The Fran Lebowitz Reader by Fran Lebowitz Page B

eagerly awaiting Easter.
    Food is such a common occurrence in our daily lives that few have taken the time to consider it in the broader sense and thus cannot truly appreciate its impact on society.
    Food is welcome at both meal and snack time. It goes well with most any beverage and by and large makes the best sandwich.
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    Food gives real meaning to dining room furniture.
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    Food goes a long way in rounding out a CARE package.
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    Food offers the perfect excuse to use the good dishes.
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    Food is an important part of a balanced diet.
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    Food plays a crucial role in international politics. If there was no such thing as food, state dinners would be replaced by state bridge games and, instead of fasting, political activists would probably just whine.
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    A foodless world would have the disastrous effect of robbing one’s initiative. Ambition has no place in a society that refuses its members the opportunity to become top banana.
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    Without food, one of man’s most perplexing yet engaging problems would be rendered meaningless when one realized that the chicken and the egg both didn’t come first.
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    If food did not exist it would be well-nigh impossible to get certain types off the phone, as one would be unableto say, “Look, I’ve got to run but let’s have dinner sometime soon.”
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    Food was a very big factor in Christianity. What would the miracle of the loaves and fishes have been without it? And the Last Supper—how effective would that have been?
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    If there was no such thing as food, Oyster Bay would be called just Bay, and for the title of
The Cherry Orchard
Chekhov would have chosen
A Group of Empty Trees, Regularly Spaced.

Arts

Arts
    Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it. This would doubtless be more heartening news were its veracity not quite so capricious. For upon inspection it is immediately apparent that life is at its most artistic when such a condition is least desired. It is, in fact, safe to assume that, more often than not, life imitates craft, for who among us can say that our experience does not more closely resemble a macramé plant holder than it does a painting by Seurat. When it comes to art, life is the biggest copycat in the matter of the frame.
    Wishing to investigate the matter more thoroughly, I gathered about me a group of like-minded associates and began the long, hard work of imitating art in its most contemporary manifestations.
Conceptual Art
    We positioned ourselves randomly on a hardwood floor and pretended to be cinder blocks. We affixed toour shirtfronts labels bearing words unrelated to one another in a linear sense. We were not understood and we were greatly admired. We found this to be not unfulfilling.
Graphic Design
    Some of us dressed up like bold, daring lines; others, like large, clear, easy-to-read letters and numbers. All of us wore simple yet childish bright colors. We arranged ourselves in the shape of an airport and adopted a manner both useful and sprightly. We were most popular with those similarly dressed.
Magazine Layout
    Quite a few of us wore the same things we had worn when following the example of Graphic Design, although we went to considerably smaller sizes. The rest of us divided ourselves equally into two groups—one being airbrushed color illustration; the other being out-of-context, blown-up quotations from articles. All of us stationed ourselves for maximum intrusion value. Everyone crowded together in the form of a single page but kept our distance by the clever use of numerous black borders. We were a big hit and proved once and for all that you can take the art out of art direction but you can’t take the direction out of art, at least not if it’s headed that way.
Furniture Design
    We researched this one carefully and decided to be both fun and