The Beauty of Art Today

Antique art in Chicago?  You’ve got the wrong person for that.  I know absolutely nothing about antique art, let alone where you can find it in Chicago other than visiting the Art Institute, the Lithuanian Museum on the Southwest side, or the galleries at the various colleges.  The one thing I do know about, though, is cooking pasta.  There’s one topic I know everything about!  Choose your noodle and pick your sauce.  I’ll tell you exactly how long to simmer, exactly how long to stir, and exactly what the consistency should be.  After all, my grandmother’s from Sicily, so she should know.  The only art she ever put on her walls were mine and my sister’s finger paintings!  But, boy, could she make pasta.  She certainly was an old hand in the art of making spaghetti, ravioli and linguini with clams.  She taught my father, and my father in turn taught me.  My father was a salesman for Motorola, but he loved painting.  That is, looking at them, not actually creating them.  Sorry—all his paintings were contemporary American and European works.  My mom?  She was just an old stick-in-the-mud.  She didn’t like much of anything, not even my dad’s delicious Italian cooking.  The only thing she liked was beer.  Can you just go figure!  She drank beer all the time, in the evenings and on weekends mostly, locked herself in their bedroom with the Sunday paper all day on Sunday—wouldn’t even come with us to the St. Sulpice services—and hit us whenever we cried.