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Sparkle (2)
It’s been quite a while now since I took these lewd and indecent photos of ravaged lobster carcasses. I’ve been practically dying to share them with you, because who doesn’t want to see something like that? And even more than that, I’ve been busting at the seams to teach you how to pick every last morsel of sweet, tender meat from the innermost cartilage of a lobster body like your children’s lives depended on the meager income you’d earn from it. I want to be the one to teach you that, because you never really forget a person who profoundly changes the way you see the world. It’s selfish, I know, but it’s also very generous of me.
The thing is, I’ve been struggling to find the words. It might be because I love lobster so dearly that whenever I think about it, a swell of emotion overtakes me, and I need to lay down with a paper fan in one hand and the other hand splayed across my perspiring brow. Or it might be because to tell my lobster love story as it truly occurred, I have to take you all the way back to 1993. And so it begins.
Once upon a time, a beaky young wisp of a high school junior in Bridgewater, NJ, sat at her dining room table picking through college application forms. Due to a misfiring of neurons related to puberty, she was dressed in an oversized plaid button-down shirt from Eddie Bauer, skinny lightning-wash jeans, and Birkenstock sandals, with enough eye makeup to keep at least two stock boys from at least two CVS branches gainfully employed for the foreseeable future. She gave the impression of being, at once, a struggling adolescent girl and the faceless New England prepster that girl wished to date — a strange performance-art rendering of her college selection criteria in flannel, denim, and petroleum products. But somehow she found Princeton, and somehow they let her in. Possibly to fill the diversity quota for fledgling drag queens. Still, in is in.
For the next four years, she did her best to appear arty but down-to-earth, thin but curvaceous, brilliant but approachable. After an awkward transition period populated with stalkerish grad students and understandably confused lesbians, she ditched the giant flannel shirts. After that, to overcompensate, she would from time to time wear a pair of “third-floor pants” — so named because preppy college boys wondered appreciatively whether a girl had needed to jump from the third floor of a building to get into them. Preppy college boys knew all sorts of things like that about physics and friction and what have you. But she didn’t really care about those things. She had her eye on the small, earnest subset of preppy college boys who had spent their summers in coastal Maine learning to pick lobster meat as unpaid, underage day laborers for their grandmothers. That’s who all the peacocking was for. And after a while, she snagged one.
Even back then, she knew the golden rule of lovestruck artists and artisans: that talent is not sexually transmittable. So she got herself invited to New England — to meet the parents, sure, but also to meat the lobster. The boy’s hands, strong and nimble as a surgeon’s, worked their beautiful magic — cracking, twisting, pushing, finessing. She watched. She learned. She ravaged. She scribbled copious notes with briny, sea-washed hands. And one fine day, after many such visits, the student became the master. (And yeah, she married the guy, but try to keep your eye on the ball.)
Now it’s your turn.
How to Choose, Cook, and Eat a Whole Lobster
Step 1: Choose. Find a dockside fish market (or a reputable online vendor who will ship lobsters from dockside overnight). Choose the bitchiest looking lobster you can get. It can be hard to find one wearing too much eye makeup, but a lot of flailing about of the tail, legs, and claws is a good sign. Female lobsters are often full of delicious orange coral, so if you’re into that sort of thing, you can let the fishmonger know you prefer chicks. I don’t know if this next bit works outside of the Jersey Shore, but if you find yourself there and sporting a decent set of hips, try smiling a lot and
