Together we are fierce.

You know how sometimes you put off doing the dishes for so long that your sink is filled to the point that if you turn on the faucet the water just sprays off the plate and splatters watery marinara on your shirt? That is how it starts to feel if you have a blog that you haven't updated in months, not because there was nothing to say, but because all the things there were to say were Very Important and you wanted to do them justice.

So I will not try to do them justice. Instead, I will post pictures of cake.

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My fiancé, Blade, made me a giant cookie to celebrate my upcoming birthday. 

I can't look at it without giggling. He was inspired by this Marc Johns drawing of two people in a monster.

I responded with an ice cream cake to celebrate Blade's birthday, which was earlier this week.

 This is no hamburger cake, but I am proud of it. It was inspired by this drawing of a bear.

 

We ate our cakes with Marty (whose classy cheesecake I didn't manage to photograph due to its lack of icing cartoons). His birthday is also coming up soon. Many of our friends came for the festivities. All the cool kids got themselves born in June. Together we are fierce.

Cake! Caaake!

A dear friend of mine sent me a link to this post by Hyperbole and a Half, which chronicles our hero Allie's psychological meltdown when she can't have cake.

I felt this way about improv in the year after graduation. Rather, I would have felt this way if I hadn't been too sick to do stand up without passing out for those first few months. After that was over, though, I had crazy, get-out-of-my-way improv withdrawal.

Improv is my cake. Cake is also my cake. The following is improv nerdiness, interspersed with cakes!

Lauren and I made this for a friend's birthday. My mom probably helped with the icing.

I've used baking as a metaphor for improv when people in my workshops ask me why their scenes aren't working even though they're working hard on accepting, heightening, making strong offers, what have you. It's because that's not improv, really; those are just tools to help your improv be less sloppy.

If improv were a cake, technique would be the wooden spoon and mixing bowl and spatula. It'd be really messy to make a cake without those things. But if all you have is a really great bowl and spoon and spatula, you'll still go hungry. At least, hungry for cake. 

Time would be the oven, the form would be the cake pan. Cupcakes have the potential to be as delicious as bundt cakes, layer cakes, or crazy sculpted cakes; short form can be as fun as Harold and Armando. They're different shapes in which to pour your awesome scene work.

I made this cake for my friend Meredith, who is a vegetarian.

There is no definitive list of what to put in a cake to make it a good cake, just some general guidelines. Most cakes have some combination of eggs and flour and sugar and milk. Some have cream cheese or carrots or cocoa; some are vegan or gluten-free. It's a lot of stuff that wouldn't necessarily taste good on its own but works in combination with the other flavors to make something new. There's flexibility there, as long as you keep your proportions reasonable and your ingredients are good quality.

Most scenes have some basic ingredients, too: relationship, character, environment, game, and probably more I can't think of. Or fewer, depending on the kind of scene.

If your milk's gone rancid or your sugar has ants, your cake will be awful. Your cake pan and egg beaters might have been fine, but that doesn't save your cake. There's no sense investing in an expensive Kitchen-Aide mixer if you're not going to bother with your ingredients and proportions.

And once in awhile, for some inexplicable reason, a cake with all those great ingredients still doesn't turn out the way it's supposed to, and you can't always know why. You just have to double-check your ingredients, clean up your tools, and try again.

My mom probably did not help with this icing. This is all me.

FURTHERMORE. You don't have to have icing for a good cake. In fact, bad icing will ruin an otherwise good cake, and good icing won't save a gross cake. If I have to chose between a cake with bad icing and a cake with no icing, I'll pick no icing.

And I'll take a good, interesting scene that doesn't me laugh over a weak scene dripping with gags. Even good icing doesn't make up for bad cake, and funny jokes don't make up for shoddy scene work.

Truth: Icing is my favorite part of cake. But it gives me a stomach ache to eat it by itself. Good icing on good cake, though? Life doesn't get better. I mean, improv doesn't get any better. That distinction keeps blurring these days.

I wonder if the same could be said for many art forms, like writing and painting. Technique helps so much. But if there's not something the technique is serving, if its for its own sake, then you have some lovely shiny clean dishes and nothing to eat.

This is from when my mom pretended it was my birthday so my friends would come over and watch Schindler's List.

It does not do a body good.

"You're not sick, you're just a person," says John Campbell. I had always taken this for granted, that being sick and tired and unfocused was part of being a person, especially a person recovering from college and a couple of years on an antidepressant. Apparently, though, lethargy, lack of focus, and depression are part of being allergic to milk.

My new doctor, an osteopath, has me hold allergens or touch pressure points while he plays a game Blade and I like to call "Flops or Not Flops" (F/NF). If the doctor pushes on my leg and I'm able to resist, then whatever allergen or pressure point I'm touching isn't a problem for me. But if it makes my leg flop down on the table, he runs more related tests to narrow down the problem. Using the patented F/NF method, Dr. Gelband of Naperville determined that my chief problem (besides being overmedicated) was milk. I'm allergic to milk. Apparently, I've been allergic to milk for a long time, but I've never been tested for it, because I didn't notice my stomach hurting.

Dr. Gelband backed up his F/NF New Age feel-goodery with a conventional x-ray. Behind my ribs, I could see what looked like an extra, coiled up bone. "That's food," Dr. Gelband told me. It was food in my intestine that had calcified. Because of milk. It wasn't necessarily making my stomach hurt, but it was keeping me from getting energy from any of my food.

Unlike someone who is lactose intolerant, I can't just take a pill with an enzyme to make it better. I just have to avoid dairy. I'm learning that we make most things with milk. Frozen vegetables or chicken are often injected with butter. Whey is in things like cookies; casein is sometimes used as a filler in over-the-counter drugs and tends to creep into all kinds of seemingly innocent foods, like soy cheese.

However, also unlike someone who is lactose intolerant, I am able to eat dairy-ish things, as long as they come from goat or sheep milk, like feta cheese. And I can eat some kinds of yogurt, as long as they have live cultures. I can even have some kinds of well-aged cheese, like Romano.

The safest foods are the ones marked vegan or parve. I can consistently eat Asian food, since most Asian food doesn't use milk at all. (When's the last time you had Chinese food with cheese or butter?) My doctor said, though, to be wary of Asian food places that are owned by Americans, because they might have changed the recipes and added milk to the soups and sauces. I eat a lot of fried rice, egg rolls, and extra-dark chocolate with almond milk, so that is nothing to complain about.

Almond milk and soy ice cream are delicious. This has not stopped me from having stress dreams about Dairy Queen.

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'Cause calcium is deadly
But tender to the tooth
And it's one sure-fire way to know
If you're MX missile-proof
Or if you're just aloof.