jello5

November 27, 2020

The New Joys of Jello Chronicles Part 5

I can’t fathom this photograph. It is beyond my ability as a thinker or cultural historian or amateur American sociologist.

Let us consider it and speculate: a stylish Black couple has just been married in front of an old church. He is drinking champagne. She is beaming and holding a bouquet. Damn they look great! His or her daughter or a flower girl is smiling at the couple. A wedding feast of mostly wondrous Jello dishes is set out beautifully on a table with a lace tablecloth. The guests are about ready to dig in and celebrate the nuptials. Two of the dishes are called Creamy Bleu Cheese Salad and Salmon Dill Mousse. Some of their ingredients include lemon Jello, a can of salmon, dill and paprika, and I will leave it at that. Can you imagine consuming this before consummating a marriage?

Were these Jello dishes the desire of the couple or Jello mad caterers? You think they ate this stuff after the photo shoot or just drank all the champagne and let the kid smash the Jello dishes out in the parking lot?

Was this an appeal by the Jello cooks and promoters for racial diversity in all things Jello in 1979? If it was, it seems almost visionary.

What were the demographics of Jello in this era? It almost goes without thinking that Jello was suburban White food, or it does to me. I don’t know why, perhaps because initially, before finding this book, I associated Jello with Dwight Eisenhower, Donna Reed, segregation and funereal receptions with open caskets.

Speaking of demographics, was Jello favored by straights or gays in this era? Is there any way of knowing this? These Jello concoctions presented in this book seem like such theatrical dishes, not that there’s anything wrong with that as Seinfeld might have put it.

There needs to be a massive sociological investigation into the world of Jello. We must know everything about it and its appeal. Once the results are in, I see a Broadway musical about Jello.

A question just occurred to me: did Jello surge in popularity during the Pandemic lockdown? To many people of a certain age, Jello was the ultimate comfort, fun food of their youth, and did they return to it as the virus tore through the world? Were there new and bizarre recipes for Jello during lockdown? I must know!

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The Old Crow

Book Club

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In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

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Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

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In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.