Dewberries revisited

So, last year I did the nostalgia thing with the kids and made dewberry pie.

Those of you keeping score at home will remember that while the resulting pies were all gobbled up post-haste, they were not perfect. Too sweet, too runny and in general almost, but not quite, similar to the pies I remembered from my childhood.

This year I resolved to try again, and this time Fairy Girl and Bug wanted to participate in the berry-picking (Monkey Girl had work). Nature, however, was not quite so cooperative. This past winter was so warm that the dewberries flowered three weeks earlier than in 2015, which meant the fruit matured earlier. The week they appeared to be at peak berry corresponded with almost non-stop rain. The long and short of it is that while we finally got to the roadside berry patch two weeks ahead of the time we did last year, the berries were already in decline. A bunch of them had gone past the overripe stage and gotten all shrivelly. Birds had gotten to a bunch of others. Other humans, however, had not, so we came away with six cups of dewberries. Not a massive haul by any measure, but a decent take when you take into account all the mosquitoes we fought for them (remember, it rained a lot the previous week).

The berries we had were enough for two pies. I tried a few things differently this time--I made a (sloppy) lattice over the two pies. This time around I included eggs and a significant amount of tapioca flour to solidify the pie and counter the runniness. I also cut back on the sugar by about 50 percent. The result? Good pies, but farther away from those Platonic-ideal dewberry pies of my youth than last year's attempts. The color of the pie filling, due, no doubt, to the influence of the eggs, was more yellow and hot pink than the deep, rich purple-red. The berries seemed diminished somehow, not as dominant in the cooked pies, even though they made up the bulk of the contents.

Not that it mattered. The pies got eaten quickly. I set them out to cool and came back to find slices missing almost immediately. Clearly, the only thing left to do is try again next year.

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The nostalgia of Dewberry pie

On the route I drive to take the kids to school there is a pasture where the barbed wire fence is overgrown with dewberry vines. I first noticed this a little more than a month ago, as first bunches of white flowers appeared alongside the fence and road, followed some weeks later by bright red (unripe) berries. Anyone growing up in semi-rural Texas in the '70s or '80s will remember that dewberries were a found treasure, purple-black bursts of tart sweetness that grew everywhere and were free for the taking. As a child, I remember going out into bramble-filled pastures with my grandmother (and presumably the rest of the family as well) filling up buckets with dewberries while getting scratched up by those nasty little thorns. We always wore boots and carried long sticks because of the potential for snakes. Both of my grandmothers would bake dewberry pies that were magnificent. I cannot remember them ever baking any other kind of pie--well, maybe lemon meringue, but as I didn't like lemon meringue, that doesn't count. The tart/sweet balance was fantastic, and I would eat as much of those pies as I could get away with. One grandmother always baked them with a crust lattice on top, the other baked them open-faced. I didn't care--I ate both types without prejudice. The one thing I didn't like was the crunchiness of the seeds that filled said pies. What can I say? I could be dumb as a kid.

So, as these red, unripe dewberries turned a tempting black, the notion that I should pick some took root in my mind. Every day I drove past, with more and more berries ripening... and every day I forgot by the time evening rolled around. Until last Saturday, when I saw half a dozen cars parked alongside of the road with twice as many people out there, filling up buckets with dewberries. "I've been thinking about doing that very thing!" I shouted out my car window. They laughed, holding up their buckets, and said there was plenty for everyone.

The next day I, along with Monkey Girl--Fairy Girl and Bug declining to participate--headed out to the dewberry patch with boots and poles in hand. Monkey Girl was somewhat wary at first, but after trying one, she ended up eating as many dewberries as she bagged. Seriously, she downed a bunch of them. Alas, the crowd from the day before got all the low-hanging fruit, so to speak. There were many ripe dewberries left, true, but a large percentage were small and undersized. The largest, most appealing berries lay on the other side of the fence, but after discovering first-hand that the fence had an electrified livestock line (that was indeed hot) we both decided those berries were just fine where they were. All told, we gathered almost three quarts of dewberries for half an hour's work. Not as many as I'd hoped, but a pretty good return rate, given the circumstances.

Someday, I'd like to make some homemade dewberry wine as my family had done years ago, but my homebrew equipment isn't set up yet, and we didn't have enough berries to even start. So pies it was. Except, I didn't have the recipe either of my grandmothers had used. So I Googled. There were recipes there that looked interesting, but were far more complex than what I knew my grandmothers made. I finally settled on one that was a simple mix of berries, butter, sugar, water and thickener (flour). This recipe had issues, however. After baking the allotted time, the dewberry pie was more soup than anything else--not what I wanted. So after an emergency application of hastily-bought tapioca flour and additional cook time, I ended up with two open-face, passable dewberry pies.

They weren't exactly right, but that familiar dewberry tartness was there, that familiar crunchy texture from seeds that I so hated as a kid. It was almost like the food critic scene from Ratatouille. Almost. Not quite. For one, it was too sweet. Too much sugar. I'll cut back on that next time. Also, the overall texture was more stratified than consistent throughout--which I attribute to the early mishap with thickener. But I was close. It was familiar. I'd forgotten how much I missed dewberry pie. The kids? Well, they were like me at that age, devouring as much as they could.

I've got a couple of blackberry plants growing in the back yard, and they are growing well--even setting a few small berries this year. Next year might yield a decent crop. But my experience with blackberries (which admittedly isn't extensive) is more sweet than flavorful. We'll see. But if these blackberry plants cannot match the in-your-face flavor punch of the humble dewberry, I know where I can harvest some vines for transplant.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream

Last fall, the show-biz bug bit Fairy Girl. She was cast as the Princess from "The Princess in the Pea" in a Fractured Fairytales-style mishmash production at her school. After getting herself so nervous she almost threw up before the show (she had thrown up and missed her previous opportunity to debut on stage a year earlier) she calmed down enough to deliver her lines perfectly, and showed that not only does she have impressive delivery and animation for a 10-year-old who'd never acted before, she also had pretty darn good comic timing. This summer, she got into a summer theatre camp at Circle Arts Theatre, where they'll be staging a trimmed-down version of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown this Friday. She's begun clamoring for us to take her to auditions in the area--television, movies, theatrical, it makes no difference. When she was only 3 years old or so, on a lark we submitted her photo to the folks casting for the John Lee Hancock Alamo movie, and actually got a call back. We had a scheduling conflict The Wife and I have begun some tentative searches of Austin and San Antonio talent agencies online, cautiously separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

All of which is how it came to pass that Fairy Girl found out that I did some acting in my misspent youth. My junior and senior years of high school I participated in One Act Play, once I finally built up enough nerve to walk away from Columbus High School's painfully dysfunctional football program. Of my brief theatrical career, a single VHS tape remains as evidence. Fairy Girl wanted to watch.

The quality of the 24-year-old tape left a lot to be desired. The audio track was poor to begin with, but the image has color shifted over the years and lots of distortion crept in as well. That's to be expected, since the tape hadn't played for at least 15 years. And damn, but I was skinny back then! I've never been svelt, but 60 pounds accumulated over the course of two decades make a big difference. All in all, it's hard to watch, but Fairy Girl sat through it like a trooper.

The play was a truncated version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a wildly uneven production, but what we lacked in polish we made up for in enthusiasm. I played Lysander one of the four star-crossed lovers who suffer from an accidental application of love potion. The other roles my fading memory can recall included David Herrera as Demetrius, Danette (Glueck) Cantu as Helena, Jill Whitcomb as Hermia, Chris Novosad as Oberon, Carrie Speck as Puck, Matt Theut as Egeus, Don Koslosky as Theseus and Camille Hunt as Hippolyta. Watching the lot of perform on stage more than two decades ago, it was sobering to realized that Matt and David--both younger than I--are no longer with us. A feeble memorial to their lives, I suppose, but we were all having fun and that has to count for something.

I tried out for Midsummer Night's Dream on a whim, mainly to get out of the drudgery of cleaning the athletic field house every day (my punishment for walking off the football team a month or so before--long story for another time). I showed up for the reading oblivious to the source material and was thoroughly clueless about the importance of the Lysander role until I started highlighting my lines and realized I was in pretty much every freakin' scene (there's no Bottom or Titania in this version--the one-act plays were limited to 35 minutes or thereabouts). That got my attention real quick, I assure you. Taking on such a role was challenging for me, since my previous stage experience was limited to the Sheriff in a third-grade production of Cowboy on the Moon and one of the playing cards trying to paint white roses red in our first-grade presentation of Alice in Wonderland. Complicating matters was the fact that Whitcomb, who played my ostensible love interest, Hermia, viewed me with the contempt most civilized folk reserve for gum accidentally trodden upon. She was a fine actress, but off stage there was nothing I could say or do around her that wasn't met with a sneer or eye roll from her. I can only assume I was considered too uncouth and lowbrow for her taste--the fact that her sister, Jo Helen (who also displayed no great affection toward me), presented as a class assignment the following year a argument that people should "only buy clothes from Nieman Marcus instead of Wal Mart so they don't feel poor and dirty" goes a long way toward affirming my suspicions.

At the district competition, my first stage performance in front of an audience made up of people who weren't mine or my friends' parents, I was probably on the verge of barfing just like Fairy Girl. I don't remember much about the lead-up to the play, other than the fact that Sealy put on a production of Everyman that impressed the heck out of me. I do remember what happened after the curtain fell, however. I'd given it my all on stage, figuring this might well be the only time I ever play Lysander, so I might as well make it memorable. Whitcomb snarled at me afterwards, accusing me of ruining the play. A significant portion of the cast lined up behind her for their turn at denigrating me as well. "You blew it," said McDonald Ruffino, our lighting tech. "You over-acted way too much." Once all the other schools had wrapped up their shows, everyone filled the auditorium to receive individual awards and find out which play would advance to regional competition. I don't know if our teacher/director Charlotte Tilotta was aware of the backstage drama going on--if she was, she didn't let on. All I know is that I wanted to curl up and disappear. My humiliation grew as they went through the Honorable Mentions, then the All-Star Cast. Lots of actors and actresses from Columbus as well as other schools were raking in the awards, but we wouldn't advance because I'd ruined it for everyone. Then they announced overall best actor, and it took me a minute to realize they were mispronouncing my name. I'd like to say that I went from abject misery to elation in the space of a heartbeat, but in truth I was too much in shock to really feel much of anything. Later on, Ruffino was the only person to apologize for jumping on me earlier. That was a classy gesture on his part, but then again, he and his family have always been classy people.

At regional, we advanced again. I was named best actor again. The wheels came off during the state semifinals, though. My timing was off, my delivery was off. I wasn't feeling it, as the cliche goes. I can't presume to speak for others in the cast, but it felt like the entire rhythm of the show was out of sync. In the end, our production was named Alternate to State, and our great run ended. I was named to the All-Star Cast. Everyone was disappointed, but proud of what we'd accomplished. The next year, we undertook an ambitious production of MacBeth, sticking with the Shakespeare theme. David Hererra got the showcase role of MacBeth, Danette Glueck was Lady MacBeth, Glen Harper was MacDuff and Bobby Horecka was Malcolm. I played three roles--Banquo, the drunken porter and one other which I no longer remember. The production was spectacular (for a pre-Glee era 3A high school effort). Tilotta spent probably the entire budget on elaborate costume rentals. There were sound and lighting effects. The finale, when a dying MacBeth descends into unambiguous madness, was enhanced with MacBeth's enemies--both living and dead--returning to deliver key, portentious lines from earlier in the play. It was breathtaking (relatively speaking). At district competition, after we finished, actors from rival schools lined up to congratulate us and say they were in competition for second place. Were we overconfident? Maybe, but with good reason. It all came crashing down when the sole judge, a drama prof from Sam Houston State, castigated us for not being just like the Orson Welles' version of MacBeth, because that was the only good version. We did not advance. Tilotta, in a fit of emotion, packed up all the costumes and shipped them off the next morning. We never had a public performance of the play. Our family and friends never got to see what we'd spent three months perfecting. We didn't even have a video copy of a dress rehearsal, because Principal Simmons (who delighted in meddling and exerting his power where he had no business) forbade Tilotta to video any rehearsals because "It would make the students self-conscious and they wouldn't be any good." All these years later, it still makes me sad. A lot of students worked hard to make that play the best it could be. They deserved better.

My own acting skills were enough to earn me try-out invitations for theatrical scholarships at a few universities in state. Those same skills were not enough to actually win me any scholarships. I learned quickly in the one acting class I took in college that there are talented people out there that I'm not worthy to do line readings with, much less act. But my stage experience did lead me to a deep appreciation of Shakespeare on both stage and screen (Ian McKellen's version of Richard III is inspired) and the hard work real actors do to make it seem so effortless.

So Fairy Girl has my whole-hearted backing. As long as acting is an interest to her, we'll gladly shuttle her to local theatre programs. If her interest holds, then by golly we'll consider shuttling her to the occasional TV commercial audition in San Antonio, or indy film casting call in Austin. And when it comes time for her to go to college, I know some folks in the Texas State Department of Theatre and Dance, so she'll get a fair shot to impress the folks there with her talents. What she does with those opportunities is up to her.

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