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THE NEW MEXICAN Saturday, October 5, 2013
Fame: Owner says sales of dish doubled Continued from Page A-1 aged the Frito pie in a recent episode of his CNN show Parts Unknown, to join the discussion. Bourdain later apologized for claiming that the “Wold Famous” Frito pies sold at the Five & Dime were made with canned Hormel Chili, an apology that came after the cook at the snack bar demonstrated on video to The New Mexican that the ingredients are made from scratch. “There are going to be a lot of people who, I’m sure, want to weigh in,” Cantrell said, “And we hope that Mr. Bourdain weighs in also. But I honestly don’t expect a response.” Panelists will include Rocky Durham of the Santa Fe Culinary Academy; Marciel Presilla, who owns two Latin fusion restaurants in Hoboken, N.J.; Dave DeWitt, who runs the Albuquerque Fiery Foods & Barbecue Show; Paul Bosland of New Mexico State University’s Chile Institute; Estevan Arellano, journalist, historian and chile grower at his family farm in Embudo; Gustavo Arellano, author of the nationally syndicated column “Ask a Mexican”; and Earl Potter, an owner of the Five & Dime. Cantrell said he added Gustavo Arellano, who turns out to be a cousin of Estevan Arellano, to the panel at the last minute because the columnist agrees with Bourdain on at least one issue — that the Frito pie is not traditional to New Mexico, but to Texas. Cantrell said that, according to one source, a dish made with ingredients similar to what goes into a Frito pie originated in the early Spanish colonial days. Before the Europeans came, Native Americans didn’t mix meat, chile and corn tortillas, he said. Not until domesticated livestock were introduced did these mixtures became popular. “The premise of this whole food conference is that when
you really look at a lot of foods, they actually came from New Mexico because we were such a melting pot of Native cuisines and Hispanic cuisines because of all the missions,” Cantrell said. “A lot of the rough ingredients came up from South America and from Europe, and they got mixed into the mission kitchens here, went back down to Mexico City, and from there were shipped to Asia, where they took the chile and you ended up with hot Chinese food.” Potter, who helped open the Five & Dime at 58 E. San Francisco St. in May 1998 in space originally occupied by Woolworth’s, said this week that sales of Frito pies at his lunch counter have increased significantly since Sept. 28, when The New Mexican was the first to report on Bourdain’s errors. “The level of outrage on the part of New Mexicans is very high,” he said. “We try actually to calm people down a little bit because we feel it’s been very beneficial for us. … ” It’s hard to tell how much the Frito pies sales have increased, he said, “because we just report the snack bar sales and we don’t weigh them up separately, but it’s certainly significant. You could probably say double. We’ve been getting calls from all over the world. We’ve tracked in the neighborhood of 250 different mentions of it in at least 15 different countries.” Lori and Ben Gobioff of the Queens borough of New York City were in Albuquerque for the International Balloon Fiesta, which begins Saturday. But, with their curiosity aroused by the publicity surrounding Bourdain’s comments, they decided to drive to Santa Fe on Friday to sample a Frito pie at the Five & Dime. “I don’t know why he would say that,” said Ben Gobioff as he and his wife shared a single Frito pie.
Retailer: Shop to open next month Continued from Page A-1 bring a breath of fresh air,” said Ann Thomas of Lucchese, which specializes in one-of-a-kind cowboy boots handcrafted in El Paso, belts, buckles and other Western clothing. She understands the Maloufs will maintain relationships with some of the same artists whose original work is now showcased at Packard’s. “That’s why people come here to Santa Fe,” she said. “We hope they keep the character of the place and what people have come to know as Packard’s.” Packard’s on the Plaza opened in 1944 and quickly became known for its relationships with authentic Native American and Southwestern artisans. Al Packard inherited the store from his parents, Frank and Marie Packard, who helped found the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, which sponsors the annual Santa Fe Indian Market. Richard and Carolyn Canon purchased the business in 1979 from Al Packard. Their daughter, Catherine Canon Mesquite, and her husband, Dean, live in California and have two children. They decided to concentrate family energies elsewhere. They will keep the Packard’s on the Plaza name. The last day for Packard’s is Oct. 12, said Craig Allen, the liquidation consultant working with the business. “We still have a decent collection, but it’s selling fast,” he said. New tenant Karen Malouf, an interior designer, said the couple purchased a home in Santa Fe in 2005 and have been coming to visit whenever possible. Their 29-year-old daughter, with retail experience in New York and Connecticut, can now assume the day-to-day operations in Lubbock, and that allows them to eventually relocate to Santa Fe to manage the new store. Karen said Scott Malouf proposed to her on the road that leads to the Santa Fe ski area, pulling over his Volvo along the side of the road and perching his camera atop a snowdrift. He
set the timer, sat next to her and popped the question just before the shutter opened. “Ever since then, we’ve always wanted to have a life there,” Karen Malouf said of Santa Fe. “There’s a of beautiful history in Santa Fe, and it’s always been a special place for us.” She said her husband was traveling Friday and couldn’t be reached. The couple already have reached out to artists who now sell original and handmade work in the 5,800-square-foot Packard’s retail space, which has carried more than 10,000 different items. And Karen Malouf said they will be in Santa Fe next week, meeting with Native and Southwestern artists with longtime relationships with Packard’s. The new store, Malouf on the Plaza, will open in early November. “Our lease is for 10 years, and we do have some extended terms, so it could be longer,” she said. The building is owned by Murray Properties LLC in Albuquerque. She said he husband, Scott Malouf, worked with his father in retail and then opened Drest by Scott Malouf in Lubbock in 2009. It started off as a women’s clothing store but has expanded into other apparel items, handbags, accessories and jewelry. The website shopacrosstexas.com describes the store: “By definition, drest literally means ‘a particular form of appearance,’ and Drest by Scott Malouf is where to go if you prefer that appearance to be ‘well-dressed.’ Drest carries the latest looks from top designers like DVF, Magaschoni, Elizabeth and James, Sigerson Morrison and more.” Karen Malouf said her husband’s family does have some distant ties to the locally known Maloof family, which started distributing Coors beer in Albuquerque and the Southwest and now has part ownership in casino properties and professional sports franchises in Las Vegas, Nev., and Sacramento, Calif.
Ginsburg: Justice to begin 21st term Continued from Page A-1 in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and when she returns East, she says to herself: “What happened to my sky?” There are tours of the countryside and hikes in the hills. There is VIP access to the works of Georgia O’Keeffe. There are sumptuous dinners prepared by her daughter, Jane, that last until 2:30 in the morning. She has gathered an eclectic and artsy circle of friends, who throw luncheons in her honor for whomever happens to be in town. Kaye Ballard, the singer who toured with the Spike Jones Orchestra in the 1940s, is here; she snaps photos of Ginsburg on her iPhone and insists on getting her menu autographed. The hostess, Winnie Klotz, 84, a former dancer and for decades the photographer for the Metropolitan Opera, startles the gathering by grabbing her ankle and lifting it straight above her head. “Do I have your attention?” she asks. Apparently unsatisfied with the response, she slides into a split on the floor of Harry’s Roadhouse. Ginsburg says later: “She does that all the time.” At night, there is always opera, which Ginsburg considers “the perfect art form,” and on this night, it is one that brings together Ginsburg’s worlds of law and culture. It is the closing performance of the world-premiere run of Oscar, a new opera about the gay playwright and essayist Oscar Wilde and his conviction in 1895 on charges of “gross indecency.” The opera was nine years in the making and serendipitously debuted four weeks after the Supreme Court’s first rulings on same-sex marriage resulted in important victories for gay rights. Ginsburg was in the majority in those cases. She slips into the grand, open-air opera house through a side entrance, dressed in an elegant jacket appliqued with white silk leaves. A tiny figure, hair as always pulled straight back, she is dwarfed by her security entourage. The cast has asked to meet her at intermission, and her security bubble bobs against the tide of patrons. The sophisticated Santa Fe crowd keeps its distance. But in the wake of her slow and steady movements, there is the debate that is a constant companion for the 80-year-old leader of the court’s liberals, soon to begin her 21st term. “We need her to stay forever,” says one woman after Ginsburg walked past. “Or,” her companion replies, “leave right now.” uuu
There are no set rules for when a justice leaves her lifetime appointment, although for Ginsburg there is no shortage of advice. The first justice nominated by a Democratic president in 26 years when President Bill Clinton chose her, she has been nudged to leave ever since the election of another Democratic president who could choose her replacement. The court has four consistent liberals, including Ginsburg, and four consistent conservatives, and the justice in the middle, Anthony Kennedy, is a Ronald Reagan-nominee who more often than not sides with conservatives. If the court’s membership does not change before the 2016 election, the new president would see a Supreme Court with four of its nine members older than 77, including half of the liberal bloc. “The reality of the court, and the parties, these days is that Ginsburg … should know that a justice selected by President Rubio or President Jindal or President Cruz is going to produce a very different nation than one selected by Barack Obama,” wrote political scientist Jonathan Bernstein in The Washington Post. He was not the first. It shows what a different time it was in judicial politics that Ginsburg — a leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, a believer in the “evolving” Constitution and promoted by the White House as a supporter of abortion rights — was approved by the Senate, 96-3. She is reminded each time she unlocks the door to her chambers; her key is on a plastic keychain with the words, “With best wishes, Strom Thurmond.” The former segregationist and Dixiecrat from
South Carolina was one of the 96. So Ginsburg understands politics but does not feel she faces a deadline to leave so that Obama, whom she admires, can choose her successor. “I think it’s going to be another Democratic president” after Obama, Ginsburg said. “The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can’t get out the vote in the midterm elections.” uuu
Ginsburg has appeared frail for years and battled cancer twice, early-stage colon cancer in 1999 and early-stage pancreatic cancer in 2009. She moves slowly, often with her head down, and speaks deliberately, with pauses that leave listeners wondering if she has finished her thought. She has ended at least two terms with broken ribs from falls. And at last year’s State of the Union address, cameras caught Ginsburg, dressed in black robe and sparkly necklace she received as one of Glamour magazine’s women of the year, asleep. But she says doctors have pronounced her cancer-free — both times she battled the disease, she never missed a day of the court’s deliberations — and she works regularly with a trainer, who says she can do 20 “male” pushups. In Santa Fe, she said she was making do with following the Royal Canadian Air Force calisthenics routine and laughingly told friends that it was not fatigue that caused her to drift off during the president’s address. There was a big dinner beforehand, she said — “and a very good California wine that Tony Kennedy brought.” In fact, Ginsburg is a night owl (“Marty called me a bat”) dating to her days at Harvard Law. Not only was she one of the few women in the class, she also was a mother, and her studies ended each day at 4, when she took over care of daughter, Jane. Then Marty was stricken with testicular cancer. She nursed him through chemotherapy and typed his third-year paper after midnight. “So it was after 2 o’clock that I started whatever was needed for my own classes,” Ginsburg said. “I came to realize that I didn’t need a whole lot of sleep and I could stretch my day.” She is active at oral argument and is usually the first to pose a question. Her reputation is as the justice who is most familiar with the details of a case and quick to call out an attorney who she believes is shading the facts. Ginsburg made clear her displeasure with the court’s conservative majority this past term by reading dissents from the bench in five cases; it is rare for a justice to do that even once a term. In most dissents, she is joined by fellow liberals Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Kagan. Ginsburg denies she was trying to send a message: “This court deals with what’s on its plate, and last year we had a lot of cases where I thought the court was egregiously wrong.” Ginsburg did not write either of the court’s same-sex marriage decisions — one overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, which withheld federal recognition of same-sex marriages performed in states where they are legal; the other allowed such unions to resume in California. But she seems to have become identified with them. In Santa Fe, David Bowles, a recording producer from California, bought a ticket to the performance in the hope of a chance encounter, and it paid off when he approached Ginsburg in the Opera Club. “I got married on Thursday because of you,” he told her, and introduced his husband, Nicholas McGegan. The identification was probably sealed in late August, when Ginsburg made the short trip across the street from her Watergate apartment to preside at the candlelit marriage ceremony of Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser and economist John Roberts. With the words, “Do you, John, take Michael to be your husband,” she marked a first in the 224-year history of the Supreme Court. There was a murmur in the crowd when she pronounced them married “by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of
the United States.” uuu
Ginsburg’s own marriage lasted 56 years, until Marty’s death in 2010, and is one of those inevitably described as what happens when opposites attract. He was gregarious and outgoing, a fantastic chef, a brilliant tax lawyer and the life of the party. She is serious and scholarly, appreciates a joke but isn’t likely to crack one, and has little use for the kitchen. Martin Ginsburg and Ruth Bader met as undergrads at Cornell. She was a brain, and he was more interested in being on the golf team, but both were smart enough to be admitted to Harvard Law. “I’m amazed at how well she has done without Marty,” said Justice Antonin Scalia. “They were married a long time, a long, long time, and he was devoted to her.” Equally amazing, to many, is the friendship between the Ginsburgs and Scalia and his wife, Maureen, who spent many New Year’s Eves together — often with Marty cooking venison or quail or wild boar that Scalia brought back from hunting trips. “If you can’t disagree ardently with your colleagues about some issues of law and yet personally still be friends, get another job, for Pete’s sake,” Scalia said. He believes that he and Ginsburg are especially good at such compartmentalization because of their past as academics. There is something of a Ginsburg renaissance at work. Her willingness to take on the conservatives on the court has delighted liberals, who never thought she was quite liberal or bold enough. Students pack her appearances at law schools. The slightly profane Ruth Bader GinsBlog praises her every move; “Notorious R.B.G.” T-shirts are available online. A new opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, will premiere next year, the work of Derrick Wang, a composer and recent graduate of the University of Maryland School of Law. Dueling constitutional interpretations, set to music. And still, the question: When is it time to leave a lifetime appointment? “When I can’t do the job, there will be signs,” Ginsburg said. “I know that Justice [John Paul] Stevens [who retired when he was 90] was concerned the last few years about his hearing. I’ve had no loss of hearing yet. But who knows when it could happen? “So all I can say is what I’ve already said: At my age, you take it year by year.” uuu
Violetta is dying. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is crying. At intermission at The Santa Fe Opera, Ginsburg had been a little worried about this production of La traviata; the singing was glorious, but she thought soprano Brenda Rae had been misdirected in Act 1, her portrayal of the doomed courtesan was too coarse to provoke proper sympathy. Ginsburg traces her love for opera back to seeing her first performance at age 11 and recalls a thrilling moment that came decades later. She and two other justices were extras in the Washington National Opera’s production of Die Fledermaus with Placido Domingo. “I was sitting with Tony Kennedy and Steve Breyer on a sofa, and Domingo was about 2 feet from me — it was like an electrical shock ran through me,” she said. Ginsburg has often said she would have preferred life as a diva. But when the elementary school music teacher sorted her students, “I was a sparrow rather than a robin.” If she could sing, she would star as the Marschallin from Der Rosenkavalier. It is one of opera’s most sophisticated works, about a woman giving up her much younger lover, and carries lessons about the passage of time, the ability to give up something valued in the name of love, and sacrifice and moving on. The music stirs Ginsburg, and so, in the end, does La traviata, delivering its usual effect. “Bravissimo!” she says backstage, where the cast has assembled to receive royalty from another world. “The tears have only just now stopped.”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg waits with her grandson, Paul Spera, and Audrey Bastien before attending The Santa Fe Opera in August. Spera and Bastien, both actors, were visiting New Mexico from their home in Paris. MARK HOLM THE WASHINGTON POST