Posted on 11/10/2002 5:35:31 AM PST by ex-Texan
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I'm not a bird's nest fan. I'm nuts about hot and sour soup.Occasionally I'll take a bit of egg drop or sliced eggs to add to it. I add about 1/4 teaspoon of fresh hot yellow mustard to it. The recipe varies from place to place. I carry a small dropper bottlr of sesame oil with me and add about three drops of it to my bowl along with the mustard at some restaurants. I can go through a quart of it at a time. I disgrace myself occasionally.
I'm violently allergic to fried tofu. The boiled bean curd in hot and sour soup agrees with me.
I also carry my own bottle of Siracha to certain places. I like my double cooked pork hot and salted and I add about 1/3 of a level teaspoon of hoy sin sauce to it in places not making it with hoy sin.
I make my own spiced shredded beef with beef, scallions, carrots, mongolion fire oil, sirracha, and occasionally orange and/or cabbage.
The tape worms take the 9:15 out the next day gasping from the style of Chinese food I eat.
The new place in town has become accustomed to me. I'm the first person they have ever seen who carries his own case of special chop sticks. They use me to test new recipes and cooks. Two weeks ago the owner came and dragged me out of the video shop next door to eat their new beef recipe.
Last night I had garlic Chicken with siracha booster.
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He was in vaudville as a musician back in the days when Milton Berle was part of the Bennett and Berle kids dance act. My mother was a southern scotch-Irish woman who went to New York to become a model and dated Harvy Fireston briefly and a guy who was loosely connected with the outfit. First born Italian men and hot tempered Scotch-Irish women are too strong-willed to get along together. The Sicillians are nothing in hot temper and holding grudges next to Souther Scotch-Irish. At the age of 70 she could hit a pack of cigarettes at 150 feet with a single action pistol. It was a stand-off between her and just about everybody. But she did learn true Italian cooking from her associations.
My parents had associations with Gloria Swanson, who my mother almost duked out. They also had associations with George Burns and Gracie Allen, Paul Whitman, and Max Rosenbloom. My mother knocked Florenz Ziegfield on his ass. That ended her stage career. She had a right cross that was something to be feared. She was Miss Denver in the 1922 Miss America Beauty pagent. They knew of Texas Guinan. They'd both be over 100 if they were still alive.
I know a lot about the period, but not enough to write a book.
I have my mother's temperament and have had to fight it throughout my life.
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There are two entirely different groups of Chines on this continent. They don't even speak the same language. There is the old Chinatown type who were cantonese coolies imported to work building the railroads. They spoke, and often still speak Cantonese. Since the late '40s there has been a steady new wave of people from other areas. They speak Mandarin as a first Chinese language and languages such as Shangianese as secondary Chinese languages. They are, or become, very highly educated. They are the engineering backbone of the nation, and particularly the semiconductor industry. Their kids go into all the professions--physics, chemistry, medicine, engineering, pharmacy, whatever. The Lees, whose Golden Pagoda restaurant I used to eat at came here with the shirts on their backs. They had five children. Two became engineers. Two became computer programmers. One became a pharmacist wo spoke perfect German. Chang and Lucida Tung's kid from the Mongolian Wok, Richard, got a score of 1470 on the old tough SATs and is probably serving his internship in medicine right now. This has been typical in my experience. This has been typical in my experience and nationally.
Your mother sounds like a real live wire. I like colorful people like that. One of my friend's mom, as a young girl was a plant in the audience for a barn storming pilot who had flown in WWI. Aviation being a new thing at the time made people scared to go up for a ride so this girl would volunteer for the first ride and shamed the adults (paying customers) into later rides. This woman had other colorful adventures in her life, she was a real pistol. Do you have much memorablia from your parents show biz careers? Showbills, advertisements, any autographs of larger personalities, photos, etc? Too bad you can't do a book on it, would be a shame for the history to be lost.
Take care.
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I don't have anything like that. The only thing I have is the stories I heard 40, 50, and 55 years ago. I didn't understand them at the time. My mother used to tell me about Phil Plant in Ne York. Phil's parents were in the pie tin business. When they died Phil inherited $4,500,000. In the teens and 20s that was equivalent to a hundred or more million now. In 1904 the "great white fleet" of the American navy cost a total of an astounding three million. Phil would have as many as five parties going simultaneously. He couldn't even attend them all. He went through the entire fortune.
A friend's mother was close friends with Bix Beiderbecke, the pianist and composer who died an early death.
On the old Ed Sullivan Show in the '50 Sullivan would occasionally have old vaudevill acts on. My father would roar and say the guy has been doing the same thing for 40 years. At the time, it didn't make any sense to me. In retrospect I realize he had seen the act back in the teens and it brought back memories.
I couldn't figure out why my father liked Paul Whiteman. To me his band music was boring. It took me years to learn it was because Paul Whiteman was classically trained. Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue and the established classical symphony orchestras of the time were too snobbish to play it. Whiteman put together his own classical symphone concert orchestra and presented it in defiance. It made Gershwin accepted as a classicist.
In the 40s and 50s I knew former vaudevill performers who were still waiting for the return of vaudeville. At the age of 45 Frank Trenary was finally able to hit a five beat tab dance step. He was one of the few who could do it. George Raft, or perhaps James Cagney wrapped ires around their ankles to cut off their circulation and numb their feet so they could do it.
Most of the stories I was told would make no sense to anyone today.
This could be also why Jews are on par with Asian in the bell curve. God instructed fathers to teach their children God's word which meant every family had to have some of the scriptures in the home and they had to know how to read. Also with living in foreign lands but wanting to keep the old culture alive they learned at least two languages, that of the host country and Hebrew so there again is a culture focused on learning. What do you think?
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One of the greatest jugglers of all time. He was one of the few men who ever lived who could keep five blocks of wood in the air.
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