Romeo has a picture of me curled up into a tight ball, fast asleep, lying beneath a giant foam arm that I’d built from scratch, the hand as wide as my entire body. My jaw hangs slack in a deeply unattractive fashion, and there may have been some drool involved. This was how he found me in the living room after I had worked through the wee hours of the morning in a mad dash to meet a deadline. My dear sweet boyfriend took a moment to snap this incredibly unflattering picture and posted it to Instagram before waking me and leading me back to bed.
I had been working as a costume designer for several years, and on this occasion I had been commissioned to build a ten-foot-long arm for a performance artist. It was part of an installation exploring midwestern archetypes that included sleazy motivational speakers, spray-tanned bodybuilders, and a gospel choir. The prop was to be covered in fake hair, fingers clenched into a fist, with a lovely red rose tattoo painted on the forearm. In the center of that rose would be a beautifully rendered, anatomically correct vagina, with the name “Chrissy” in italic script underneath, topped off with a golden halo around the C.
I’d spent the past few weeks doing sketches and making scale models to prepare, and now it was time to build it. Every night, I laid down a plastic drop cloth and opened all the windows in our place to let in the frigid winter air. I donned my work uniform: a fur-trimmed parka; a Food Party apron that Lucy had gifted me; latex gloves; paint-splattered Forever 21 sweatpants; and a full-face respirator—the exact kind that a meth cook might sport. I sat for hours slathering toxic glue onto industrial-strength latex foam. I wanted to cry because it was three in the morning; I’d been working on this for weeks, and this thing that I was building in no way resembled a human appendage.
I had been so excited about the prospect of taking on such a project that, in a fit of manic overconfidence, I agreed to do it without fully comprehending just how complicated it would be. But after weeks of wallowing in the chaotic foam shit show that I’d built for myself, doubt started to creep into my mind. I was behind schedule and over budget, and besides, I’d never made an arm before. Livers, hearts, and spleens, yes. But a ten-foot arm? I didn’t actually know if I could pull it off. After weeks of struggle, I e-mailed Lucy about the mess I’d gotten myself into, again. I wondered aloud if I might be bipolar. It was the only rational explanation for these irrational patterns of behavior.
“I am no psychiatrist, but I have seen Homeland, and I am pretty sure you are not bipolar,” she wrote back.
I wasn’t entirely convinced.
After I’d abandoned fashion as a vocation, I set about finding a new job that catered to my very specialized skill set (i.e., birdcage hats, panic attacks, and the ability to quote Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit from memory). I applied for dozens of jobs and sat through multiple interviews, only to be told I wasn’t what they were looking for. I was getting desperate. My savings were dwindling down to next to nothing, and I didn’t know how I was going to make my half of next month’s rent. Then I saw a listing on a job board for an assistant designer at an independent costume production shop. I didn’t know the first thing about building puppets or mascots, but I figured that I could just watch the first half hour of Labyrinth on YouTube and improvise the rest.
The costume shop was in a two-story loft strewn with dislocated furry body parts, like some kind of macabre Muppet slaughterhouse. There were shelves of retired NBA animal mascot heads, tails nailed to the mezzanine like trophies, and what looked like an elderly man’s chest, pinned to a chair. (I found out later this was part of a costume for a male enhancement drug—rejected because it didn’t look virile enough.) In the kitchen, there was a Freudian Christmas card from Cynthia Plaster Caster on the fridge. Pot leaves seemed to be a dominant decorating motif.
The owner of the shop had an impressive résumé. She had won major awards on Broadway and had thirty years of experience under her (figurative) belt. Waving at her brown crushed-velvet tunic and matching bell-bottoms, she told me that she never wore pants without an elastic waistband, because life was too short to be uncomfortable. This was about as far away from the fashion industry as I could possibly get. The shop specialized in the unusual: custom mascots and props for commercials, film, theater, and live appearances. She looked through my portfolio and at the garments that I had brought to show her. She turned everything inside out to examine the seams and the finishing. After an hour of scrutiny, my face beginning to hurt with the effort it took to look outgoing and upbeat, she told me that I was hired.
I spent the first few months of my employment in constant fear of being defrocked—of failing to perform a very simple task that would reveal my complete ignorance to the other employees. Every single day at work was an exercise in avoiding embarrassment, scrambling to correct my mistakes before my boss discovered them and chewed my head off. I’d text Lucy on my lunch break: “I think I’m getting fired today.” And she’d remind me that I’d said the exact same thing the previous week, and here I was, still employed. Despite what the extensive tie-dyed wardrobe might suggest, my boss was not laid-back. She had exacting standards; “close” was not good enough. The job was not for everyone, she warned.
I spent a lot of time trying to keep up with the work. My boss hadn’t built a thriving business in a competitive field by being lackadaisical. Something as small as a sloppy seam or a poorly placed stitch was a catastrophic error. The clients would never know if a button was a quarter of an inch off, but she would, and that, she told me, was what separated her work from the amateurs’. My coworkers would emerge from the bathroom, faces splotchy with angry tears. I’d watched more than one person disappear on his lunch break, never to be seen again. I’d go home and replay that day’s mistakes over and over in my head. My evenings were spent studying pattern books, but there was nothing in them that could teach me how to construct a respectable habanero pepper from stretch velour.
I’d arrive every morning at work praying that this day might go better than the last one had. I’d come home and call Lucy. She’d tell me about her job as a reporter for a respectable news organization. She was finally living out those Lois Lane fantasies, chasing down political scandals and trying to squeeze information out of hacks and PR flacks. Then I would tell her about the latest mascot crisis. One year, a national organ transplant foundation rejected the purple velour lung we made for them due to its overwhelming resemblance to a diseased smoker’s lung. An emergency meeting was called because the ad agency that had commissioned human-sized ballpoint pens thought that the tall, cylindrical costumes we’d constructed looked too phallic. Over the years, I built every animal imaginable, as well as hip-hop granola bars, chocolate chip cookies, and video-game babes for Comic-Con. The best thing about my job was that every project was different. We were reinventing the wheel each time.
There is something magical about the process. It starts out as a pile of garbage: bolts of synthetic fabrics, sheets of foam, thread, and buckets of paint and glue. It’s too much to wrap my head around the whole costume at first, so I start with something small: a paw, a belly button, or the inside of a shoe. Weeks pass with my head bent over a table in a fluorescent-lit room. I sew until I can’t see straight. I lose track of all the times I’ve accidentally stabbed myself with an X-Acto knife. My coworker stitches right through her fingertip on the heavy industrial machine, so I yank the needle tip out with tweezers, dump a bunch of peroxide on her finger, and hope that she’s up-to-date on her tetanus shots.
After hundreds of hours of painstaking labor, it all comes together. A face begins to emerge. Someone gets roped into trying on the costume, and all of a sudden, Alexei the Hemophiliac Dog is standing before you. After months of hard work, all that glue and thread and foam and fake fur have been transformed into a plucky yellow dog with spirit, who won’t let a rare blood disorder keep him down!
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but one day I walked into the studio and I realized I no longer felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack. I was completely at ease on the set of a commercial, secure in my ability to put out any fires that might arise. I started doing freelance work, designing and building costumes from my home studio, growing my own client base. I could negotiate budgets and manage a project from concept to completion. I knew how to build giant cartoon shoes from scratch, manipulate tricky materials, and make the scary industrial machines sing. More importantly, when I made mistakes, I could reverse engineer exactly where I went wrong. It was no longer just bluster; now my confidence was backed up by actual skills and experience.
I had heated arguments with my boss over an eighth of an inch and other esoteric details that no one else cared about. Both of us were absolutely certain that if we did not have it our way, we might as well throw the costume in the garbage and set it on fire. After our respective tantrums, we’d laugh and she’d tell me I’d been working for her too long. It might have been the first time I’d felt comfortable enough around a boss to scream right back at her, but the thing was, I’d always had that inside me. My obsessiveness over details, something that often manifests itself as controlling behavior, is a trait I’ve undeniably inherited from my mom.
My mom is a complete nut about food. Growing up in Vietnam with such a large family, food scarcity was a real problem. I can still feel a palpable sense of reverence in the way my family prepares meals. I was lucky to have grown up ignorant of want; I took it for granted that our fridge would always be full. I was always a slow eater, even as a child. After the dinner hour had passed, the dishes cleared, I would have barely made a dent in my bowl of rice. My mom would tell me in her usual cool, conversational tone that if I did not finish my dinner, after I died, in hell (I would be in hell, obviously), all the uneaten grains of rice would swell into fat white maggots and I would have to swallow them whole. To this day, I always clean my plate.
When I was growing up, she spent weeks obsessed with perfecting her rum cake recipe, going through an entire handle of booze in a month. Because we were little brats, my brother and I would show the near-empty handle to visiting cousins when my mom wasn’t looking, hinting in hushed tones at my mother’s drinking problem. Before that, it was radish cake, Yule logs at Christmastime, beignets, and Hainanese chicken rice. She was constantly trying new things, willing to devote hours, sometimes days, to a single dish, because to her, it was worth it. She enjoyed the process; the little successes that came with capturing that perfect taste, harmony and balance between flavors and textures. It wasn’t until I was a little bit older, failing in my own kitchen, that I realized how much artistry went into the way my mom cooks.
I flew to California a few years ago to see my mother. I had plans for the weekend; dishes I wanted her to cook and places I wanted to visit in the Bay Area. She didn’t tell me until after I’d arrived that we were going to a death anniversary party for my long-deceased great-grandma. These gatherings are ostensibly about honoring your ancestors—incense is burned, prayers spoken—but mostly they’re an excuse to get the extended clan together to celebrate with an enormous feast. We ate langoustines, plump and sweet, with just a hint of smoke from the charcoal grill. A simple yet complex green papaya salad, shredded into long ribbons on the mandoline and soaked overnight in a sweet brine until the rawness had been tempered. Atop this we laid thin slivers of spicy sweet homemade beef jerky studded with chile flakes, which we then dusted with finely chopped fresh basil from the garden.
My relatives had gone to absurd lengths to procure certain ingredients. There were handmade meatballs for the noodle soup, bought in San Jose from a man who ran a business out of his house, and there was a jar of the finest fried shallots I’d ever eaten, transported all the way from Vietnam. My mom sent me home with a Ziploc bag of fresh lime leaves, cut from the tree out back. When I protested that I could buy lime leaves back in Chicago, she waved me off. “Yes, but these are better.”
I was lazy about food for a long time. I was a mindless consumer, ignorant and, worse, vulnerable to self-flattery. I’d often make the mistake of confusing time and effort spent in the kitchen with the quality of the finished dish. With age and experience, my own tastes had evolved, and living with a picky eater really made me examine my food choices closely. I ate more consciously, thinking critically about what I was putting in my mouth, dissecting each element as ruthlessly as my mother would.
When I first moved away from home, I used to dread every time I saw my mom’s name on the caller ID, because she only ever called me to tell me when a relative had a terminal illness or had died. We both care deeply about each other, but we never had the kind of relationship where we spent hours talking on the phone. I never asked my mom for advice about school, or clothes, or, God forbid, boys. After I started cooking more seriously, I began calling her to ask about recipes and techniques. She’d call me back a week later to see how the dish turned out. It was a pleasant surprise. After more than two decades of being mother and daughter, we’d finally found something to talk about.
With my mom’s tutelage, a steady diet of cookbooks, and a slew of inedible disasters, my cooking improved. I learned from Tom Colicchio’s first book that complex-tasting food wasn’t necessarily complicated. If you treated them well, you could transform three ingredients into something greater than the sum of their parts. I learned that you didn’t need to rely on heavy cream, butter, or copious amounts of cheese to make a good pasta dish. I finally understood why my mother was so particular about minor details, why she’d traveled three thousand miles across the country with a box of free-range chickens. It was because every little thing mattered.
It took many failed meals for me to understand that these rules applied to the kitchen as well as to my work. This is what my mother had been teaching me all those years. It all matters: timing, temperature, and the way the judicious dusting of salt will make a tomato taste more like itself. There is a joy in cutting uniform batons of sweet potato that roast to an even golden hue in the oven, or cooking a glass noodle to the perfect degree of al dente, and there’s beauty in an artfully arranged plate of fresh herbs. All these minute details add up, and contribute to or subtract from the success of the final product. I had learned this through my work as a costume designer. The client would never notice if the guts of a costume were shoddily crafted, but I’d know, and I had become the kind of person who could never live with that.
In art school they tell you on the very first day that there is no one path to becoming an artist, and then they make a few halfhearted references to working a day job to support your passion. My early twenties were devoted to figuring out what kind of artist I wanted to be, and how to make a living at the same time. I had to make a lot of mistakes to learn that perhaps those two aspects of my life should be separate. I love that I have a career that satisfies the part of my head that loves order, being creative, and problem solving. But at the end of a long day, I still have room in my brain to make work that is meaningful to me.
Months after I began the arm project, I finally completed it. I painstakingly hand-stitched every single hair, considered the placement of each freckle. It is a strange profession that I’ve found myself in, but I can’t imagine a more natural fit for me. I painted the final highlight on that vagina tattoo, snapped a picture to send to Lucy, and then I thought to myself, I’m the luckiest girl in the world.
Serves 4 to 6
Prep time: active prep, 30 minutes; resting time, 50 minutes; Cook time: 40 minutes
Once my kitchen successes outnumbered the failures on a more regular basis, I felt comfortable enough to take on more difficult projects. Homemade pasta seemed intimidating at first, but these fazzoletti appealed to me tremendously because they don’t require any special equipment beyond a rolling pin. Loosely translated, fazzoletti means “handkerchiefs” in Italian. These are rough sheets of dough made with lightly toasted flour, which gives the pasta a wonderfully nutty flavor.
3 cups flour, divided, plus more for dusting (I prefer 00 flour, but all-purpose is fine)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 large eggs plus 3 egg yolks
½ cup water
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Spread 1½ cups of the flour in a thin layer on a baking sheet. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until the flour is the same dark blond color as Taylor Swift’s hair. Halfway through the toasting process, stir the flour.
Whisk together the remaining 1½ cups of flour, the newly toasted flour, and the salt. Pour this onto a clean cooking surface; create a little crater in the center of the flour and add the eggs, egg yolks, and water. Using a fork, beat the eggs, slowly incorporating in the rest of the flour. Once the liquid has been incorporated, knead the dough for at least 10 minutes, until it is smooth and uniform. Wrap in plastic and let the dough rest for 30 minutes at room temperature. Do not skimp on the kneading or resting steps. Think about how smug you will be when you tell your guests you made this pasta from scratch.
Liberally dust the work area with flour. Divide the dough into 4 balls. Press one of the smaller balls into a flat circle and roll as thin as possible, no thicker than ⅛ inch; dust sparingly with flour if necessary. Ideally, the pasta should be thin enough that you can see the color of your hand through the other side. If you are a fancy person with a pasta machine and the cabinet space to store the pasta machine, just roll the dough on the thinnest setting. On a liberally dusted flat surface, let the pasta dry out for at least 20 minutes, until the texture is slightly leathery. Cut into rough squares no bigger than 4 inches wide.
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook the fazzoletti for 2 minutes, or until al dente. Fazzoletti tend to stick together when they sit too long in a colander. It is better to pull them out with tongs when they are done and slip them directly into the pan for the final dish, so time accordingly.
To freeze: Place the pasta on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Take care to not let the pasta pieces touch. Put parchment between the layers of pasta so they do not stick together. Freeze for at least 2 hours before transferring the pasta to a freezer bag. You do not need to defrost before cooking; rather, just add about 30 seconds to the cook time.