What’s in Our Queue? ‘The Great’Meeta AgrawalIn Brooklyn with 🍼& 📺Podcast: ‘Home Cooking’Like a lot of people, I’ve spent this pandemic cooking. And, like a lot of people, I’m pretty sick of it. An unexpected balm: listening to Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway talk about cooking. More
Ben Watkins, a rising young culinary star who appeared in the sixth season of “MasterChef Junior,” died on Monday from a rare form of cancer, his family said. He was 14.“Our Ben went home to be with his mother this afternoon after a year-and-a-half-long battle with cancer,” Donna Edwards and Anthony Edwards, Ben’s maternal grandmother and uncle, said in a statement on Monday on a GoFundMe page called #Love4Ben. “Ben suffered more than his share in his fourteen years on this Earth, but we take solace in that his suffering is finally over and in that, in the end, Ben knew he was loved by so many,” the family said.Trent McCain, the organizer of the GoFundMe campaign and the family’s attorney, said in a statement that Ben was an inspiration. “I have seen humanity and kindness up close with the outpouring of love and support Ben has received over the past three years,” Mr. McCain said.Ben appeared on “MasterChef Junior” on Fox in 2018 at age 11. He was one of six Chicago-area children to appear on the program that year.In the show’s premiere episode, which had 40 contestants between the ages of 8 and 13 competing for 24 slots and a chance at a $100,000 prize in the finale, Ben snagged the final white apron of the night by making a peach cobbler with whipped cream and caramel sauce.Ben placed in the top 18 on the show, and became a fan favorite, especially as viewers learned of his family history.In September 2017, Ben’s father, Michael Watkins, shot and killed Ben’s mother, Leila Edwards, before killing himself in Gary, Ind., according to The Chicago Tribune. Ben’s grandmother and uncle became his legal guardians.At that time, Ben had voiced his aspirations for becoming a chef and had dreamed of having his own restaurant, much like his father, who had opened Big Ben’s Bodacious Barbecue & Deli in Gary. The restaurant, The Tribune noted, was named after Ben.Ben had also worked at his father’s restaurant, the newspaper said, running the cash register, taking orders and selling his own homemade cookies, brownies, cinnamon rolls and banana bread. He attributed his baking skills to his mother, saying, “My mom taught me everything she knew. Or I just picked it up by watching her.”A statement on the show’s Instagram account said Ben had a “remarkably positive attitude” and was a “tremendous role model” for chefs of all ages.Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef and host of “MasterChef Junior,” said in a statement on Tuesday that Ben was a talented home cook and a strong young man. “Your young life had so many tough turns, but you always persevered,” Mr. Ramsay said.Not long after his 13th birthday, Ben was diagnosed with angiomatoid fibrous histiocytoma, his family said. The condition is a rare soft tissue tumor that most commonly appears in children and young adults, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.Mr. Edwards, Ben’s uncle, told The Tribune in August that doctors two years ago had thought that a growing tumor in Ben’s neck was malformed lymph nodes. “But even after treatment, the tumor kept bleeding,” he said.In late July, Ben began chemotherapy treatment for tumors in his lung, spine and shoulder, The Tribune said.Ben’s family and community rallied behind him.Katie Clark, a family friend, told the newspaper that like his mother, Ben could light up a room. “He is polite, outgoing, smart, funny, and remained that way even into adolescence, which isn’t always the case with kids entering that phase of life,” she said. More
Drawing on interviews with soldiers and classical texts, Theater Mitu’s experimental collage is visually absorbing but thematically fuzzy. More
The author didn’t know when she’d be able to work again in America. So she was thrilled to go to Helsinki to help stage a new “Jekyll & Hyde.” More
Paula Madrid, a trauma psychologist specializing in resiliency training in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, thought she had mastered the art of working, parenting and tending to her parents. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. She and her husband, Nestor Sulikowski, have had to juggle the needs of their daughter, Chloé, 7, and her parents in New Jersey, especially her ailing father who is vulnerable to the coronavirus. For their sake, Ms. Madrid, who is a Colombian immigrant, has kept Chloé attending school remotely and limited her social interactions. It’s the only way, she says, that all three generations can spend time together safely every few weeks at their second home in the Catskills.
PAULA Everyone in my family matters the same. So I will do what I have to do to keep everyone safe and healthy. That is the juggling piece of it, how to manage the varying needs of the different generations.
I am Spanish. I am family-oriented. I think of my parents’ needs as my own. My father is 73 and has lung cancer.
We have seen my parents for about a week and a half at a time in upstate New York, depending on when my father has to go for his medical exams. Every single time, prior to seeing them, we get tested. This is the new normal.
This pandemic has called on me to do what I have done best through my life, to multitask, anticipate people’s needs. It’s an opportunity to be resilient and to show Chloé, my little one, how to do it.
There was an option to return to school in person. She would have done well with the mask. She follows instructions. She gets it. She would have preferred it. For us, it wasn’t an option. If she goes to school, when do we get to see her grandparents? It just complicates matters too much.
She is daydreaming about friends, having fantasies about the day we can go back to parties in person. She is a fortunate kid. I tell her this is a parenthesis in life.
In the middle of the night recently, I called Chloé’s friend’s mom and I said, “We can’t see you tomorrow. It’s a risk we can’t take. My parents are with us.” So, the day after, I had a conversation with Chloé. I was tearful, I said I am sorry. I told her that I found myself at a roadblock, do I go right or left? “Going right is to do what would be most fun for you, to get together with your friend and have a pottery lesson. But in the end it could really get us in trouble.
“Instead, I am choosing to go left: We are still with grandparents in this amazing Catskills forest. We are happy, and everyone is safe. In a week, we can see friends. It’s probably better that we don’t see them today.” She said, “Gosh, I wish there was a way in between.” I said, “You know what, I guess the left side is in between because we are holding off a little. We spend time with the oldies, have fun, do the best we can. In a week or two, we get together with friends.”
After one of those long stays, she asked my mom, “Grandma, when are you leaving so I can see my friends?” My parents were not supposed to leave for five or six days but she said, “Yeah, we are leaving in two days.” She told me she was leaving so Chloé could see her friends.
Last weekend, my mom called. She asked, “Why can’t we just come over to you in Brooklyn? I said, ‘Nope, I’m not doing this, Mom. Nope. Chloé just saw her friend.’”
We will take the test on Saturday, get results on Tuesday, and we will go back to the Catskills to be together. More
Season 4, Episode 9: ‘East/West’One of the challenges of serialized television shows, especially plot-heavy thrillers like “Fargo,” is that the demands of moving the various subplots forward can keep individual episodes from having their own distinct flavor. The fourth season has fallen into that mid-season trap a little, sacrificing the thematic purposefulness of the early episodes for a little too much plate-spinning. It needed an audacious, standalone hour like this week’s episode to reassert itself again.The Bertrand Russell quote that opens the episode speaks to the arc of the whole season. “Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim” is actually a piece of a quote from a letter the philosopher wrote to his lover, Ottoline Morrell. It’s preceded by this line: “People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn.” This has been the show’s understanding of American power from the beginning, as a relentless tribalism in which entire ethnic and racial classes start at the bottom, gain legitimacy and then take it out on next disfavored group.The one sticking point to that cynical thinking, which the show has expressed since the changing-of-the-guard sequences in the season premiere, is that Black people are an exception to the rule. The Irish and the Italians may take that route to broad cultural acceptance, but there’s nothing an exceptionally clever leader like Loy Cannon can do to advance his race from oppressed to oppressor, even if he succeeds in his war against the Faddas. The show is aware of this fact, most plainly in the co-opting of Loy’s credit card idea by white bankers, and yet here’s that Russell quote anyway, preceding an episode that doesn’t have much to do with it. Oh well.That one hiccup aside, the episode is both a conceptual marvel and an example of how big ensemble shows can benefit from focusing on a couple of characters and sending the rest of the cast on vacation. We hadn’t seen Milligan and Satchel since the botched hit job sent them on the lam together, so it was a treat to spend some quality time with them before their fates were literally cast to the wind. “Fargo” has strayed from Coensville all season long, so it makes sense that an escape to rural Kansas would shift to “The Wizard of Oz” as a reference point rather than to the quirky denizens of Minnesota and North Dakota.Shot in black and white, with that startling shift to color after a tornado, the episode follows Milligan and Satchel, who are definitely not in Kansas (City) anymore. The two hole up at the Barton Arms in Liberal, Kan., “the pancake hub of the universe,” for a couple of days so that Milligan can find his bearings and figure out where they should go from there. As Satchel stays in the room, bonding with a stray dog of Toto-like proportions, Milligan heads back into Kansas City to retrieve $5,000 in ill-gotten cash that he had tucked in the walls of a feed shop. Only the feed shop is now a catalog store, and the wall is gone, leading Milligan to conclude that the new proprietors have his money.The episode builds to two crackerjack suspense sequences. The first has Milligan trying to get his money from the catalog store, which is never a situation he doesn’t have entirely in hand. But outside the shop, Satchel faces the much more dangerous prospect of a conflict with a white police officer, who basically eyes him for the crime of Sitting While Black. Milligan gets back in time to defuse the situation, but for Satchel, it underlines an essential difference between him and his “guardian”: They may both be orphans, but in reference to the monologue about the Goldilocks story back at the Barton Arms, Satchel will always be the “outsider in search of himself.” He has no home that could ever be considered safe.The second set-piece is much showier, landing Milligan in the middle of a gunfight between one of Loy’s henchman, Omie Sparkman (Corey Hendrix), and the wraithlike Constant Calamita. Sparkman has set a trap for Calamita at the only filling station for miles around — one that happens to be eight or nine miles away from the Barton Arms — but when Milligan turns up looking for a treat for Satchel’s birthday, he gets roped into a conflict. To this point, only the Kansas setting, the black-and-white photography and the little dog have suggested “The Wizard of Oz,” but it’s enough to justify the tornado that wipes all three characters off the map.The switch from black-and-white to color after the tornado isn’t as revelatory as when Dorothy opens the door to Oz — what could be, really? — but it does mark Satchel’s transition to another world, one where he is truly orphaned, without his real or surrogate father. Perhaps some version of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man or the Lion await him on the lonely highway that stands in for the yellow brick road, but it’s been made perfectly clear to him, outside the catalog store and inside the Barton Arms, that he’s not welcome anywhere. He can’t click his heels three times. In Kansas, there’s no place called home.3 Cent Stamps:Welcome back, Coen references! The Barton Arms is a nod to the Hotel Earle, the purgatorial dump where John Turturro struggles to script a wrestling picture in “Barton Fink.” Touting the pancakes of Liberal, Kan., honors Peter Stormare’s Gaear Grimsrud in “Fargo,” a man who speaks of little but his desire for pancakes. (The Coens and Stormare also call back to the pancakes during his appearance as a nihilist in “The Big Lebowski.”) And it may be a stretch, but the old man strapped to a machine at the Barton Arms sounded a little like the retired TV writer in the iron lung in “Lebowski.” (“He has health problems.”)Back to less expected references, the episode features a straight-faced telling of “Yertle the Turtle,” the classic Dr. Seuss story about the vain turtle king who makes a throne for himself atop a stack of other turtles. On systems of oppression, you get your choice of Bertrand Russell or Dr. Seuss. I choose the latter.Love the scenes with the billboard and its maker, who isn’t in a hurry to finish up lest he be unemployed. Milligan has no idea what “The Future Is Now” is supposed to mean, and it’s especially perplexing because the billboard’s image of white suburbia seems so far removed from the snow-dusted plains of rural Kansas. But Satchel appears to recognize that the future isn’t his, at least not now.Apologies to Milligan, but the finders keepers rule does apply here. When the owners of the catalog store bought the feed shop, they got everything that came with it. “Leaky pipes, bag of money, what have you … that’s the American way.” More
Connection or isolation? Intensity or escape? This spate of shows that put the watcher to work are rewarding, but often in contrasting ways. More
She had a leading role as an uptight debutante-turned-hippie in the original Broadway production. She died of Covid-19. More
