Bezjian: Madam Lucy's Green Peas
31.12.69
Pilaf, simmered in sheep butter, a handful of chickpeas, and sprinkles of black pepper, if you are Armenian. As I fill my cheap non-degradable black plastic bag, I recall two things (as I always do when I see green peas, be they fresh, canned, jarred, or frozen in plastic bags of corporate brands)—that is, my mother’s recipe, perfected thoroughly from macho criticism, and Madame Lucy’s servings as the only alternative to my mother’s home-cooking years ago, when I was just an observant little boy.
Madame Lucy was an Armenian woman with a helmet of dark brown hair. She wore dark eyeglasses in white frames, was short and husky, her fashion insignificant, her lips always painted bloody red, shouting and yelling, smiling and charming, always waiving her right arm and trying to control her left, which had a mysterious history and was replaced by a prosthesis that extended into a skin-toned yellow leather glove. She had an iron-fist control over her troop of cooks, busboys, waiters, doormen, chaperones, shoe-shine boys, coat girls, bartenders, musicians, and clients. They all obeyed her as the goddess of lust. At times her artificial arm moved on its own, and the right one had to force it down to its place, much like Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (which, incidentally, I saw in the Bleecker Street Cinema near New York University years ago).
Source: Armenian Weekly
From May 2 to May 10, 