Big Bread for the Sweetest Little Whorehouse in Portland

Perhaps in an effort to compensate for the whore-y-ness coming out of me at rehearsal this morning, I have decided to bake an enormous loaf of herb bread. The Hulk Hogan loaf, rising precipitously in the oven, overshadows the swearing, vomiting, sluttish and otherwise charming characteristics of Doll Tearsheet, restoring my sense of self as a nice girl more accustomed to book lights than red lights. The fact that I went to Octoberfest this afternoon with a group of strange men, acquaintances of T's, and proceeded to get drunk is completely besides the point. The gargantuan bread is a towering paean to domesticity that amends my momentary lapses in gentility.

Ah, Doll! The biggest acting challenge I've encountered since deciding to write and perform a one-woman amalgam of Euripidean tragedy my senior year of college. (Really, where do I get these ideas? And why do they seem so good at the time?) She's really tough. A drunken whore--literally--with a mercurial temper that swings from tender to hallucinatory in 30-second intervals. My first line is "hem," Shakespearean for "very big vomit, upstage right." I've been prepping for the role by recalling encounters with drug addicts and listening to Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black." I really like the title track, but the music conveys less heroin-laced insanity than I was hoping for. The music's bluesy, but too triumphantly so, with horns and sass, to be representative of Winehouse's problems. But that's off subject.

Anyway, hollering Doll's lines and embodying her sadness is more upsetting than I'd anticipated. She inhabits such a tawdry, hopeless world--the only whore in a flopsy tavern on a dirty street in London, with an impotent fat man as her only glimpse of the kind life--that it's hard not to leave rehearsal a little ickier than I walked in (not to mention much hoarser). It's good, because the worse I feel the better the character is, but I've never felt so emotionally depleted by a part. Or, not depleted. More impacted: I feel like a dirty whore onstage and am embarrassed by myself.

See why I need to bake bread? Floury, crunchy, salty, aromatic piles of flatbread for dinner (tonight with butternut squash, red onions and stinky blue cheese); giant crusty, herby loaves of white crumb; whole wheat and walnut rounds laced dark with grain. Too much bread to eat, and so bread to freeze, alongside our beef and pork and voluminous bags of ice (T!). Bread to assuage the stress in my shoulders and the inky worm of self-doubt and loathing creeping toward my heart each day at rehearsal's end.

Bread for life. Bread for happiness. Bread for me.

The Zen of Some Butter, Sugar and a Little H2O

The calm before the storm. The island lull before the big kahuna. The deep lungful of oxygen before the plunge from the plank.

It is my last day before the 100-hour work weeks begin.

It's time to bake pie.

I'm not amazing at baking pie, but I love every minute of it. Pie baking is therapeutic, maybe even more so than bread making, because your standing mixer can't pound and smooth the dough, and it doesn't have the eyes to gauge the length and thickness of the butter smears traveling the length of the round. Mixers don't have the hands to appreciate the velvet smoothness of a rich crust, or to delicately pinch the pie into a picture-perfect crinkle (okay, neither do I, but go with me here). More than anything, baking pie is an old domestic art that fills the house with the aromatics of hominess, and ties us to the histories of people who have also spent afternoons in the warmth of kitchens, rolling dough and peeling apples. It's hard to explain, and sounds silly, but when I bake pie I feel like a woman. The rolling scent of my pie is like a maternal caress of all the people I love; warm pie from the kitchen is a kiss and a hug and a premonition of safety.

Today's pie is of apples, scarlett pears and dried cranberries from the farmer's market. The fruit's ensconced in a butter crust heady with lemon zest and brushed with egg yolk and cream to make it golden. I even cut out some sweet little hearts with the extra dough to garnish the top, which I was very proud of until T criticized them as girly. (No matter. Who wants a masculine pie? Should it be covered in soccer balls and naked women? Or for T-Money, a foxy Blood Elf from WOW?) The best part is that the pie is in our gorgeous Italian copper gratin dish, which we've never used and makes it look so rustic and lovely. Even if it tastes bad it looks pretty.

So will tomorrow and the next day and the day after that be a madhouse of grading, shelving and memorizing lines? Yes. But is today filled with pie? Yes.

And for the moment that is enough.