I want to be. Not just physically, but in work. No big hits, eight-album combined record sales that fail to add up to a million, yet she’s still working and working passionately at her art. I like to think that Shelby and I travel the same road: it takes at least three rough decades of work to become a proper girl.

But back to that body that houses and manufactures that voice. That night, Shelby wore, without a bra, a simple black lycra camisole (Probably Victoria’s Secret. My little sister and I too wore black tank tops to the show that night, except ours were Rick Owens. This is the only night when Victoria beats out Rick for coolness and beauty), black Rock & Republic jeans (tight, but not too tight: wrinkly calves) and black buckly boots (“Like you buy on Polk Street,” my sister assessed). The ensemble was apt uniform for the booming femininity she projected on stage. Her interaction with her band (well, a guitarist and a percussionist) and audience revealed a femininity that was stretchy and tough as that black lycra tanktop. Bossy (getting pissed at her guitarist for changing keys: “It’s in G now, Ok?” followed by angry silence. Was she joking? Hard to tell!), gracious (“I appreciate your lovin’, I really feel it in my bones now” she said before her encore), never pandering or cutesy (Never a flirty sexpot, she scowled and worked her way through her guitar playing and communication with her guitarist. Lynne’s reaction to some male geek audience member who yelled out at the end, “Don’t be a stranger!!”: SILENCE). “She’s so hard!” my sister whisper-exclaimed to me moments after Lynne took the stage. She was right. Sensitivity that shoots through a perforated black carapace: that is Shelby Lynne’s femininity.

At the San Francisco Yoshie’s where my sister and I saw her this week, we were seated at our table with a cheerful middle-aged middle-class couple from Concord who had just discovered Shelby...through NPR. “I’ve been following her since the 90s!” I snottily and warmly offered. And while I’ve been co-opting her voice to blow up my own little heartaches since 1993 when I bought a tape of her Nashville album Temptation, Shelby’s look has never compelled imitation in me. Until now. Not because she’s not pretty (she is very pretty) but because she’s always been a bit too pretty (blond, blue-eyed, blah blah blah). But Wednesday night, she showed up with short hair and made me want to crawl inside her black carapace. Her hair was pitched—and I mean, pitched, like a bale of hay or a wall of Phil Spector strings—somewhere between a Teddy Boy’s ducktail, Morrissey’s flop top, and Etta James’s peroxide poodle cut. The hair could have gone so wrong (i.e. small town white dyke) but instead it went so right. (And note: the short hairdo was not a Rihanna ‘do. Rihanna cut her hair to be a “good girl gone bad”; Shelby Lynne has never been a good girl. Plus, Lynne’s hair is not ironic/ flamboyant/ science fiction. Instead, it’s historical fiction that is indecisive about the particular decade. Rihanna’s hair poses aggressively towards the future; Shelby Lynne’s hair muscles aggressively into the past. Shelby’s short hair is definitely retro—but it decreates itself and its human source.)

For the first time in many years, I felt not only a bit dowdy but downright boyish in my scraggy long locks. Shelby Lynne made me believe I could achieve a better kind of femininity if I chop my hair off short. It gives some hoping room for the futurity of a girl whose male genetic destiny may include a receding hairline. I haven’t taken up the scissors yet, but I’m not afraid to think about it. I don’t know if a floppy beehivey ducktail will work with my hair, but Shelby made me want to find out.