Posted: 10 months ago

Going through graduate school at the University of Colorado, my evening job was the ‘salad chef’ for a restaurant about 25 miles from Boulder. It may have nothing to do with this journal called A People Salad and then, again, it just might have triggered an idea of how I put together different ingredients to make special tastes for a customer. Here, I am the prime customer (that is the purpose of journals) so I will make a mature people salad from those who have influenced my tastes. I start with several kinds of simple foods: a leafy green lettuce that stands for my parents, simple down to earth, hard working yet loving people who gave me drive (my father’s gift), opportunity to grow and love (both parents), and an appreciation of wonder in clouds and shapes (my mother’s gift); some spinach leaves (my teachers at Carnegie Museum School, Dartmouth College and University of Colorado); apple slices (my friend Harold from Spokane and Norm from New Zealand, one who made a football field full of ashtrays so that he could do his monumental sculpture in Seattle and another ‘down under’ who wakes each morning with pain, saying ‘g’day, I’m still alive’); goda cheese (Kimon Friar and his introduction to the works of Kazantzkis, along with my early love of belly dancing at cafes on 8^th Street in New York, which led me to my love of the ballet at a later time); crotons (those little bits of taste that blend with the other mixtures, like the moment in my first ballet at the New York City Center Ballet when I was trying to impress some girl by going with her to something that I thought had ‘girlie men’ dancing, and John Mitchell picked up a ballerina on one hand and walked majestically off stage like he was carrying a wine glass, which only a true athlete could do with such style, or the time my son stopped in a race to join hands with his friends so that they could all win together); some elements of color: small red tomatoes (my daughter who adds color to my life), orange sections (some paintings that I pretend to own in major museums), pineapple squares (some authors, like Josef Conrad, Dr. Seuss, Romantic poets, and others such as Langston Hughes and Maya Angelu who gave me a taste of insight into the colors of the world and the differences that can unite all of us); some small, chopped, meat segments (my wife of 53 years who has added to all the flavors that make up this meal and help to unite all the diversity of taste that I accumulate, and my roommate and friend from college, Harry, who still challenges me mentally with notes from his travels); and finally, maybe blue cheese dressing (which I love with a passion like the understanding of deep character from Rembrandt, the drawings and inquiry of DaVinci, the colors of Van Gogh, Renoir and others, the magic and mystery of Fan Yuan and other Chinese landscape painters from the Sung, Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties, the collage mixing of Rauschenberg, the freedom of Pollock, the spirit of Rothko, the courage of Oscar Wilde, Kakabadze, Goya and two friends from Canada who take their two-man theatrical team all over the world in search of ‘peace’ and who recently married, my art collection from all over the world, and the seeming simplicity of Mondrian). Some salt and pepper, maybe, I might add as a spice of Hemingway, Shakespeare, my ballet favorites and some friends (that make me laugh when I feel like crying). I would stir it well, allowing each taste to form a marvelous mix of tastes, then serve it to a world that I now live each moment within and enjoy. The dish that I would serve it in would be influenced by F.L. Wright, I.M. Pei, and Frank Gehry. The chairs, tables and how the waiters served would be collaboratively designed by Robert Wilson and Martha Graham. And the People Salad would be served on Picasso’s birthday at my Houston home.