Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.
People still ask my husband and me which of us is the mom - which, as one lesbian friend pointed out to me, is like asking which chopstick is the fork. This pressure on us to embody normative traditions can be paralysing.
We will, as Americans, inhale another culture on a fork before we try their music or their art or even, God forbid, hang out with the actual people.
As a young boy growing up in New York City, we would spend our summers on the South Fork of Long Island. My dad would take me down to the beach at low tide. We would walk a mile down to the jetties, and he would lower me by my ankles into the crevices between the massive boulders to grab at huge ropes of mussels.
It took me a little while to remember how to use a fork. You know, we don't use forks in the penitentiary. You get a spoon.
One of the rudest things you can do, food-wise, is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function - like animals, we are trapped by our hungers, but we do our best to disguise them with such civilized props as menus and forks.
This is a shameful thing to say, but I've never really got that 'grown-up' mind-set. I have to buy forks? Why?
I'm a magician. I've learned to do some really cool tricks like levitating myself and melting forks.
If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.
My mother was a waitress in a Lyons Corner House, but she married up. She was keen on bettering herself. She taught me how to use the right knives and forks and behave properly.
