Arts & Entertainment
Picky eating (continued from page 15)
some foods. A less-sensitive segment of the population can’t even detect some types of bitter flavors After she subjected herself to a variety of tests, genetic testing definitively ruled out her being a supertaster. In the process, Lucianovic did gain insight into the combination of factors, whether childhood trauma, genes or psychology, that create picky eaters. She writes about the physiological effects of stress on the digestion that cause “delayed gastric emptying” — the sensation of food sitting like a lump in your stomach, causing discomfort and nausea. She interviewed dentists and a sword swallower about overcoming an overactive gag reflex. “I wish I could have told more about the gag reflex,” she says. “There’s just not much on how it works and how it’s controlled.” For Lucianovic, keeping herself from gagging helped her get through a dessert of poached peaches and avoid embarrassing herself in front of her future in-laws. For other picky eaters, textures or smells can make or break a meal. Most toddlers spend some time as fussy eaters, a well-known developmental phase that freaks out parents, but that most outgrow. While picky children are often thought of as being rebellious or spoiled or going through a difficult phase, finicky adults face the stigma of being thought immature, unsophisticated or high-maintenance. Lucianovic describes herself as a polite, eager-to-please middle child who didn’t want to offend. She simply couldn’t make herself eat food she found abhorrent. “It’s not like people really understand,” she says. “You can’t help (food) preferences, any more than you can help what music you like. No one gets into a knock-down, drag-out fight over liking Miley Cyrus.” Lucianovic said she wanted to go out to restaurants without worrying that she couldn’t stomach some of the things on her dish, and eat at friends’ houses without offending them by refusing part of a meal. So she set out to overcome her picky ways, inadvertently using a technique neuroscientists call “pattern reset.” Stealing a bite or two of food off the plate of her decidedly non-picky husband helped open her up to new foods, she writes. The positive associations overwrote the negative ones. Her interest in food blossomed to the point that she enrolled in cu-
TheatreWorks
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longtime lovers and friends, fleshing out their characters believably and with precision. Their engagement with the emotional demands of the text keeps us engaged, in spite of some perilously long pauses. Saxon has the professional-editor demeanor to a T, with just the right touch of emotional involvement. Newcomer Moser is delightfully ditzy, providing much of the play’s humor, and yet can get movingly serious when required.
linary school, started a food blog, and became a food writer and editor. The picky eater had somehow morphed into a foodie, “annoying diners around me by taking dark and blurry photos of every single meal I ate out.” She even had a stint in the prep kitchen for a season of Jacques Pepin’s public-television series “Fast Food My Way.” “I worked in the back kitchen and was terrified the whole time — not of him; he was sweet and nice,” Lucianovic says. “We’d ask how he wanted (ingredients) prepared, and he’d show us how he wanted things done. Every morning was like a mini cooking class with Jacques Pepin.” But while she grew to love peaches and broccoli, and happily eats fish, there are still some things she can’t stand to eat, and has no interest in learning to love: like bananas and raisins, or the titular frozen succotash she endured as a child. She now considers herself a “picky foodie,” and has written a blog entry for the Washington Post enumerating the many reasons that bananas are evil. She’s also discovered that KQED Forum host Michael Krasny is a fellow picky eater. “You can bond with someone over raisin-hate,” she says. Lucianovic says she was lucky to find an editor who embraced the topic, as a lot of them didn’t understand why anyone would want to read a book about picky eaters. “One editor wanted it to be about why we love the foods we love. I said ‘picky’ has to be in the title.” While she did a lot of research into the topic, she says parents with serious concerns about their children’s nutrition need to consult a pediatrician or dietitian and not rely on her book. “I can’t tell you how many people have come to me and said, ‘I didn’t think anyone would write about how I felt,’ “ she says. “The most important thing for me is that I want people to feel that they’re not alone. When (picky eating) gets carried into adulthood is when it gets really lonely. It affects social interactions, makes them stressful. ... They’re not doing it to be annoying or childish or difficult.” N Info: Stephanie Lucianovic is set to speak about her book, “Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest To Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate,” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 27, at Books Inc. in the Town & Country Village, 855 El Camino Real in Palo Alto. Go to booksinc.net.
The Brooklyn-loft set design by Erik Flatmo is impressive in both detail and height, imparting an epic feel to the action. But the actors occasionally look a little lost in the space, and the cavernous design swallows vocal projection. Michael Palumbo’s lighting enhances the action and mood and adds a nice touch for a Brooklyn rainstorm. Despite my quibbles with the pacing and the play’s ending, the production is well worth seeing, for both the timely and timeless questions it addresses. It may not give answers, but it definitely makes you think. N
Worth a Look
at the door on Saturday and $20/$30 on Sunday. Go to digitalmediafestival.com or call 650-223-0300.
Art
‘Gender Specific’ Smith Andersen Editions is saluting local women artists this fall with “Gender Specific: Take It or Leave It,” a show of work by 30 creative types, most of them from the Bay Area. “The main purpose ... is to ac-
“The Kin,” a 2011 mixed-media piece made on a vintage album cover, is one of Kathryn Dunlevie’s works on exhibit at Smith Andersen Editions.
Arts
Mountain View Art & Wine Festival No matter how much you adore your new Prius, don’t try to take it for a cruise down Castro Street in Mountain View this weekend. The downtown thoroughfare will be closed to cars for the annual Mountain View Art & Wine Festival, which is now in its 41st year. From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, downtown will be filled with artists and craftmakers, home and garden exhibits, performing musicians, food vendors, carnival rides and, of course, visitors milling about drinking mojitos and microbrews. The usual crowd includes hundreds of artists showing and selling their visions in ceramics, glass, wood, jewelry and so on. For a slight change of pace, visitors can wander over to the community stage, where people will be demonstrating Bikram yoga, hula-hooping, Zumba and Scottish dance. To read all the details on the event (and to get public-transit info; parking is often tight), go to miramarevents.com/mountainview.
Music Family concert
knowledge the often understated role of women in art,” a press release reads. Smith Andersen is a place for prints, and the exhibition features monoprints, along with paintings and mixed-media works. Photograph mash-ups on vintage album covers? Kathryn Dunlevie is showing those. Edible jewelry? Sure. Abarna Nathan will exhibit her pieces, and talk about them at the reception on Sept. 8, which is scheduled from 3 to 7 p.m. The gallery is also planning other special events with exhibit artists. Inez Storer will lead a mixed-media workshop on Sept. 29 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Kathryn Kain teaches a workshop on Xerox-transfer monotype, on Oct. 20 from 10 to 4. The show will be up Sept. 8 through Oct. 31 at 440 Pepper Ave. in Palo Alto. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and by appointment. Go to smithandersen.com or call 650327-7762.
Two pianists, two pianos, one married couple and one family concert. That’s the plan for a free Sept. 6 program in Tateuchi Hall at the Community School of Music and Arts. Married couple Klara Frei and Temirzhan Yerzhanov will perform two bright pieces with their roots in dance rhythms: Gavrilin’s “Sketches” suite for four hands and Ravel’s “La Valse” for two pianos. To make the concert more educational, the pianists will also describe the pieces and how they call to mind Russian history and Vienna balls, the pair said in a press release. They’ll also talk about how a simple piano duo can evoke an entire orchestra. Yerzhanov comes from Kazakhstan and is a graduate of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where his wife, a native of Kyrgyzstan, also studied. The two live in the Bay Area and frequently perform together. The concert begins at 7 p.m. at 230 San Antonio Circle in Mountain View. For more information, go to arts4all.org or call 650-917-6800, extension 305.
Festival Digital Media Festival
Lecture
Kepler’s Books harks back to its counter-culture days this weekend with film screenings and talks about Silicon Valley’s history in both technology and music. The Digital Media Festival is planned for this Saturday from noon to 6:30 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m. at 1010 El Camino Real in Menlo Park. The schedule includes screenings of Eric Christensen’s documentary “Trips Festival,” Len Dell’Amico’s doc “Welcome to Dopeland,” Chris Felver’s “Ferlinghetti” and Dudley Murphy’s “Saint Louis Blues.” Stanford University professor Fred Turner, the author of “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism,” will give the keynote speech at 2 p.m. on Saturday. At 3 p.m., Turner will join Dell’Amico, Christensen, Felver, Grateful Dead archivist Nicholas Meriwether, and music historian Buffalo Benford in a panel discussion about the decades of music and technology in the Valley. At noon on Sunday, movie writer and producer Julian Phillips will give a talk about adapting books for film, and about how new media have changed the process. Admission to the festival is $40 in advance and $50
Reilly. Sydney Reilly. Doesn’t exactly have the same ring, does it? But the talented Mr. Reilly lived quite an interesting life just the same. He was said to be a notorious spy for more than one country in the teens and ‘20s, and 60 years after his death (by a Soviet bullet) he was the hero of a fictional TV miniseries, “Reilly, Ace of Spies.” Most famously, Reilly is also said to be the inspiration, or at least one of them, for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. On Sept. 6, Edward “Bruce” Held, the director of the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy, will give a free talk in Menlo Park on Reilly. The lecture is to be called “The Real James Bond: Sydney Reilly and the Origins of Modern Espionage.” An espionage historian, Held is also a former clandestine-operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, serving in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The talk will be at 4:15 p.m. in the Kavli Auditorium at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park. Go to events.stanford. edu or call 650-926-8537.
‘The Real James Bond’
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