Cecil Gershwin Palmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lasthumanvoice) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ph_logs2024-10-13 02:12 pm
lasthumanvoice) wrote in ph_logs2024-10-13 02:12 pm
[OPEN, Mingle] Yamsgiving
Who: Cecil and EVERYONE
What: Another Harvest Celebration
When: Beginning of Pumpkinfest
Where: Center of town
Warning(s): Discussion of the Gala and its attendant CWs may come up
1. Yes, we're happy as fish [Food Prep, Oak and Iron kitchen]
Cecil's made a point of seeking out the best known chefs in town to help him put everything together for this meal. While sweet potato dishes are the star, at least one available with every course, he's hoping to hit a broad variety so everyone can find something they like. He, of course, is peeling and chopping his eternal sweet potato to make sure there's enough to go around.
(Of course you don't need to worry about him with a knife! He's fine! Don't you know he was once a boy scout?)
If someone needs an extra hand for their dishes, though, he's happy to lend one. There's an attitude of camaraderie and cheer in the room, with Cecil even breaking out singing at one or two points in the evening.
2. And gorgeous as geese [The Meal; Festival Green]
Everyone's invited to the feast. That is, in fact, the whole point. Cecil's always been pointedly neutral in the town's tensions, working as the most unbiased media monkey he can. He's the Voice of Pumpkin Hollow, and that means not taking sides between Dahlia and Neil and the Temple and whoever else. But after the gala, he's made a choice to act, to try to foster goodwill and warm feelings. This isn't the stone stew he offered during January's famine, this is a Redwall-style feast.
So, between glasses of mead from Kasprak Farm and dandelion wine, everyone is invited to fill their plate with candied yams and zucchini bread, roast chicken and venison donated by one of the Enforcers. There's a homemade cranberry sauce with citrus wedges and dandelion-leaf salad with an apple cider vinaigrette and toasted acorns for garnish. There's pasta with a homemade pesto sauce and cheese. Desserts, too, are plentiful, some even flavored with...chocolate. But many are not, and feature sweet potatoes. Muffins, pies, etc.
Find a table with a friend or a stranger, and indulge. This is a warm-fuzzy type thing--feel free to use it as a mingle.
3. And wonderfully clean in the morning [Cleanup; Also Festival Green]
Cecil is, quite honestly, expecting to be the only person to stay and clean up. He's been up since about five in the morning and he's dragging a bit at this point. Oh, he did take the time to eat, so he's not starving, but like. He could use help putting the Green back to rights.
4. We've got everything, we're growing everything [Cecil Wildcards]
[You know how to find me to plot.]
What: Another Harvest Celebration
When: Beginning of Pumpkinfest
Where: Center of town
Warning(s): Discussion of the Gala and its attendant CWs may come up
1. Yes, we're happy as fish [Food Prep, Oak and Iron kitchen]
Cecil's made a point of seeking out the best known chefs in town to help him put everything together for this meal. While sweet potato dishes are the star, at least one available with every course, he's hoping to hit a broad variety so everyone can find something they like. He, of course, is peeling and chopping his eternal sweet potato to make sure there's enough to go around.
(Of course you don't need to worry about him with a knife! He's fine! Don't you know he was once a boy scout?)
If someone needs an extra hand for their dishes, though, he's happy to lend one. There's an attitude of camaraderie and cheer in the room, with Cecil even breaking out singing at one or two points in the evening.
2. And gorgeous as geese [The Meal; Festival Green]
Everyone's invited to the feast. That is, in fact, the whole point. Cecil's always been pointedly neutral in the town's tensions, working as the most unbiased media monkey he can. He's the Voice of Pumpkin Hollow, and that means not taking sides between Dahlia and Neil and the Temple and whoever else. But after the gala, he's made a choice to act, to try to foster goodwill and warm feelings. This isn't the stone stew he offered during January's famine, this is a Redwall-style feast.
So, between glasses of mead from Kasprak Farm and dandelion wine, everyone is invited to fill their plate with candied yams and zucchini bread, roast chicken and venison donated by one of the Enforcers. There's a homemade cranberry sauce with citrus wedges and dandelion-leaf salad with an apple cider vinaigrette and toasted acorns for garnish. There's pasta with a homemade pesto sauce and cheese. Desserts, too, are plentiful, some even flavored with...chocolate. But many are not, and feature sweet potatoes. Muffins, pies, etc.
Find a table with a friend or a stranger, and indulge. This is a warm-fuzzy type thing--feel free to use it as a mingle.
3. And wonderfully clean in the morning [Cleanup; Also Festival Green]
Cecil is, quite honestly, expecting to be the only person to stay and clean up. He's been up since about five in the morning and he's dragging a bit at this point. Oh, he did take the time to eat, so he's not starving, but like. He could use help putting the Green back to rights.
4. We've got everything, we're growing everything [Cecil Wildcards]
[You know how to find me to plot.]
no subject
Lev pauses, considers Cecil's request ... and then, because he's merely easily distracted, not truly thoughtless, he belatedly recalls exactly what the feast was meant to commemorate, and who it was in honour of. He bites his lip.
"I'll be happy to tell thee and ... nu, well," he begins, and starts fidgeting with the cuff of his morning jacket. "Like. I wish not to offend our hosts, but like, I wish not to neglect my duty, neither."
One might expect him to sound unhappy, but he sounds merely thoughtful. And maybe a little sheepish.
"Nu. Thou hast spoken to our hosts, so maybe before we bentsh, thou could'st put my mind at ease, offer thy perspective? I can like, translate the texts for thee. And Nyura can help, if he likes."
no subject
He rakes a hand back through his hair, exhaling.
"My perspective is this: I don't know much. I don't know everything. I don't know enough to be good at being Jewish. I once left a poem written by a Jewish man in the aftermath of a great war on Celestine's altar, and she responded with a pretty sky. I'm not a proud man. I've talked to her when grateful and when desperate. They say that each of us is favored by one of the goddesses, and loved by all of them."
He realizes he's rambling. He also catches the fact that he feels defensive.
"Someone also said the goddesses pass along prayers to our gods, that they can reach back to our worlds and make our thoughts know to those we worship. But. Like. I don't know how you pass along something like the act of building a sukkah, without diminishing what that is. Or the choice to skip leavened bread for Pesach. Or the smell of fry-oil for making sufganiyot, because Judaism isn't just in the words of praying, it's in the living, too. I might not be following every commandment every moment of every day, but the life I am living here, the one I'm choosing, is relentlessly Jewish, much more so than at home because I have you and Anzu and Zivia and the chance to learn, and is learning itself not an act of Jewishness? I remember reading that when students first start to learn to read Hebrew, they're given honey, so the learning will be sweet to them, and...I don't know that Celestine can pass along the sweetness of getting to ask questions, but that's something that's Jewish, wholly entirely Jewish without being a prayer in the normal sense."
He deflates a little. "Which might not, any of that, answer the question you're really trying to ask, huh?"
no subject
Lev chokes back a sob, and then lunges forward and hugs Cecil, burying his long nose in his friend's shoulder. So overwhelmed with emotion and gratitude and love for his friend he is, that the double entendre totally sails over his head.
"I was born in exile and besides the hope I'm obligated to carry, I have not no reason to think the Moshiakh shall come while I yet live," he mumbles. "But here, here should be exile of the worst kind, but thou art here. But here we live as we have been commanded to, even here. Even here."
He lifts his head up a little, and sniffs. He doesn't want to get snot all over Cecil's shirt again. If he does it three times, it'll be his minhag and he'll be obligated in it, any time he and Cecil talk about yiddishkayt.
"I asked the wrong question, but thou gave'st me the right answer," he says. "But ... I ... I should talk. To the mistresses of this isle. At least to one of them. They brought me here, so they must've wanted one like me here. But I need to know."
He won't say, not directly, what's eating at him. The best he can do just now is admit that something is bothering him.