Romeo and Reuben

Big eyes. Babies are drawn to them. The more contrast, the more intense the stare. Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet was fresh in both of our emotional orbits. So too was our first eye-encounter in Shakespeare class. That’s how it was with us. Eye-struck love.

Once our eyes had found each other, everything else followed—sound, proximity, the slow rearranging of our days around whatever kept us close.

Ted carried the musky scent of desire—an aroma I folded myself into whenever I nuzzled into his neck. His eyes large and blue, almost startling, set against the Greek-cut angles of his face—nose, jaw, all of it sculpted. Add the Sixties essentials—pork-chop sideburns, longish hair, the faint haze of dope—and he’s every inch the pop-music devotee I fell for.

A while after our gazes lightly trip one another during Professor Dorothy’s lecture, we agree to dive into drama together; but instead of acting out play scenes in class, we introduce ourselves to personal dramas of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

At Ted’s shared apartment we lock ourselves in the single-bed bedroom with two speakers, a turntable, and an amplifier. Night after night—and often day after day—CSN ¹ (Crosby, Stills & Nash) drown us out, their harmonies slipping into spaces where language fails—a soundtrack of our combustion.

"Chestnut-brown canary...."

The lyrics seem less like songs than messages, floating through the room, threading us together.

When the music finally pauses, hunger takes its place—not just for each other, but for something warm and sustaining, something repeatable.

There is an electric fry pan on a card table in the roomy kitchen. It’s used to make chicken cacciatore à la Romano, and for months this is the only thing I cook for him. Ted eats it faithfully, which feels, at the time, like love.

It’s easy, in that kind of intimacy, to forget that the rest of the world still expects attendance, punctuality, and ambition.

Even though Ted is offered an acting scholarship, we are interminably late and hardly show up at theater class. It’s the first flunk for me—an honor student until I discover the smugness of tight, holey jeans and I cop an attitude. I go from diligent to drifting, suddenly I'm One Toke Over the Line. ²(Brewer and Shipley)

We know our professors have private conversations about us. Dorothy cautions Ted, “Mind you don’t leave Linda in the wings.”

A phrase that irks him for decades.

To soothe the sting of it, Ted introduces me to a Reuben sandwich—my first. I’d never seen one and never heard of one. In return, I woo him with his favorite kosher dills. In my Italian sanctum, both are small culinary shocks; for me trades of comfort for novelty.

AMX circa 1969 with our groomsman to-be

And then there is the car, which arrives like an answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked.

With three older brothers who inject life into anything mechanical, I too, have grease in my blood. When my brother-in-law, a used-car salesman, encounters a red AMX, it’s mine. After driving a stripped-down Dodge, I’m suddenly behind the wheel of a white-striped monster—twice named best-engineered car of the year. ³ (American Society of Automotive Engineers, 1969 and 1970)

The AMX might not have been the first hatchback, but for me this futuristic muscle-machine—with its flattened interior, decorative pillows, the scent of weed smoke and patchouli oil—was our meta-reality. Musically, everything from Peter, Paul, and Mary to Led Zeppelin made sense because then it was all about sensations.

I learn quickly that freedom announces itself loudly, but not everyone appreciates the noise. Ted’s landlord is livid about me and my bad AMX. Me—bad, even with religious instruction, nuns, confessionals, and a home in the very-very Italian neighborhood at the opposite end of town.

There, on our stairway landing, my inventive immigrant mother installed a window with hinges on one side, so it opens outward like a door. On the outer shingles, a reel uncoils two layers of laundry lines stretching across the lawn to the towering trunk of a sour cherry tree.

When I hang out—literally—over the parking area below, motorcycles snarl, greasers screech their wheels, and I squint at flashing switchblades.

Even there, amid engines and bravado, music finds its way back to me.

Sometimes I’d tilt an ear toward the a cappella quartet standing on the corner. It was a Fifties sound that drifted into the Sixties, and even now I levitate when I hear chapel harmonies. I’m sure that’s why those CSN boys resonated so deeply in our little bedroom.

Each time I leaned out from that hinged window, clothespins between my fingers, I felt myself leaning toward something else entirely. I longed for excitement as I grew up and out of where a good daughter hangs the family laundry.

I give up old friends for new ones because I don’t want to be pulled back into a life I’m trying to leave. It has to be a clean break; keeping both worlds would hurt too much.

College becomes a frontier—mind-expanding, soul-stretching—where innocence quietly slips away.

It makes sense, then, that as a newly formed couple, Shakespeare and two visits to Stratford-upon-Avon inflame our love for English culture. We don’t give a thought to the fact that Romeo and Juliettakes place in Italy. England feels distant enough to imagine ourselves new. A tidy counterpoint to our Mediterranean, intense, nearly tribal families—a background hum for our two-of-us lineage.

All of this happens before the real complexities. Before mind games, irritations, volatility—before the long negotiations of adult life.

At the time, it feels like a beginning. Only later do I understand it as a prologue to the drama of real life.

It’s different now.

And though his scent has changed along with his profile, the same acerbic humor, delivered on the fly, ad hoc, off the cuff, remains.

©TLCmoon, LLC

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MUSIC TO COOK BY

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, Crosby, Stills, & Nash

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RECIPE

Deconstructed Reuben of Quail

Serves 8 as an appetizer

2 tbs. olive oil

1 small red onion, thinly sliced

2 strips of cooked bacon, diced

4 c. green cabbage, shredded

1 tsp. caraway seed

4 tbs. unsalted butter

salt and pepper

8 quail, whole

maple-wood chips and smoker, optional

2 fresh medium tomatoes, seeded and diced

½ c. crème fraîche, room temperature

¾ c. Swiss style cheese, small cubes

Add olive oil to a large, heated sauté pan.

Before it smokes add onion and cook until translucent. Do not brown.

Add bacon and cabbage. Stir for 3 minutes over heat.

Add caraway. Cook for 2 more minutes.

Optionally prepare smoker with wood chips and smoke whole quail over very low heat for 4 minutes.

Heat sauté pan over medium heat. Add oil and when hot cook quail on all sides until browned. Place in a 375 degree oven for 8-10 minutes or until internal temperature is 150 degrees.

Remove and cool. Remove breasts and legs. Remove thigh bone.

Layer the meat, cheese, and cabbage mixture on a plate. Create a smear of crème fraîche around the stack, then sprinkle with diced tomato and swiss cheese.

©TLCmoon, LLC