Damn You Yankees

It seems it's necessary for me to sound the annual alarm bells. People, Yankee Swap/White Elephant parties are mean! The premise is getting together with people you like and taking stuff that makes them happy away from them. Please stop the madness. My full diatribe is here.

Instead let me direct you to a kind of swap that isn't mean. It's just to show you that two born and bred Yankees like me and Our Janet can be reformed while staying frugal.

So, Janet messages me before Thanksgiving and asks if I'm anywhere near this. I am not, in fact, any nearer or farther away from that than I am to anything else in New York City so I say yes. It turns out that if you go to the Chobani yogurt parlor they serve you in cute glass dishes and you get a discount when you bring your dish back for a refill. Janet didn't want a refill, she wanted some cups so I said I'd work on getting them for her.

This yogurt parlor is in Soho. Soho is fancy. It used to be a mix of very fancy with kind of downtrodden and I used to spend a lot of time in the latter establishments back when there was a truly fabulous theatre there that used to let me play in it. Now it's all fancy. I felt weird crossing the old streets and seeing store after store filled with stuff that cost my life savings. I nurtured that weird feeling until I started to get anxious about ordering my yogurt. How expensive would it be? Did I need to ask for the glass dishes? Would it be so complicated that I'd make a mistake?

You're a fucking 43-year-old woman of sound mind and body and also it's yogurt! Buck up.

So I bucked and went in and, while the clientele was all skinny twentysomething women in cashmere languishing on bench seats, the employees were beautiful, normal-looking, helpful, and kind folks. They handed me a menu (of yogurt, I know) and took my order and told me to take as many pictures as I wanted, even urged me to belly up to the pass through window so I could see my concoctions in progress. They lovingly packed my glass dishes full of fresh ingredients into a recycled materials paper bag and waved me on my way back to cut-rate-cashmere, non-fancy life.

Home in Brooklyn I happened upon a perfect shaft of light cutting across my imperfectly clean dining table and snapped a few pics for the record. Eddie quickly grew bored but Anna stuck around to supervise. She likes to see if I'm going to accidentally leave food unattended.

I ate the Pomegranate and Power one, first. I love pomegranate and clearly after my crisis on the way to buy yogurt I need to look into getting my power back so it was an obvious choice. Pomegranate and yogurt is food of the gods. Power apparently comes in the seeds of flax and hemp. I could do without seeds in my teeth but they don't taste like anything and I know they're good for me so that was fine. For my Greek yogurt cravings I usually apply Fage so I was interested to find that Chobani has a slightly looser texture and is sweeter. Now, I didn't read my menu closely so maybe they added honey or maybe the yogurt is naturally slightly sweet. Does anyone know? It was a perfectly delightful snack but then I was full so I put away the other serving for later.

I was afraid that my second snack would suffer some tragedy of flavor melding after a day in the fridge but fortunately that did not come to pass. This one was Pistachio and Chocolate and I got it because, duh, chocolate. There was a whole bunch of other stuff in there, too, the same seeds but also some fruit, maybe slightly dried pineapple, and mint leaves on top. The chocolate was good and dark and there was enough that you could have some in every bite. If I ever braved the fancy yogurt place again I'd be hard pressed to choose between these two.

A week and a half later when I'd finally cleaned the dishes I mailed them off to Our Janet nestled in a box engineered by Mameres out of free items we found at the Post Office and the roll of tape I brought. Miraculously (not a miracle, Mameres knows his shit) the dishes arrived unscathed and Janet's Dave started on my half of the barter. You see, Dave is an artist (among other things) and when Janet asked if I wanted anything from New England in return for the dishes the first thing that popped into my head was, "Will Dave draw me a picture of Eddie?" Without consulting Dave at all she said yes (Thanks Dave!) and asked, "Do you want a standard portrait or Dave-style?" Dave-style all the way. I've never had anyone do a portrait of any of my animals and I'm really excited for this. It's something I've wanted for a long time.

See how nicely this all worked out? A straight swap of things we each have access to. Nothing expensive to provide. Most importantly, nobody gets to steal anything! Seriously, if you try to steal my Dave-style portrait of Eddie I will fucking cut you...probably with some shitty gift someone stuck me with at a Yankee Swap!

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Don't forget that the world premiere of my new cabaret show, Back Where I Belong, is coming up December 12, January 9, and January 17. Details are here. I hope you can make it and bring all your friends! Please spread the word and use the hashtag, #KizzCabaret.