by Guy Branum
I got one, of course. I worked at a small legal publication we’ll call Litigation Compendium. It basically went through all the civil litigation decisions in California and published them for other lawyers to consult when demanding damages. If this sounds technical and unrelatable, let me put it more simply: For about six months, my job was to keep track of how much a dead baby was worth in California. Look, for parents, a dead baby is a horrifying pain that will never truly be healed, but for the attorney they hire to sue whoever killed that baby, things have to be a bit more clinical. Thus I learned that, in 2001, the time of my employment at Litigation Compendium, a dead newborn baby was worth about $800,000, declined for the first six months, then grew in value as its viability increased, to a peak of around $1.1 million at around age four or five. The value then steadily decreased through the teenage years, when we understand that a tortious homicide is really as much a favor to the parents as a tragedy. You could back over a sixteen-year-old in your Chevy Tahoe for like $600K in the early 2000s.
Being an editorial assistant at Litigation Compendium barely paid better than working at a movie theater. I was mad at myself for not making more money. I was educated, but I certainly wasn’t important. Finally, I managed to land a job as a glorified paralegal at an insurance defense law firm in Oakland. It paid much better, and I was excited to jump into something less morbid. It could not have been further from the truth.
In my tiny, windowless office in a midsize high-rise in Oakland, there sat across from me binders that read “Breast,” “Bladder,” “Brain,” “Multiple Myeloma,” “Leukemia,” “Lymphoma.” It was all of the cancers of the people who were suing our client, the company who insured a tech manufacturer in Silicon Valley. I was one of the bad people in Erin Brockovitch. Not one of the lawyers you see, but one of the army of lawyers behind them that does terrible things to help large companies keep their millions. The workers at the tech manufacturer, almost entirely women, were saying that exposure to toxic metals had given them cancer. Our job was to get them to settle for as small a sum as possible. My job, particularly, was to come up with legal theories to make their most embarrassing medical facts admissible in court, and by “most embarrassing medical facts,” I think you know what I mean. We, as a law firm, were trying to shame as many women—mostly Catholic, mostly Latina—about the abortions they’d had, to get them to stop saying our client’s client had negligently caused their cancer. I had jumped out of the dead-baby frying pan and into the aborted-fetus fire.
Needless to say, this was the grossest job I’ve ever had. Grosser than writing for Punk’d. My protest was to be as bad at my job as humanly possible. I goofed off, I wasted time, I wrote jokes. The worst part was the end of the day, when I had to bill for my time. See, lawyers bill their clients by the hour, so every law firm has a draconian system that tracks your time in six-minute increments. Every day, in detail, I had to account for the uses of my time by the tenth of an hour. Filling out the billing software honestly would have been onerous enough if I’d actually been doing my job, but how was I supposed to explain what had happened during that hour I was writing jokes about the Hebrew calendar?1 The last hour of every day at work became a short fiction seminar when I attempted to come up with plausible lies for what had filled my day. It was during this dark period of my life that I discovered the cost of my soul was twenty dollars an hour, plus benefits.
During this time, I started doing stand-up. The whole time I was in law school, I’d kept thinking that when it was all over, I’d go back to a place full of interesting people with interesting opinions: I’d go be a stand-up in San Francisco. I was scared but enchanted. When I actually returned, I let my fears rule me, particularly those that centered on my capacity to exist and support myself. It wasn’t until the financial stability of moral prostitution was present that I felt like I was allowed to cross the bay and start dipping my toe into the world of open-mic comedy.
I was soon fired from my job. I was truly, magnificently irresponsible at it. I was worried that said irresponsibility might affect my application for the California bar. There’s a thing called a Character and Fitness application you have to submit, to show that you’re honest and responsible. I was certain that my bad performance at the legal job, combined with my truly execrable credit score, would lead the state of California to reject my application. This is ridiculous; the law is a profession rife with criminals, and no one cared about my stupid little problems. I was probably just creating barriers to guide me away from a life in the law. Fundamentally, I knew I did not love it enough to be really good at it.
When I got fired, I should have been scared, right? I was, but not scared like I’d been when I first moved back. The successful acquisition of two jobs and the ensuing ten months of job-having had sort of taught me I was capable of survival. But more than that, doing stand-up meant I was happy, and despite my cynical thoughts to the contrary, part of me was certain that following what made me happy would be the right path.
I got a semi-bullshit job selling high-end tech solutions over the phone. It was basically tech-boom telemarketing. It didn’t matter. I had decided to stop worrying about what my career and path were and focus on making a life that seemed rewarding. Plus there were two sassy ladies who worked there who liked to get chips ’n’ margs after work.
For the better part of a year, that was my life. I did stand-up nearly every night. I did a job I didn’t care about every day, and it never gave me any problems. Finally—for the first time in this book, maybe—I was just being me. There were problems, failures, and bounced checks, yes, but it was living.
Then, in April 2003, two separate people asked me if I was going to have a Passover Seder. One was my roommate Alice, one of the original founding hipsters of the East Bay. Before we had a word for hipsters, she was drinking PBR and having bluebirds tattooed on her shoulder blades. She also had a graduate degree in medieval Irish history, a deep love of Catholicism, and a passion for ritualized religion of any sort. The other person was my friend Ryan, my editor from the Daily Cal, who was then a scrappy young tech journalist. He was neither Jewish nor obsessed with religious ritual, so his motivations will remain a mystery. I said no to both of them, then decided if I had been asked twice, I should consent to whatever force was attempting to nudge me in that direction.
What is Passover? you may ask. Passover is a Jewish holiday, which, like all Jewish holidays, commemorates an occasion when a genocide against the Jewish people only mostly succeeded. Hanukkah, Purim, the story is always the same: People tried to kill us, they only mostly succeeded, so now we eat, we don’t eat, or we eat in a weird way.
In the case of Passover, it was Egyptians who attempted to kill us; various miracles that managed to save us and transport us to the land of Israel; and the weird way we eat is a removal of leavened bread from our diet for a week.2
And what is a seder? you ask. A seder is the highly ritualized dinner party that is the core of Passover celebrations. Like Thanksgiving but with a script and props and elements of a talk show.
I did not grow up having fabulous seders. My mom’s deeply closeted Arkansas approach to Judaism precluded splashy celebrations. For the most part, we just waited for the supermarket to put up an end-of-the-aisle display that included all the items from the Jewish section, not just matzo but mourning candles and bean soup mixes, everything remotely Jewish out at the end of the aisle for everyone to see. My mother would clandestinely buy a few boxes of matzo and possibly kosher-for-Passover breakfast cereal and try to check out without anyone noticing. At dinner, we’d have matzo, and she’d explain to us that we really needed to remember that we were brought out of Egypt and that we were once slaves. I loved it, though I did have a hard time remembering which one was matzo and which one was pita. The breads of the Mediterranean were a blur to me as a third-grader.
However, I did grow up with feasts. Once every few months, sometimes for a holiday, sometimes not, my mother would take it upon herself t
o work miracles. She would start with an onion or some peaches off the tree, then reimagine them. Sure, there were ancient and traditional recipes—she deemed my paternal grandmother’s cobbler3 better than her mother’s and never looked back. Most of the time, she was riffing, improvising, improving. She’d buy seeds for something she’d never heard of, plant it in the garden, and sixty days later we were discovering what snow peas were. There was also meticulous planning. She was a cafeteria manager: Every feast was a series of tasks to be accomplished, surmounted. She always aimed a little too high, but the results were always delicious. When I was around the age of twelve, she let me cross the bar. I was her foot soldier. I chopped onions, I snapped peas and peeled peaches. If I did a shoddy job, she yelled at me;4 if I did a good job, she just kept joking and talking and cooking.
Let’s return to 2003. Having a seder of my own seemed like a fun lark. I researched some compelling Sephardic dishes, put together a menu,5 and bought some groceries. Then I realized I needed a Haggadah. A Haggadah is the script-thing you read at a seder. My mom would buy them for me and give them to me when I was growing up,6 so I could imagine what real Judaism was like. I considered asking Berkeley Hillel to loan me some, then the answer hit me: I should write my own Haggadah.
So my first Passover seder was just me and four friends around our kitchen table, eating artichokes I had not properly cleaned and which were thus exceedingly fibrous. We drank too much kosher wine and laughed at the silly jokes I’d made in my version of the Haggadah, and the years of sadness and uncertainty seemed gone. If my childhood had been a knife fight to maintain my identity, if my coming out had been a wrestling match with depression, in that moment in 2003, a couple of weeks after the U.S. invaded Iraq, I, if I alone, felt at peace.
The next year, I knew I had to do it again. Bigger. I borrowed a table from a nearby elementary school and got some folding chairs from a church. I invited eight people, including some of the cool people from my new writing job. To impress them I had to write a longer, more joke-heavy Haggadah. The 2004 menu centered on a dish of tuna steaks with bitter lettuces that no one really appreciated. It didn’t matter—it was a gleeful success.
This ritual became part of me. When I moved to L.A., I brought it with me. It got bigger and bigger by the year. I started ordering custom kippot7 in springy, pastel colors with little slogans stamped in them like “Guy’s Seder ’09: You Don’t Deserve to Be Here” or “Guy Branum’s Seder 2017: You’ll Never Feel This Alive Again.” I added games, like the ritualized asking of a moderately invasive question of someone at the table you don’t know,8 or a fun round of anti-Semitic Password.
When I could afford it and couldn’t afford it, I’d rent tables. I’d buy racks of lamb. I’d spend weeks planning and preparing when I should have been writing spec scripts and doing comedy shows. I spend too much time, money, and labor on a religious dinner party that no one cares about. It is, perhaps, the most important thing you can know about me.
To understand why, we must go to the 1987 Danish film Babette’s Feast.
Babette’s Feast is one of those well-reputed foreign films from before your time that you’ve never seen but people have told you to watch. It sounds vaguely boring and inoffensive, and while you’re not sure, there may be Nazis involved. Everything but that last part is true. It is, in actuality, an adaptation of a short story by Karen Blixen, the lady Meryl Streep played in Out of Africa. That’s how deep the 1980s prestige movie cred of Babette’s Feast goes: It was written by a Meryl Streep character.
The story seems insanely dry. Two old sisters live in a community of Lutheran ascetics founded by their dad. Each has a chance at romance, one with a dashing army officer, the other with a French opera star. They both turn down this secular glamour to assist in their father’s work. Then, one dark and stormy night, a woman appears at their door. She’s Babette, a friend of the French opera star who’s fled the purges of the Paris Commune and seeks employment as a maid. The old sisters grudgingly agree, and they find that somehow Babette manages to make their meager income go further and their lives feel better.
Then Babette wins the lottery and makes dinner for the religious community.
That’s the movie. Drained of its life and presented as a series of events, it’s certainly a lot less compelling than Inception. Babette’s Feast isn’t about plot points or set pieces, though. It is, fundamentally, about art and generosity.
See, Babette had a friend in Paris who bought a lottery ticket for her every year: her only connection to her life before she became a refugee. When she wins, the sisters assume Babette will be leaving them, but Babette asks for the chance to cook a meal for the hundredth anniversary of the women’s father’s birth. They agree.
Babette then begins a long process of purchasing strange ingredients and fancy table service from France. The old, ascetic Danes have only ever eaten salt cod and a porridge made from beer and bread. Babette brings in a turtle, quails, truffles, and Veuve Clicquot. The Danes are scared—they do not know what kind of witch’s Sabbath this foreigner is making—but they love her, so they vow to go to the meal and consume it without making any judgmental comments.
We see Babette cooking, not like a breezy Nancy Meyers heroine or a luscious Nigella but like a seasoned field marshal. Like Debbie Branum. This bitch knows some shit. We’ve seen glimpses of it in the rest of the movie, but here, fully equipped, she summons the fullness of her powers. Blinis Demidoff, turtle soup, tiny quails stuffed with truffles and pâté and then baked in puff pastry. The dashing soldier happens to be in town; now a widowed general, he accompanies his aunt to the meal and is able to identify what they’re eating: “Cailles en Sarcophages,” the specialty of the greatest chef in Paris. That this decadence is happening in a windswept village on the Jutland coast seems miraculous.
Miraculous, too, is its effect on the little community. Old and poor, they have seen their lives and relationships turn to bitterness and regret, but full of champagne and amontillado, they change, they soften, they remember that the world is a beautiful place full of beautiful things to love.
A friend of mine, one of the smartest I know, read the short story “Babette’s Feast” at my recommendation. He was confused. When he read it, he could make sense of it only as a Christian allegory. People who lived lives of service were rewarded with treasures in the “afterlife” by the Christlike Babette. There’s a line from the general in which he evokes the afterlife: “Everything we have chosen has been granted to us. And everything we rejected has also been granted.” It feels impossible and antinomian, a nice idea for an afterlife but meaningless to a person who does not believe in that messiah or afterlife. It’s a perfectly valid reading, but it’s not my reading.
In the wake of the magical, transformative feast, the two aged sisters, Philippa and Martine, ask when Babette will be leaving with the rest of her lottery winnings. Babette says she has spent the entirety of the ten thousand francs on the meal. The sisters are perplexed. “Now you will be poor the rest of your life,” one says. “An artist is never poor,” Babette responds.
The Last Supper is, of course, the image evoked by Babette’s Feast. Christ offering his blood and flesh to sustain his fellow Christians. And the Last Supper was, of course, a Passover seder, a meal and a ritual where we consider the horrible fate that should have destroyed us but did not. I have had my seder in good years and bad years, when my career was going great and when it was in the tank. It is, if nothing else, a reminder to myself that my worth is not what I receive, or what I have saved away, but what I can make and give.
Before the dinner, Babette never refers to herself as an artist. She’s a maid. She’s a functionary. She’s good at her job, but the job she does is the job that’s instructed. As she carves and sautés and simmers and tastes, sweat rolls down her face, and she begins to glow. She remembers the powerful creature she once was; she remembers that she’s a goddess. She does not eat the meal, she never enters the dining room when the meal i
s being eaten. No one tells her it is good. That’s not what matters. What matters is she got to do the thing she is capable of doing. She got to use the fullness of herself. Babette never talks about cooking before this meal, and cooking is a strange thing to think of as a creative art form. When the meal is served, however, we are all aware her creative powers are legion. She may then reference her artistry as self-evident. “Throughout the world sounds one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me the chance to do my very best.”
That is why you do not know me unless you’ve been to my Passover seder. It is my chance to be my very best. It is a chance to give my love and attention to food and words and my friends, to create one night when life in my little apartment touches the divine not in spite of the physical world but through it.
The first time I had my seder, it was a benchmark, a moment to say, “You’re fine, bad things have happened in the past, but you made it through.” Each year I get to remind myself of that. I am a fat, gay, bald, depressive man with no husband who will probably never have a long-term relationship. I live in a world that hates me for a lot of reasons. It’d be very simple to sour in these things, but I am consistently dazzled by the extent to which everything I have chosen has been granted to me, and everything I have rejected has also been granted. This creation is rich with possibilities and opportunities. I have friends who are funnier and smarter than I ever could have imagined. I make a living writing jokes. I get to dust quail with za’atar, grill it, hand it to someone I love, and have him see the world a little bit differently afterward.
